Barely 40 and very well paid, Tom Morgan was sitting on a Manhattan trading floor when his whole being became bathed in love. Then a voice started in his head, and it didn't stop for two years.

Sound Bites

• "I had what I can only describe as a spiritual awakening or psychotic break depending on your biases."
• "I had this objectively incredibly desirable life. And I was looking around being like, shit, is this all there is?"
• "Like you're making so much money, you have no transferable skills, just hold on."
• "Toothpaste comes out of the tube and you can't put it back in again."
• "We have these 67 year old adolescents running the world who behave like adolescents."
• "God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience and shouts in our pains."
• "Don't employ a psychotically depressed life coach, just a piece of advice."
• "Give me your life and I will give you that salary."
• "If I had had hope, the dark night wouldn't have been dark."
• "Your choice isn't no death. Your choice is risking death through the adventure."

Description

Tom Morgan jumped through every academic hoop, got fired as a football agent, then lucked his way into the City and on to New York. At barely 40 he had the salary, the Manhattan life and the commitments, and a desk in an office where, he says, everyone was pretending to work. Then he started asking whether this was all there is.

Today he runs The Leading Edge, a community for people hearing the same call. He talks about why it so often arrives around 36, what happened after the awakening, and why Wall Street never talks about it.

What We Explore

• Rich, successful and asking "is this all there is?", and why it so often arrives around 36
• A spiritual awakening on a trading floor, and the two years of hell that came after it
• The terracotta army: men told there's no second act, and what it takes to leave the Shire

Mentioned in This Episode

• Bill Plotkin — his soul initiations in the wild, and his claim that this crisis is an established time of life
• Iain McGilchrist's hemisphere theory — it lit Tom up during lockdown, and it is his first theory of the voice
• C.S. Lewis — "God whispers in our pleasures…", the line Tom reaches for when the body forces the change
• The Gospel of Thomas — what you bring forth saves you; what you don't destroys you
• Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth — "spiritual nitroglycerin", and the patient zero of Tom's whole journey
• Carl Jung — "there's no greater burden a child can bear than the unlived life of the parent"
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari — Tom loved it at the time, and now thinks it is catastrophically wrong
• The Matrix — for Tom, the best telling of the hero's journey
• Oldboy — the film he reaches for to describe the first night he felt his son's love
• Spring 1 from Max Richter's Recomposed — on the beach at Montauk, when he began to feel his boy
• Moloch — the force Tom felt sitting underneath Wall Street
• Tim Freke — our guest on episode 4, who told Tom that not everyone makes it out
• The Leading Edge — Tom's community of 150, and the network of networks he is building

Connect with Tom

The Leading Edge on Substack: https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/

X: https://x.com/tomowenmorgan

Tom says he is less active on X than he used to be. Substack is where he writes.

A little about Hamish Niven

For 25 years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside. Inside it was falling apart, and I was throwing fuel on the fire — addiction, alcohol. I was on a steep path to self-destruct.

November 2018. I chose life, and had to change everything.

I built The 13th Room because nothing like that existed when I needed it.

The Brave Man Project — this podcast. It is about men, but not just for men. Men who broke under the weight of their own performance. Men who rebuilt and climbed so much higher.

The 13th Room is a space for the successful man who needs to change and knows it. 13 sessions, you and me. No fixing. Pure witnessing. Starts with a free 20-minute conversation.

Podcast website: https://thebravemanproject.com

Hamish's website: https://hamishniven.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBraveManProject

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamishniven/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamish.niven

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamishniven/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hamishniven

And at that moment I was sitting on the trading floor.

I had what I can only describe as a spiritual awakening or psychotic break depending

on your, on your biases. Except it was a very,

very settled experience. My whole,

my whole being became bathed in love.

like an absolutely incomprehensible love.

I started chuckling with

Mm-hmm.

just the bliss of it. And then the monologue in my head stopped and

I just started serenely walking around Manhattan.

I went and had an hour long face-to-face meeting with the chief investment officer

of a hedge fund, And I could

feel anyone's emotions within 12 feet of me.

And I became precognitive and I could sense truth when I said it when other people

said it.

So Tom, thanks for turning up this afternoon my time this morning,

your time. The reason I wanted to talk to you is because you had a crisis

of note during your financial life in America.

Can you tell me sort of what was Leading up to when everything went sideways isn't

quite the right way, sort of down a wormhole or something like that?

Yeah, downwards, not sideways.

downwards.

So I am ~ basically British,

jumped through all the academic hoops,

was very good at that game, assumed I was destined for a life

of inevitable success and wealth and fame,

and then got fired from my first job as a football agent straight out of university.

realised that my path wasn't going to be quite so straightforward and

I was arrogant and incompetent.

I'm

But eventually lucked my way ~ into the city of London and never really fancied

finance. But relative to the peanuts I was getting paid as a football agent

but relative to the peanuts I was getting paid as a football agent

and had been fired, the money that they were throwing around

and had been fired, the money that they were throwing around

was simply incomprehensible. ~ And I actually realised that the city

was simply incomprehensible. And I actually realised that the city was full

was full of quite fun people, curious,

of quite fun people. Curious, interesting,

interesting, ambitious, motivated,

ambitious, motivated, not as many...

not as many ~

Let's just say nasty people as you would have expected back then.

And I loved it.

Mm-hmm.

In 2009, after five years in the job,

I moved to New York. I was a US specialist and the world was ending and

I was in love with an American girl.

So I figured I'd move over. And I eventually ran out of road in that

job after about six years and got laid off,

which hit me very, hard. And I got hired by a lovely kind

of mid-tier investment bank to work there.

They gave me a two year guarantee for lots of money.

And I looked around after a couple of years and I realised no one

was doing any work. And everyone was pretending to work.

Mm-hmm.

know, multiple people killed themselves in my office.

Multiple people were dying at their desk metaphorically.

And I started, my health started deteriorating.

But yet I had this objectively incredibly desirable life.

And I was looking around being like,

shit, is this all there is?

system.

Right? Like I was, you know, I was barely 40 at the time.

And I was like, and everyone's like,

hold on.

Like you're making so much money,

you have no transferable skills,

just hold on. And so you're looking down the barrel at least

Mm-hmm.

another 20 years and you're told there's no second act.

And I was like, wait, is that true?

Like particularly in America where college,

health insurance are cripplingly expensive,

mortgages,

Thanks.

you you live in Manhattan, like you've got enormous commitments

and suddenly you start feeling very dissatisfied,

but you can ignore the dissatisfaction,

but then the health crisis comes in.

And

Yeah.

that was kind of where you find me in the story.

You get given a big bag of cash every week,

every month, but your sacrifice is your health,

your sanity, your mental health.

What causes a business to be like that?

What's not working in that kind of business?

I don't know the business isn't working.

I don't think it's that straightforward.

I think that, you know, for 11 of the 15 years up until that point,

I was loving it. I learned a lot of skills that have served me incredibly useful

in life. And yeah,

it's a zero -sum business. Yeah,

it does a lot of damage to the world,

but there are people in it doing good things and there are ways of doing good things

in it. I just think there's a stage of life when you grow out of

zero -sum games and you grow out of caring about certain things like

the stock market in a world where you're like,

well, no one should ever grow out of this,

right? No one should ever really want to put their skills to higher and better use.

And particularly when finance is dramatically more lucrative,

theoretically, at least in any of those things.

So for me, wasn't, yeah, it's a flawed industry,

but for me, it wasn't a flawed path.

It was just something that you grow out of.

And when you do, it's very hard to find a path forward.

Okay, so the growing out, what did that mean to you?

What happened?

toothpaste comes out of the tube and you can't put it back in again,

which is like, you just, you just don't care.

Right? You just don't care. Like you're an ambitious,

motivated person. And someone puts something that will use to delight

you about the stock market in front of you.

And it just bounces off you, you can't get through a page of it.

And yet, on the other hand, there's an energetic gradient,

where like, have you read the power of myth by Joseph Campbell?

You know, like, oh, have you ever read Carl Jung?

You start reading about bigger and more expansive topics,

the things that I know you and I care about,

and they just electrify you. But there's no obvious path forward towards them.

And

you

you're not going to get paid to read about them allegedly,

you know, I get it. And so it's this very weird dichotomy where where

you are is very, very stale. And you're hearing this call to adventure,

but you have absolutely no idea how to answer it.

Okay.

Yep, terrifying,

horrifying, equal measure. why do people get to a time in life when they start

to question the money, the fame,

the security, all these things?

What, what triggers that dissatisfaction?

I interviewed a chap called Bill Plotkin a couple of weeks ago and

he does things called soul initiations in the wild.

And he actually says that this is an established time of life.

I found it happens around 36, almost universally.

It's very weird and I have no idea why.

Where basically once people have got to what he calls the confirmation stage,

mystery, as he calls it, blows up their life.

Right? They're basically like you,

there's something in you or something relational between you and

the world that knows that you have enough,

even if you're unwilling to accept it within yourself.

And it's like, great. Next stage.

Now adulthood and adulthood means bringing those gifts to the world,

but exist in a paradigm that only has adolescents.

So we have these, you know, 67 year old adolescents running the world

who behave like adolescents. Everything's about social proof.

Everything's about material gain.

And again, there's nothing wrong with that stage.

You've just got to grow out of it,

right? And bring the tools that you learn in that stage to bear in

a more positive -sum and holistic way in alignment with a force that creates

everything. But the denial of that very force often breaks people because they have

no idea which direction to take next.

absolutely relate to all of that.

Not quite sure. I was 36 when everything fell apart,

but yeah, absolutely. So it's almost like you're told to change.

You have to change. It's a really good idea to change.

If you don't change, something might go wrong.

If you don't change, something will go wrong.

Yep. I see that consistently as a great line.

I always think of from CS Lewis,

which is God whispers in our pleasures,

speaks in our conscience and shouts in our pains.

It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

And

I was interviewed yesterday by one of our members at Leading Edge.

had two Widowmaker heart attacks.

Like pick up the phone, dude. And I see

Hmm?

it all the time. Brain tumors,

heart attacks, anxiety attacks,

nervous breakdowns, you know.

not to be too wonky immediately,

but I'm obsessed with ~ Dr. Iain McGilchrist's hemisphere theory.

And I believe that a lot of life can be reduced to the idea of getting stuck

in your left brain, logical, linear,

highly verbal, intellectual, and actually all of the cues guiding your life

intuitively come from the right brain,

somatic, emotional, nonverbal.

So how else is it going to get your attention other than giving

you pretty bad emotional and somatic markers?

And you said people metaphorically die their desks.

What do you mean by that?

There's a chap next to me in the office.

He was probably 60 odd. And I would come in every day.

And this is from like a bulge bracket investment bank,

you know, like the hard charging Wall Street.

I arrived at this bank. And I think they deliberately put me on the other

end of a row to him when I moved.

And he would come in every morning and he would just turn on TMZ,

know, celebrity gossip or YouTube.

And he just watched YouTube videos at full volume during like the busiest part

of the day. I was like, what the is this guy doing?

I thought he was a moron until I went out for dinner with him.

Turned out he founded one of the most influential conferences on Wall Street

and was just blindingly intelligent.

And he died shortly after I left,

very young. And,

you know, he was probably, he died probably 20 years too soon,

30 years too soon, because

Yes.

he'd completely given up on the idea of using his gifts.

kind of terrifying because you're you're sowing a story that if you don't

use your gifts they will challenge you as you said ~ they will challenge

you or they will just leave and there's nothing left.

It's line from the Gospel of Thomas,

if you bring forth what is inside you,

what is inside you will save you.

And if you do not bring forth what is inside you,

what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

And it will.

So your story, you, you, we decided you didn't go sideways,

you went down. What happened that you went down that rabbit hole

or wherever you went?

So I started getting non-specific health ailments,

anxiety attacks. I'd go through the US healthcare system and I'd get

a bunch of tests. And then I'd wait for the test results.

And that anxiety was always one of my worst,

still is actually one of my worst anxieties.

You you've got a biopsy and you're waiting for the results.

I'd rather

Mm-hmm.

not have the cancer, right? Like,

than the waiting for the results.

And every single phone call and voicemail I got for like months

and months and months, I was like,

ah, this is when I die. All right,

this is the death sentence.

And I think at the time, in retrospect,

was the ego, the ego sensing its time was up,

the left hemisphere realising its time was up,

but it manifested in just straight terror.

And eventually I found a functional medicine doctor and I did a year long functional

medicine course after a year later or so.

And I realised that like the most important thing about functional medicine

is an elimination diet, which is basically cut everything fun out of your diet

for like three months. And I gained so much clarity that I

got an almost manic level of energy and I basically started writing

and it just poured out of me. I wrote about 60 pages of everything that

had ever resonated with me. And I got to the end and I was like,

I'm the book. And at that moment I was sitting on the trading floor.

I had what I can only describe as a spiritual awakening or psychotic break depending

on your, on your biases. Except it was a very,

very settled experience. My whole,

my whole being became bathed in love.

like an absolutely incomprehensible love.

I started chuckling with

Mm-hmm.

just the bliss of it. And then the monologue in my head stopped and

I just started serenely walking around Manhattan.

I went and had an hour long face-to-face meeting with the chief investment officer

of a hedge fund, which went completely normally.

Well, probably not that normally.

And I could

feel anyone's emotions within 12 feet of me.

And I became precognitive and I could sense truth when I said it when other people

said it. And these were all things I was like,

I was a Wall Street worker. was all the least likely things on my bingo card

to have happened in any context.

And suddenly over the... It was like a knowing.

I was like, my God, this is how deep reality works.

It was sort of

Mm.

like you hear people describe things as realer than real.

Even to this day, it's by far the most real experience I've ever had.

And it was completely spontaneous.

I then descended into this incredibly expansive state,

this alternating between these two personalities.

One...

super doomy and flat and emotionless and the other one glowy

and spiritual and flowy. And a lot of

the precognitive visions I had actually ended up coming true,

which is a bit bonkers even today.

and

And basically I just got completely unmoored and delusional.

And for two months I was kind of getting through life fine.

I lost an enormous amount of weight.

didn't know how to orient myself in the world.

And then on Boxing Day 2017, I made a heartfelt commitment to deal with

my shit and to fight the devil and to have a son.

~ And that night I went completely insane.

A voice started in my head that was relentlessly hostile and it turns out lying,

telling me I was damned, telling me that I was worthless,

telling me that I was going to run out of money,

telling me that I was mentally ill,

telling me that I was disabled.

And it didn't stop for two years.

and it tastes like

it's a kid.

~ And nothing made it stop. Even praying the Hail Mary constantly to

try and drown it out didn't stop.

~ Medication,

Thank you.

like psychiatric medication made it better.

But I basically

Hmm.

spent the next two years completely abstracted from the world.

Really unable to think because the pace of my thoughts was so great.

I couldn't really speak. I couldn't pay attention to my wife or my baby.

I couldn't attend to my own needs.

And I was absolutely pathologically obsessed with life transitions.

that I had a part of me that knew with total intellectual rigor that there

was no hope for me and no way forwards.

And yet I tried self-sacrifice after self-sacrifice of going into hospice work,

social work, tried to be a recruiter to help other people get jobs,

Thank you.

tried to be a life coach, that was a disaster.

Don't employ a psychotically depressed life coach,

just a piece of advice.

Damn.

And I panicked and went back into finance for nearly a year.

That legitimately nearly killed me.

~ And eventually things got so bad.

I wasn't exactly catatonic, but I was extremely bored of being alive.

~

Hmm.

And I don't think I could have done it much longer.

Would I have killed myself? I don't know,

but I was running out of options and felt like I had nothing to lose.

And I ended up getting ~ ketamine infusions in New York under medical guidance.

And the first seven were hilarious drug experiences.

The eighth was an express elevator to hell,

a dark vision. And then after that,

I was lying in the infusion centre

future.

and crying from what I'd seen,

because it didn't feel redemptive at all.

And an Irish nurse walks in. She just looks me dead in the eyes,

these beautiful green eyes, and just goes,

"There's hope." And I didn't believe her.

And so I just folded.

and cried for four hours. And within a week,

my psyche was kind of fixing itself.

It was very strange. took me about 11 months to learn how to talk again,

talk about how all that played out.

But that was the dark night in a nutshell.

That is a long, long, long dark night blimey.

Looking back at it, what was it?

I mean, this, this voice that just says you are condemned,

you are useless, you are going to die.

You are going to lose all your money.

What, what was that was? Yeah.

What was that? Do you have any idea?

No, I have theories. I love my theory.

Mm-hmm.

My theories are, ~ it was my left brain.

You know, your left brain is hyper

Mm-hmm.

intellectual. is for most people,

the voice in your head. It hates losing control.

Thanks.

And it's the only side of the brain that lies.

The right hemisphere is totally truthful.

And so you get to this pivot point where

Mm.

the ego needs to be transcended,

not destroyed, transcended service at the right.

Yep.

And

it absolutely shits the bed and tries to kill you.

~ That's option one. Probably the most explicable.

Actually, you the

Hmm?

most explicable is I was desperately mentally ill and psychotic

and bipolar and crazy and it's DSM.

Yeah, that's another option, isn't it?

Yeah, that's option one. You've got to put that one on the table and keep

Yeah. Yeah.

it on the table. Like, I'm so,

I could still be a crazy person.

Option three then, after the option of the left hemisphere would be,

it was the devil or one of his minions.

Yeah.

Like, the devil is the prince of lies.

And in that moment, I said, I want to fight the devil.

And then 20 minutes later, somewhat unexpectedly,

he showed up. But he showed up in the way

you

that esoteric traditions talk about devils and demons,

which is they

Okay.

put lying thoughts in your head that make you immobile.

Mm. Yeah.

And

I was literally petrified, turned to stone

Mm-hmm.

by fear for two years

Hmm.

and immobilised by the idea that I was utterly worthless.

And they talk about hell as being disconnected from God.

And I was entirely disconnected from everything,

from emotion, from sensation, from anything good that happened in my life.

I know I had a Channeller tell me recently that it was actually

an archetypal shadow wizard that did it.

And I'm like, oh, fine. You're a Channeler.

You got

Give it

your options. I'm curious. I like to say I don't know.

But I care. It's pretty interesting.

~ I just guess the most important thing is it was lying.

least I think it was.

I'm leaning into the idea of the ego because it's designed to keep you,

ironically, designed to keep you alive by almost killing you.

~ Yeah. mean, why not that,

the Channeler, the devil? mean,

you look back in history and if people are going to write about the devil enough,

there's obviously an element of truth in there,

whatever you want to believe or disbelieve.

I suppose the result is you come out the other side scarred maybe,

but you've made sense of it or you've accepted it and life goes

on slightly differently.

very differently in my case.

So what are you doing now then?

So I got a job during COVID selling a very

low quality financial product.

I didn't like doing it, but I had to give about 300 pitches sequentially

in my bedroom, because it was work from home.

So I was sweating bullets and could barely speak,

but I had to give pitches over and over again.

I think it was the universe really helping me out,

which is like, this is how you speak.

Learn to speak again, learn to be articulate.

but was bored out of my mind and stuck at home.

Thanks.

And so I could do, I could explore a lot of other things because no one could

see my computer screen. And so on my left window,

I had my work and on my right window,

I had everything that I was reading.

I encountered the work of Iain McGilchrist and it lit me up.

Mm-hmm.

I'm not one of those absolute psychos that can learn something that they think

is well-changing and tell no one.

So I was shouting it from the rooftops.

I didn't really have a distribution.

I wrote an article about all this and sent it to my former finance distribution

list.

one of my old clients was like,

oh, well, hire you to write about stuff.

completely like a synchronicity that makes absolutely no sense.

He totally saved my life. And at that point I've been on LinkedIn dredging through

every day being like, what puzzle piece can I fit myself into?

How can I contort my soul to fit this hole?

And instead I did what I couldn't not do.

And someone called me up out of the blue and was like,

here's your dream job.

Mm-hmm.

And so for three years,

I wrote for a wealth manager in Indianapolis about increasingly unhinged topics.

I started off pretending to write about the stock market and ended

up writing about reincarnation.

And eventually they were extremely justifiably like,

dude, stop it. And I was like,

I'm sorry, I can't. Things have gone too far.

And in those three years, I've been on a boatload of podcasts and much

to the chagrin of my employers,

I was talking more about going mad and life transitions.

Mm-hmm.

And I found out that it's an epidemic.

It's an unspoken epidemic, particularly around Wall Street.

And so

Mm-hmm.

many people contacted me in the interim.

And they were like, what do I do?

Where's the container for this process?

And I was like, I don't know. There isn't one.

Hmm.

And I'm the least entrepreneurial person you can possibly imagine,

hyper risk averse. But eventually,

the toothpaste came out of the tube in that work,

and I got given sequential nudges to go do something else.

And I resisted it and resisted it.

And then I was like, I can't resist it.

And so I founded a community of 150 people.

We're called The Leading Edge.

Uh, we'll never go beyond 150 people,

but the format really works. it's basically average age of 45,

30 % finance, 50 % kind of business founders and

20 % glorious weirdos. We've got psychic neuroscientists.

We've got Reiki healers. We've got coaches.

We've got all manner of like channelers and gifted people that I want in the group.

~ And I can talk about what we do in as much tedious detail as you want,

It's not a particular tick-tock

but it was essentially the container I didn't have.

And I'm now,

I'm now as bullish on the prospects for these containers as I've been about anything

in my entire life.

Who turns up there? mean, are these people all who you were?

No. And thank God, man, one, because that would be a group of awful people.

also, I can't hold people in mental health crises,

nor should I, right? Like, a random dude,

right? I would say at any one time,

five to 10 people in Leading Edge are in it.

They're in the dark night. They're in some sort of gross transitional process.

They're in hell.

Mm-hmm.

We can hold their hand. But if it was 150 people in hell,

That would be a bad, that would be a poorly functioning community.

Actually, it's kind of the reverse.

The people that come to me had heard my story typically or come by

a referral and they're just a little bit less alive than they know they can be.

And they've been sold something that they're not buying.

And they're very,

Mm-hmm.

very curious. They're basically in stasis and hearing the call to adventure.

We have a bunch of people on the other side of the abyss who

are just fully integrated human beings living their best life.

And I interviewed one of them yesterday.

is one of the most extraordinary conversations.

Because I'm like, yeah, you're in the promised land.

Well done.

Mm-hmm.

I wish I could say I had more of those people in my life.

But a lot of people are like, OK,

I run a private equity company,

and I'm fascinated by UAPs, UFOs.

But that's a socially disqualifying topic.

Professionally,

Mm-hmm.

people don't want to talk about these things,

particularly in mainstream American society.

And the online discourse is completely psycho.

you have something where you're a very high discernment,

very high agency person, and you want to talk about a topic that's

at the Leading Edge with normal people,

and you can't.

Yep.

And whilst UFOs are kind of a weird edge topic,

like the same applies to like consciousness,

right? And

Hmm.

like, it appears that the evolution of our consciousness is the entire point

of existing from this time on to next.

And so it's just like, why aren't we focused on that?

Right? Like, why

Mm.

aren't we focused on that? And why can't I talk to other people about it?

And it's a bit of a common knowledge game.

where basically like I speak to 15 new people a week and they're all like,

I'm like the only person I know that's interested in this.

And I'm like, no, you're like the 14th

Hmm.

this week I've spoken to about it.

Everyone's interested in this now.

There's just no coordination.

I'm writing a book on this, but I have a theory that curiosity

is one way we relate to a force that will evolve us into a perfect niche

for our own gifts. You can't fully control what you're interested in.

So what does? It's a wild idea.

It's a brain breaking idea. You can't control what you're interested in.

And no one ever thinks about that.

what does? People are like, it's my genetics.

I don't care what your answer is.

You're not in full control of it.

And I regard it as a relationship with a guiding intelligence.

And all Leading Edge is, and all these communities should be,

is a container for curiosity. Well,

Hamish cares about very different things to me,

but we can talk about it and explore it together and you can experiment with

new identities. there's

Mm-hmm.

no guru, there's no central thesis,

but it's a container for curiosity.

And everyone comes to Leading Edge comes out of curiosity.

And that curiosity just opens doors and minds,

doesn't it? I mean, who knows where you're going to go?

You must, it sounds like you have the best fun in the world.

You're this, this reticent entrepreneur.

Obviously that is a label that you've given yourself.

That's not quite true anymore.

I mean, that must be quite exciting,

exploring, getting curious about that.

Am I really reticent or am I just bored with the wrong stuff?

And now I found something exciting.

Yeah, and I wasn't really given much choice as to whether I do it.

It's just one of those things that became so obvious and I got kicked

in the nuts every time I tried to do something else.

Like, no, dude,

Yeah.

you've wanted to do this your whole life.

You've wanted to help the Terracotta Army of people trapped mid-career.

Like you wanted to do this. Stop trying to be a hospice worker.

You moron, right? Like use the skills you acquired on Wall Street,

the communication skills, the writing skills,

the meeting people, all of the things you've enjoyed,

just do them. And my life is inexplicably blissful,

right?

particularly relative to a guy that was told by the health industrial complex

in the US that I was never getting better,

that I was a medication case and was going to be some dead-eyed freak

for the rest of my life. And now I'm just,

I mean, my favourite quote is follow bliss and doors will open where there were only

walls from Joseph Campbell. It happens.

It happens. I just see it too much for it to believe anything else could possibly

be true.

Joseph Campbell, when did you meet him first?

He was the patient zero of all of this journey.

The Hero with A Thousand Faces I think is a terrible book.

I've tried to read it

Mm-hmm.

twice, failed both times. But The Power of Myth is spiritual nitroglycerin.

That stuff has wisdom per page because it's sort of the synthesis of

all of his life's work. And you read it and you're like,

it was the first time. So I read the Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens and

I loved it at the time despite now realising it's like catastrophically wrong.

where it's like all human stories are fictions.

They're created to make people cooperate.

Like France doesn't actually exist.

Peugeot doesn't actually exist.

They're coordination mechanisms that are fictions.

I'm like, that sounds really clever,

but it's not true. ~ Myth speaks to a force,

some of them, not all of them,

speaks to a force that we can align with and when we do our life goes really well.

That is the hero's journey. That is why we've been telling that story for tens,

if not hundreds of thousands of years,

that you're stuck. You're in stasis.

You're Thomas Anderson in the Matrix in the cubicle job.

And then you get the call. You get the phone call from the anima,

from Trinity, saying, follow the white rabbit.

Follow your curiosity. That's the call to adventure.

That's where I find a lot of people.

And then you get the choice. Do you cross the threshold?

Mm-hmm. Yep.

And you say no, because it's bloody terrifying and I don't trust it.

So Neo goes back to his office after he meets Trinity.

and then gets interrogated by the Matrix.

That's by the agents, he doesn't get given a

Hmm?

choice. That's the heart attack,

that's the health crisis. And then you cross the threshold,

but you have to do it willingly,

red pill or blue pill. And then once you do,

you confront the shadow self, which is Agent Smith,

the force of conformity, the generic guy in the generic suit,

the voice in your head saying,

just be the same as everyone else.

And then when you integrate that in the Matrix,

he doesn't kill Agent Smith, if you watch it carefully.

He dies and

Mm-hmm.

is reborn, his heart restarts when Trinity kisses him,

and he integrates Agent Smith into himself,

and he emerges as the One, an integrated human being with magical powers.

That's the hero's journey, and The Matrix is the best version of it,

because it's about, ~ at the end of it,

Neo has aligned with the force of evolution,

and it has made him unstoppable.

It's a magical tale I've listened to Joseph Campbell,

I've got it on my phone, I listen to it every now and again because

it is spectacular. It is such an archetype,

isn't it? It's from Star Wars,

it's pretty much every book. It's just a beautiful tale of choice.

Are you going to make that difference?

Are you going to sit in your desk till you're 65 and you get the paycheck

and then die two weeks later because you've

run out of everything or are you going to get that curiosity?

But I'll tell you one thing, right?

It's all very well, I'll talk about this on a podcast and...

You asked me to talk about emotion or tones.

And it's this idea that like, cool,

this sounds good. And maybe even as a part of me that really knows it's true,

but I have a family, right?

Am I gonna gamble my savings,

my family's welfare, my social standing,

my very lucrative and successful career on a hunch that isn't

confirmed

listen.

really by much of what I see around me and is not confirmed

by mainstream materialist science?

and sounds pretty woo. That's where the rubber meets the road.

And that's unfortunately when people are having the heart attacks because they don't

Yep.

trust. But

it's a big deal. And I still

Hmm.

don't, I still can't tell people with certainty and I don't think I ever will

be able to if you make the right leap you held.

We have a chap in Leading Edge right now.

He's the most mystically grounded person I've ever met in my life.

I call him our chief mystical officer.

He himself has just decided to leave his very long career to pursue the path.

that he knows is unfolding for him,

although he doesn't know what that path is yet.

And he's terrified. The reality of walking this path relative to

the theory of walking this path is very,

different. And I guess that's one reason why you need a community.

that whole thing of that fear.

I that's my journey. I came down to two choices before I decided I'm going

to ask for help. Yeah,

I wanted to live. I guess I was one of those people,

I lost pretty much everything.

However, I didn't want to lose my life.

So that was the choices. I had to change everything.

And

Scary, absolutely. Terrifying,

absolutely. Institutionalising myself in a rehab,

scary as hell. Worth it? I think so.

But then I have no dependents.

I don't have the wife, I don't have the kids.

~ That doesn't make it any easier for me.

So I guess ~ as a man,

as a parent, as a father, I mean,

you've really got to weigh these things up.

How you're going to change, how you're to do these things.

How did that work out for you?

Because I know you're...

Your story, you mentioned you had a son come into the argument,

come into life.

Yeah, it was catastrophic. I mean,

I always tell people my favourite,

second favourite quote, which is from Jung which is,

there's no greater burden a child can bear than the unlived life of the parent.

But I didn't start with that framing.

Mm.

I went full blown nuts, Boxing Day 2017,

and it got a little bit better.

And so my wife and I carried on with IVF,

we'd struggled to have kids. And then she got pregnant in February.

By the time my boy was being born in November,

I was having waking visions. I was floridly insane.

And all of it was revolving around the concept of sacrifice for a child

and this concept of archetypal sacrifice that I

Mm-hmm.

felt I was in direct.

direct encounter with a force that I came to call Moloch,

which is the Canaanite god of child sacrifice,

which, yeah,

it was a pure, pure shattering terror because

I felt that this was what was underneath Wall Street and was actually causing this

petrified terracotta army, which was just,

know, the child sacrifice basically says,

give me everything that you value.

and I will give you safety, control and power.

And so it's often not a literal child sacrifice,

but it's like, give me your life and I will give you that salary.

But I would also give it for your kids,

but you're killing your kid because your kid doesn't have a dad,

right? And doesn't have a parent.

And it's not a simple trade off.

And anyway, so when my boy was born,

I was floridly insane. It was actually a retrospectively pretty funny photo

of my wife having just given birth.

and I look much worse than she does.

It looks like me that's just spent 10 hours

in labor because I was insane.

when he got,

when he was born, it didn't get better,

it got worse because I couldn't connect with him.

I couldn't really connect with anything,

but every time he cried, it set my bones on fire because it was a call

to connection I think I couldn't have.

And I would get, I would get irate to the extent that like my wife was worried

I was going to hurt my child.

And my

Hmm.

wildly ineffective psychiatrist called me one Sunday night and said,

don't kill your wife and kids.

~ Which you probably shouldn't tell someone in those circumstances,

but it made me wonder if I was capable of it.

~ Which I don't think it was, but it was a dangerous thing to be incepted with.

There

Hmm?

was one night I was holding my boy when he was a very young baby.

And there was a knowing in me.

that he was going to save me with unconditional love.

And there's this movie I love called Oldboy Boy,

which is about a man that gets imprisoned in a room for 15 years for no reason.

And at one point he finds metal chopsticks in the food they leave him and

he uses a metal chopstick to to burrow out of the bricks and he manages

to get his finger

See you guys.

into outside of the building and into rain.

And it's first time he feels rain in 15 years.

And that was what it felt like.

But I was still in the room.

And for like an hour,

Thank

I was telling my wife, I'm out.

I'm out of this. I'm out from under this.

And I could feel again. And she,

she was trying not to get hopeful because I'd looked different and I felt different.

And by the time

Hmm.

I woke up the next morning, I was in hell again.

but I was right. And in the Ketamine hell trip,

~ I'd always had this vision that I dragged

it.

my boy into hell.

and was my fault and I was damned.

And in the final Ketamine session,

I saw this black blob in this vision.

All my other visions had been just like huge galactic geometric shapes

and this time it was a black blob and I went into the black blob and in it,

I was dragging the boy into hell and it was my fault.

I still don't know what that means.

I've got lots of interpretations that have been offered to me by different people.

Hmm. ~

I don't know what it means, but that was the thing.

And when he was about 15 months old,

to be happy with the most.

so a few months after that, I was on the beach in Montauk listening to

one of my favourite songs, which is this is transcendent classical song called

Spring One by Max Richter.

and it's called Recomposed, the album.

And I was like, ~ I can hear this music.

And I'm starting to feel my boy.

I'm starting to feel something with him as he becomes more reciprocal.

keep your voice down. And it helps us as well.

And now my son sets some rises with him.

This is with you.

Now

he crawls into bed with me in the morning and every time it's the best moment

of my life. But it took a long time to get there.

You've mentioned the terracotta army.

mean, that's what is the terracotta army?

They're buried beneath every city on earth.

And they're me.

They're you. They're people of our age that have been told this line by the

Mm-hmm.

devil, which is like, this is it.

Hold on. There is no adulthood.

There is no Dao When you die, that's it.

It's a dog eat dog world. It's just business.

You're just a number.

You actually don't have any gifts.

And if you did have any gifts,

they wouldn't be monetisable. They don't have value to them.

You can't live off your gifts.

The fuck are you going to do? Be a chef?

Ridiculous. You're going to finger paint?

What even is creativity? What even is art?

You don't have anything special about you.

That's what they've been told.

And

Hmm.

even if what it was, you wouldn't be able to transition without completely

obliterating your family. Right?

And then they'll leave you. They hate you.

Right? You'll disappoint your children and your neighbours will look

at you and think,

You know, what happened to that guy?

My God, he had a nervous breakdown.

He had a midlife crisis. They don't understand that it's

an initiation into adulthood and that it's agony,

but it's an accepted part of human evolution.

That's the Terracotta Army.

So it sounds very much to me like your journey has been a boy to man.

It's been initiation. It's been that whole process of becoming a man from

a child That whole tumble down,

making sense of and all those conversations.

That initiation,

~ is that a fair expression or fair understanding of it?

it is an initiation.

of the central questions of my life is,

does everyone need to do that?

Right? Like, does everyone have to go to hell?

How much...

how much of the unnecessary suffering can be solved through truth,

just letting people know that this is a path rather than

Mm.

let them stumble through it backwards,

right? With the complete denial of any of these forces.

But I would say like, I started reading Campbell before my crisis,

Mm-hmm.

something in me that understood that Campbell was speaking

to something intrinsically true.

And then the moment I went into crisis,

that

residual foundation of confidence completely obliterated.

And I think that was part of the experience.

If I had had hope, the dark night wouldn't have been dark.

So I wrestled with this like,

Yep.

this is kind of like a slightly douchey self-serving conclusion from all this,

which is I'm wiser because I spent two years in hell.

And if you only spend 18 months in hell,

you're less wise, right?

Mm-hmm.

If I suffer more, I'm better than you.

And like, that's an awkward question to start asking,

which is,

Hmm.

if you do the full Mandela, do you get the full Mandela?

You know what I mean? Like, if you do the full Viktor

Hmm?

Frankl, do you get the full Viktor Frankl?

Or is it something

Yep.

that can be alleviated for people?

I don't know the answer. I'm very curious.

That's an interesting one. I've had conversations with people who have,

I'm just going to say that they were more aware,

they were quicker than me. They didn't have to go down to that depth.

Well, Tim Freke was saying

Hmm.

that, you know, he had his, I think he had his awakening experience at 12.

And he said to me, you know, like,

not everyone makes it out. Not everyone makes

Mm.

it out of the initiation. The Shaman understood that.

know, Bill Plotkin, guy I was talking about earlier,

he was like, there's three outcomes of a soul initiation.

Number one, it

Mm-hmm.

all goes great when you live your life's purpose.

Number two, you get stuck in the cocoon for a long time because

of trauma you haven't resolved.

And number three, you die. You die in the process.

And I think in the

Mm-hmm.

West, you're like, whoa, okay,

whoa.

Whoa, I could die in this process.

And then you

Mm.

was like, yeah, but how many kids in America and the West die as a result

of the lack of our initiation process?

And how many people ignore the call to adventure and die anyway?

It's a pretty stark question where you're like,

Yep, exactly.

your choice isn't no death. Your

choice is risking death through the adventure.

You got to leave the Shire or possible death in your bed,

you know?

Yeah, I'm not going to ask you was it worth it,

~ but are you happier on the other side?

I don't care if you're asking me,

it was worth it. I mean, the thing is,

that like, yes, I did feel like I made a choice.

Like I actually made a soul deep choice to cross that threshold that night

on boxing day.

Mm-hmm.

But if you had said to me, Tom,

you're going to go to hell for two years,

a hell of unimaginable agony that will feel like

an infinite period of time. I mean,

like, do you still push the button?

you still take the pill?

Yeah.

You you feel like Neo waking up in the Matrix and you're like,

well, that was a huge mistake.

You know, like, I

Mm.

you wish you took the other pill now.

But you don't get to do that.

Life doesn't work that way. And I'm exquisitely happy now.

I get to do exactly what I want to do in life.

Don't look

Hmm.

exquisitely successful to people from the outside,

but anyone that knows me will probably say I'm one of the happiest people they know.

So yeah, it was worth it.

You have fallen very far through a necessity and come out with a vision

and a purpose and,

creating something for people who are also curious and as you said,

hopefully not having to fall quite so far,

but they want to change. And that's the exciting thing,

finding these people, finding you and willing to make a difference in their lives.

Yeah. And my God, there's going to be millions of them.

There already are, I think. They just can't find the others.

So how do people find you? How do they find one of these groups?

I'm building it right now. Last couple of weeks,

I've been building the network of networks,

which is I can't accommodate people anymore.

I'm full. I've got a long waiting list.

So I've put together a network of networks.

Anyone can contact me. We'll probably get home.

We've already got a sales funnel page up for it.

Can't join my group. How about Hamish's?

This is what Hamish's group is about.

This is much it costs. This is how many people are in it.

This is where it's based. Go join it.

That's a simple, easy fix for us.

For me, I write obviously publicly.

I don't believe in paywalling anything.

That's at The Leading Edge on Substack.

and I'm on Twitter, Tom Owen Morgan.

Less active on there, thank God for my family's sake than I used to be,

because it's less fun. Occasionally I post on LinkedIn,

which makes me want to kill myself,

but that's about it.

Hmm. It sounds like you're having fun,

Tom.

The most fun of anyone I know.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Are you insane?

But by current societal standards,

quite definitely, yeah.

Congratulations then. think you are.

Here's to being insane in a sane world.

is it the other way around? Yeah.

No, brilliant.

Doesn't matter which way.

No, ~ Tom, this has been a fab conversation.

Thank you ever so much. I've really enjoyed it.

And you've opened my eyes and you've given me an awful lot to think about.

So thank you.

It's been my pleasure, thanks for having me.

Well, there we are everybody. Another really interesting conversation.

In fact, probably one of the more esoteric ones we've had so far.

If you're still listening, if you like what you heard,

please like and share this. Please contact Tom,

please contact me because.

This is a really important conversation.

Life is changing. We've no idea where we're going.

But if we stay curious, then there's just that opportunity for magic.

So thank you ever so much.