218: Mastering Viral Content and An Unconventional Approach to Modern Mindfulness with Author and Social Media Influencer Cory Allen

In this episode of The Light Watkins Show, host Light Watkins sits down with author, podcast host, and meditation expert Cory Allen for an inspiring and insightful conversation. Cory, a daily meditator for over 25 years, shares his journey from a chaotic family environment to becoming a renowned digital creator, author, and podcast host. With a following that reaches over a million people weekly on Instagram, Cory’s content on mental clarity and motivation has resonated deeply with his audience.

Light and Cory dive deep into the secrets behind Cory’s viral Instagram posts, offering valuable tips for creators looking to grow their online presence. Cory breaks down his analytical approach to content creation, providing a unique perspective on how to gauge and optimize the impact of social media posts. This episode is a treasure trove of practical advice for aspiring influencers and anyone interested in the digital space.

Listeners will also get an intimate look into Cory’s personal story, including how his unstable childhood led him to self-discovery and daily meditation. Cory’s candid sharing of his life’s challenges and triumphs offers a relatable and motivational narrative that underscores the importance of perseverance and inner growth.

Additionally, the episode explores Cory’s innovative approach to music production and his early days of growing his Instagram page. Light’s thoughtful questions guide the conversation, making it easy for listeners to connect with Cory’s experiences and insights.

Tune in and discover how Cory Allen has turned his life’s obstacles into opportunities, and learn practical strategies for finding your path and purpose. Whether you’re a creator, a meditator, or someone seeking inspiration, this episode promises to leave you with actionable takeaways and a renewed sense of possibility. Don’t miss this engaging and uplifting conversation.

Transcript

EPISODE 218

CA: “I was just like, fuck this. Okay. All I care about is the writing. I don't care about what it looks like. I don't care about what, like, I think people want. What do I, what represents me? What do I want? And that's just minimalism and all black, like I've always worn all black and I like minimalism and so it's like, I'll just do the same thing, but I'll just do all black and I'll just use that every day. And it doesn't like, I don't care if people don't like it, it's what I like and I'll focus on the writing. The first day I posted one of those, my engagement went up like 500%. So that is a lesson for people. And this is not just me. It's not just in this experience of mine, some other experiences, it is every person I know that has had a breakthrough, creatively the moment when you can let go of the idea of what you think that other people want from you and you do exactly what feels right to you, which you want to see in the world. That's whenever things start happening.” 

[INTRODUCTION]

Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins show. I'm Light Watkins, and I have conversations with ordinary folks just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or what they've identified as their mission in life. And in doing so, they've taken They've been able to positively impact and inspire the lives of many other people who've either heard about their story or who witnessed them in action or people who've directly benefited from their work.

The goal of these episodes is to expose you to as many people as possible who found their path. And to humanize them in their stories and after hearing story after story, hopefully, eventually you give yourself permission to move further in the direction of whatever feels like your path and purpose, because what you'll see is that anyone who does that has had to overcome many of the same obstacles. That you might be dealing with right now. And this week I'm in conversation with one of my favorite social media influencers, Cory Allen. Cory has been a daily meditator for over 25 years. He's got a top rank podcast, and he's been posting these daily motivational thoughts on mental clarity to his massive fans. Following on Instagram over the last few years, his content reaches over a million people a week.

And on top of being a digital creator, Cory has just released his second book, which is titled Brave New You to write the book. Cory tapped into insight from his online community so that he could discover what people most desire to know where they most wanted support and the best way to give them what they needed and he distilled what he learned into a radically fresh, yet profoundly intuitive roadmap for taking change in your life.

And in this episode, I asked Cory to reverse engineer. The posts that he has that went viral on Instagram, which has happened several times, and he went very deep into the analytics and into the algorithms and into his thinking of why he posts what he posts and how he gauges whether or not a quote will resonate with his audience. So if you are a creator or an aspiring creator, you've been wanting to post more, you've been On Instagram, but you're not quite sure how to tell what to post. I think you're really going to get a lot out of this conversation because we spent a lot of time talking about creating content. In addition to hearing about Cory's fascinating backstory and how an unstable family environment led him into this path of self discovery, which eventually converted into him becoming a daily meditator.

And we also talk about Cory's unique approach to music production, which is something he's also known for. And the early days of his Instagram page, when he didn't have very many followers and how he grew his page step by step. I definitely think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. So without further ado. Here is my conversation with author, podcaster, and influencer, Mr. Cory Allen.

[00:04:12] LW: Cory Allen. Thanks so much for coming on to the podcast, man. I'm super excited about diving into your story, talking about Brave New You and unpacking your perspective on meditation and mindfulness and all the things you've been up to. 

[00:04:28] CA: Beautiful, man. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm happy to be here with you and just man, ready to connect and dive into some good stuff.

[00:04:35] LW: Yeah, man. I think you have the best voice of any podcast guests that I've had so far, as I've just mentioned. So I like to do really like extensive, deep research. Someone wrote a book, I like to read their book. I read your book, but what I'm really looking for, because this podcast is about, people who sort of pivoted away from the conventional thing and towards something that they feel more in line with and they're now using that whatever platform they've created to leave the world a better place. I'm really interested in personal stories and, things that you've potentially had to overcome or leaps of faith or obstacles. And so I was just mentioning to you before we hit record that I haven't found a lot of that on online and you were telling me partially that's on purpose, but.

Can you please continue telling me what your intention has been since you become a public figure? 

[00:05:33] CA: Yeah. Thank you for asking about that. Yeah, there, there is a decent amount of stuff. I suppose one would just have to listen to a lot of podcasts. There's probably 500 podcasts or more of me out there in the world. And yeah, so I don't really go into it unless I'm asked about it and I don't intentionally put my “story” out into the world. This is because early on, whenever I first got the idea that I was going to talk about, what I talk about publicly truly, I had been focusing on practicing researching, experimenting with all of this work my entire life, but it wasn't until I was in my kind of mid-30s, early-30s that I started talking about it publicly.

Really, it was a two fold thing. Reason why I've positioned things the way I have is one is that I'm not interested in myself. I guess I should say that I really like to make what I put out there about the idea and that way the person who receives that idea can then make it theirs and, have their experience with it.

For me to put my fingerprints and like wrap every idea of mine in a story and kind of in my background, I feel like there's too much of my capital S Self intertwined with the ideas and that mode of delivery. And so I like to just put the ideas out. And I've always thought about this, I was a composer in my early-20s, like a music composer and I had my own audio production company for like a decade.

And one of the things I've always thought about was like, it's my business model is like, if you make the thing you put out there strong and undeniable enough, it doesn't really matter what other stuff is surrounding it, it'll just cut through time and find the people it needs to find and money and opportunity to all the other stuff will flow around and from that, as opposed to positioning something where it's the youth, it's getting all of that stuff out there. And so I really just focused on what I'm putting out there a lot more because of that. The other reason that I started doing that from early on was it was it's learned it's unraveled over time, but it was to like safeguard any potential ego, gratification.

Like I wanted to make sure that once I had a bunch of people every day telling me how great I was and how much they liked me and how much they were aspiring to be like me, which I don't know why you'd want to do that because I know me, but didn't want there to be a chance that I'd get a taste for that, nothing.

I just thought, let me just make sure and do that as well and keep that nice and tidy. Of course, over the years, you know, as the decade went on, as I continued doing the work publicly. It became clear to me that, that was more about me, not being able to accept love and appreciation and gratitude and be able to feel it.

And there's a good way to sidestep all of that stuff and not have to be vulnerable.

[00:08:38] LW: Awesome, man. Yeah, I get that. I understand that. I think on one hand you definitely want the work to speak for itself and it should. Ideally, I know when I've written books, I want my books to be timeless as possible.

And the way you can achieve that is you extract the, whatever the, the The backstory, like if someone has to have context to understand this piece, then it's not gonna be as timeless as it would be if it didn't. You didn't need to read the little placard next to that piece, understanding what the artist was thinking when they came up with this.

Exactly. I totally get that. And at the same time, and I'm sure you found this, 'cause you do this in your podcast, you, you like to. Talk about how people develop the perspective that they have. And so what I like to do is I'm asking questions, not as a meditation person, not even as an author, but really just someone I want to represent people who Look at your work, look at my work and they see us posting and they see, these big followings and they see books and they see all these things. You're on these various podcasts and they think themselves, I want to be like that, but I couldn't, there's no way I could be like that. 

[00:09:51] CA: Yeah. 

[00:09:52] LW: They have this whole story around, how people like us are special and the reality of the situation is actually we just found the inspiration or the courage, maybe from watching somebody else to put ourselves out there. And so I'd like to reverse engineer the work of luminaries and just make it more accessible. And sometimes telling the personal stories can lower the ladder down a bit and make. People more relatable and there's in their backstories more relatable and where I like to usually start is in the early days.

So I would like to invite you to just share whatever you feel called to share about your, you're from Austin. I know that. And I didn't know it was called Waterloo at some point. That was interesting. 

[00:10:42] CA: That's impressive. That's like a fact I'll pull out for somebody that I'll be like, only the dustiest of the OGs know facts such as this. So I'm impressed that you've pulled that one out. 

[00:10:56] LW: Yeah. So talk about little Cory, I don't know what your parents called you, but I know there were some, chaos and some contention in your house growing up and you have an older brother that's four years older. And so just talk a little bit about that.

What were some of the life philosophies, good or bad that you heard, growing up from your parents or from your caregivers? What were some of your favorite activities as a young person? 

[00:11:21] CA: Yeah. Okay. So first off, yeah what you're saying about sharing some of your own experience, to as you beautifully put it, let down the ladder to invite people in. I mean, that's a great way to describe it. And it took me, doing this stuff, I don't know, seven years, eight years publicly before I started realizing that if I wanted to take things to the next level, I needed to meet that in the middle a little bit and offer that. And it really is it's a beautiful way.

And again, it's a different type of vulnerability, and it's like, you don't consider that as a listener as much in the way it feels, as someone who's creating something, whenever you are vulnerable in that way, like you're describing It's really strange because you were like opening up about something and then just like putting it out in the world and it's like, okay, now it's documented now in time and space and it's out there.

So it is an odd feeling but it's definitely worth, working with so I mean, let's see, where did it even begin? 

As a kid, I was very shy and very withdrawn and very sweet. I didn't speak to anyone until I was four years old, except for my mom and my brother. And I was just really like in my head all the time. Just I lived like in a dream world, I would just as a little kid, I would say, and I suppose most kids, a lot of kids do, but I would just like, you be lost in kind of a almost a visionary in and out. I'm not trying to sound mystical.

I mean, just that level of visual kind of imagination and I loved it there. And yeah, very shy, very timid. And, ultimately as I got older, what happened was that, I had no one. That was there to show me the world no, parental figure to help teach or guide me. 

My parents separated. My dad wasn't around from a very young age and he was a very like, it's like a Quentin Tarantino movie character. Very like Alpha Texas, like old school, bad ass type of, vibe that is very specific, but it's also it's a very specific generation and type of person.

And yeah, so, his role was always like anytime that maybe I would see him once a year, it was always a threat. It was like, basically do what you're told or else you're going to feel the wrath of, but there wasn't any guidance. There wasn't any emotional connection or anything like that. Might be a little extreme for your audience or maybe not, but like, for example, he would choke one of my brother's friends with a pistol, like by shoving the barrel of it down his throat as a way to intimidate him. So, just that type of dude. 

And one of the lessons I did learn that you mentioned good or bad is that I remember as a little kid, him saying one time, he always carried this briefcase with metal. He always had a gun on him or two. He slept with like a shotgun under his bed. He also died, when I was 20, out of nowhere and people were like at his funeral laughing and like partying. He had a lot of contentious relationships, let's put it that way. But he had this briefcase with like metal edges on it.

I asked him why he had these metal edges on it. And he said, because he never knew who you, who he was going to see when he walked around the corner. He lived in Dallas. He's like, well, I'm in downtown Dallas. I don't know who I'm going to see. And I want to be ready in case I want to hit him in the side of the head with it.

And I remember thinking as a little kid, like that's so odd. I want the opposite of that. I want to be excited about who I'm going to see when I go around the corner, it's little things like that, or even as a kid, I was like taking notes of like learning what not to do and like intuitively feeling like that feels like that level of violence and like a fear based mindset seems like suffering essentially. I remember thinking like, I don't want that. 

Anyway, so then in the house, growing up then my mom was you know, she had a lot of struggles in her life and unfortunately, that materialized into, I think like any parents, she tried her best. She was always trying her best, but she had a lot of emotional manipulation, a lot of emotional abuse, a lot of gaslighting. That was all a lot of extreme experiences, which if I started talking about them, it would really bum out your listeners. But we'll put it at just a lot of extreme narcissistic and manipulative and emotionally abusive behavior. 

And yeah, so that basically made it to where I was the kid and I was very sensitive and very much in a dream world and very withdrawn.

Probably some of that was a distancing technique almost as a, to, to separate from the external reality. But what started happening is I realized, from a young age that if I didn't show myself the world that no one was going to show it to me, I needed to figure things out and I needed to be self-reliant.

So I slowly started becoming hyper independent. So much so that I pretty much just like shut out anything, any support system that could have been there in life. I stopped being able to even identify them as support systems because I didn't trust anyone. I didn't trust an authority figure to help me because all authority figures were always trying to exploit and threaten me. And they were perpetually betraying me physically and emotionally. And so what happened is it forged this, as I said, this hyper-independent self reliance and what that turned into was an extreme self confidence because I knew that I had to take care of myself and I also had to battle this ecosystem of abuse that I was in and be strong to withstand that and to be smart to be able to navigate it. 

During that time, what started opening up, I looking back at it, I didn't have the language for it then, but I started noticing the things that really served me until this day and that became a big part of the work I do and things I talk about, which are. I started recognizing in moments where I was being gaslighted and manipulated.

I would recognize that I was present for something in reality and I was being told that something different had happened than what I observed and it made me start realizing that everyone perceives reality differently and that everyone talks and believes truly, passionately, sometimes aggressively a story about reality that, is relative to their perceptio emotional and cognitive biases. And I started seeing that clearly from multiple points of view. And it made me start watching for that. It became a tool to learn not only to be able to see that happening so I could protect myself against it, but also I could use it to protect myself in the ways in which I talked about reality. 

And then from a very young age, no one in my family was, were readers no one ever like no real higher education no books in the house, maybe a few national inquires, and there was no knowledge base and I'm 42. 

So in the 90s, there was no internet and I heard someone in public. This is like strangely divine, like this is one of those things where it's like just a cosmic worldly gig where I'm just like, okay, I think there has to be, there must be something going on in this, three dimensional axis of time and space that's beyond cause it's so weird. I would just do the domino effect of, I overheard two people talking in the pub in public one time and they said, if you could have dinner with Two people living or dead, who to be.

And this random person said, Jesus and Nietzsche. And I remember thinking Nietzsche sounds like such a cool name. Like I always thought it sounded like the edge of a knife blade. It's like this sharp and it is, and so then I was in a bookstore and I just really just getting a cup of coffee.

And I saw that name on the back of a book whenever I was a teenager. And I was like, oh, there's that name. I went over and I grabbed it and I always felt so isolated. I always felt so the way in which I thought in the world, I couldn't connect with anybody. Like I could make people laugh. My brother and I got each other and we would laugh and just, we had that language and stuff. But outside of that, like I had a really hard time. People connected with me, but I didn't feel like I was connected with them. There was no container for me to, exist within. And whenever I went over and I opened this Nietzsche book, I was like, wow, this is how I think.

And it's not what I think, but it's just the mathematics of Logic of big abstract ideas broken down into potent, few words arriving at an actionable point that had, that created a shift in consciousness. That's like how I was thought from a young age. And when I read that, I was just like, Holy shit, this is what I need to be studying.

[00:20:55] LW: Was there like a specific Nietzscheism that sort of defined that part of your life? 

[00:21:00] CA: Yeah, it was from beyond good and evil and I can't remember it was like, that one is just a little sticks of dynamite. I don't remember the exact one, but I remember it was just that there's like some pacing in that book where it's just like a few sentences and then a few sentences and a few sentences and it's just like, they should come with a warning sticker on it because it'll, it can really undo your brain the good way. But I don't remember that. And also I was like a total metal head. Like I was obsessed with like death metal. And also that was the golden era of hip hop too. And being from Austin, like everything from Houston came up here. So I was like really into too short. Well, from as far as Texas goes, it was this is crazy.

And any, like. older hip hop fans, this will trip them out, is that DJ Screw who for people that don't know, is the one that invented chopped and screwed music he was from Houston. And he basically, he invented it because he just would slow down, the tapes, cause they were all drinking codeine. So it was like in the same vibe as how they were feeling. And so it was like, they would slow it down. But what he would do is they would just make cassette copies of these mixes he made and they would just like handwrite like DJ Screw, like Wineberry over gold volume one or something on there.

And then they would sell it like it was drugs. So basically, like, they would be like, I got the new, I got like 100 copies and people would, and, I say that quite literally is they had like a door, like a, the a wrought iron fence door on the house in the back door. You could come to the back door. They'd open up, you give them the cash and they'd put an arm out of the house for music. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. They give you a cassette. And so I had a bunch of those, like I had those cassettes from DJ Screw. 

[00:22:50] LW: You would go to the house and get them? 

[00:22:51] CA: No, my friends would go down there and get them and then they would bring them up. Yeah. No, I had originals. I had originals. And it's so stupid that at the time I didn't realize how important they were. And so I'd play them. I'd give them away. I'd like, leave them whatever. And so I don't have them anymore. But anyway, yes. I was reading all of that and it just started blowing my mind.

And then really from oh, I'm sorry. I started talking about metal and hip hop because the, All of the anti authority stuff, like really spoke to me because I, you know, it was resentful. It's like, and also I didn't like the idea of being controlled and stuff because of emotional abuse and manipulation. So it was a two pronged thing. And so the energy in both of those forms of music was definitely good, because it was very anti authority. And so that was one of the things that drew me to Nietzsche. 

[00:23:38] LW: When I was growing up, I grew up around the same era. I'm a little older than you are, but my older brother would come home with tapes, LL Cool J, Run DMC. He was the one that kind of introduced me to stuff. And I'm curious who introduced you to metal and to hip hop?

[00:23:55] CA: Yeah, definitely with the new stuff, my brother introduced me to metal whenever I was like it because since, as you said, he's four years older than me. So he was in, in I guess early nineties, like he was into Metallica and Pantera and stuff like that. But then I quickly took that and I've always been like a researcher.

So with everything like very autodidactic. And so I would go to the record stores and I would buy whatever was new. And so what was new at the time was death metal, which is weird. It's like, and like 92, 93, it was like, someone like Deicide or Cannibal Corpse, like that was their earliest albums were coming out.

And it was like, it was just totally frying my brain. But then hip hop was friends at school. They all like had off everything that was coming out. And so we would, I would always get, I hung out with a lot of like gang members whenever I was in middle school and high school. 

[00:24:49] LW: And so that's because guns didn't scare you gun. You're just like, okay, whatever. 

[00:24:52] CA: Totally. Totally. I'm like, yeah, an assault rifle and a bunch of weed. This is sort of this I'm very comfortable. This is, This is home. Yeah. It's funny you say that because that's a hidden talent of mine that would surprise people is that every time I did go spend time with my dad.

All we would do is go to the shooting range and you would teach me how to fire every type of weapon and then clean. And then when you teach me how to actually pack ammunition too, so I could pack like shotgun shells or, four caliber weapons. So I'm an expert. You're like Jason 

[00:25:25] LW: Bourne with a gun.

[00:25:26] CA: You like pull it out. I really am, which is funny. And I actually, probably about like five or six years ago, I was like, I wonder if I still have it, and so I went to the range, I was like, okay, so like, it was like riding the bike. I still got it. 

Yeah. So yeah, so I love Nietzsche because he was anti authority. He was basically just like, you know, here's the way to think. Here's what's right and let's. Deconstruct, the cultural way of thinking, religious ways of thinking, all of that stuff. And that really spoke to me. And so after really, it was partially because I was like, insatiably obsessed with philosophy where I first found it. Also now, as I get older, I realized it was another form of like avoidance of retreating into a dream world so I could block out reality. But I would read for like six to eight hours a day just every day for years really. 

And then I ultimately started getting the idea of like, maybe I should check out Eastern philosophy. Interesting. And so I went over in with, what memory serves to me, this is like 30 years, almost 30 years ago, but I picked up a book called essays in Zen Buddhism by DT Suzuki who for people that, aren't familiar, he was one of the earliest and most important translators of Zen writings for Western culture, or basically just into English.

And that book blew my mind because when I opened that one, I was, it was like, this is not only how I think, but it's also what I think. This all of the classical elements of Buddhism really ignited me and it showed me that there was this world in which the things that I felt were true and I what I felt was right. Actually, there was a system around it and there was a whole culture of people that followed that and it was inspiring and I became so obsessed with Western wisdom traditions and I was also taking psychedelic, at the time and I would, as a teenager, I would like read this, you know, of course, back then there was no top 10 list of how to meditate. There was no YouTube. It was like long, sprawling, amorphous texts about ideas that were poorly edited. And just, you had to really, I know you, I love speaking with you about this light because I'm sure you probably read some of the same things back in the day. It's like you had no access to, there was no internet. And so you had to read old dusty books and just figure it out, and so that's what I did. And I just became obsessed with it. 

And then, as I mentioned, I basically, as I started seeing that consciousness change, I then. Started, reading Hinduism and like even things in Sufism and even things like Alistair Crowley or in pure Zen, just like really in like the hippie philosophers like Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson and people like that.

And I really just started like experimenting with my brain and noticing that every change that I made, every Insight I had, it actually reflected in the texture of my mind, like what I was experiencing, what I was perceiving, what I was feeling was shifting based upon what I was teaching myself, and it made me, I had a really powerful insight that was just as you learn, as you expand your mind and deepen your wisdom, that it actually shifts the way that you see reality, and I began being able to see that shift, and I started. Again, this is like my researcher brain.

I would be like, okay, so how did I feel six months ago and how do I feel today? Like, am I less reactive? Do I feel like I have more intentionality and like my actions and what I'm saying and doing? Do I feel less anxious? Because I was always horribly anxious. And I just started noticing these micro shifts in that direction.

And from there, I went so deep into all of this work and I really never stopped because I just thought the limit in which the expansion of my mind and my heart and my presence is only limited by the amount of work and effort I'm willing to put in to continue deepening it. So I will never stop deepening it.

[00:29:42] LW: And this is like what 16, 17 year old Cory having these. Yes. Yes. So one of the ways. Yeah, people learn stuff, whatever it is, doesn't matter what it is when you're a young person, especially you want to tell other people about it. Did you have anyone that you could bounce these philosophies and these ideas?

I'm sure your brother wasn't interested because you're four years younger. So he probably feels like, oh, yeah that's cute. Yeah. Who did you talk to about this? about this. Who did you vet some of these ideas with? 

[00:30:15] CA: Well, that's the weird thing about it is that I had to hide it all in my house because if I was found, like there would be some Thing would story would be created that I would be guilty and then in threatening and in need of punishment.

If I was found reading something that was a different way of thinking so I had to always hide everything. And the, yeah, my brother wasn't really that interested, but and he was doing his own thing. But so I couldn't talk to about it around the house, but I would talk to a couple of friends. Just at school a few people, you know, and they, I don't know, I think that really, they just liked hearing kind of the music of what I was saying, and they, and there was a couple of dudes that were, and let's face it, it was all dudes. A girl coming around for this conversations.

Have you read the Merleau Ponty and Edmund Husserl, these philosophers talking about phenomenology. There's some guys that, they were like tracking it, and they would be like, Oh, that's really crazy. How interesting. 

And, I liked that you bring that up because what that kind of turned into was, I figured out this way, and I hadn't really thought about this before, but I figured out this way to where I would always sort of like slip in the spirit or little snippets of some of that stuff into what I was talking about in daily life.

And so as I continued into adulthood, I was always talking about it. You know what I mean, but not so directly, but people would be like, whoa, I never thought of it that way. And in fact, of course, because I snuck in this idea. 

[00:31:58] LW: Which is a gift. It's a gift to take those concepts out of beyond good and evil and to make them accessible to simplify, to make it relatable to other people, which kind of is a, those are breadcrumbs to where this whole story is going. 

And on the other side of things, obviously you got really deep into music. What were the breadcrumbs of that? Were you in the school band? Were you studying an instrument? What was your introduction to music? 

[00:32:25] CA: Yeah. So, it was at the same time that I got, started getting obsessed with this other way of thinking. I got obsessed with guitar, and it was again, that's how you get the girls. Even though I'll say that it never worked because of course I took a really nerdy approach to it.

[00:32:42] LW: Classical guitar? 

[00:32:43] CA: No, it was like shredding, like metal, like crazy solos and death metal shredding. Yeah. But I got into it cause I was skateboarding whenever I was like a kid and I used to, I used to take, like, I would take psychedelics and then go down the biggest hill I could find in like, while blasting death metal in my headphones, because I thought that was, fun.

Really again, looking back, I'm like, this is just, I was trying to feel something, it's almost like cutting or something where a person's putting themselves in an extreme situation to try and force through some emotional connection because those internal circuits are so atrophied, that there's not a connection between the mind and the body and the heart, so I know that's why I was trying to have those extreme experiences, which I had a lot of whenever I was younger. So basically then I was skating and my brother was like, he was getting into playing guitar and stuff and he was like, I was like, man, there's no rush better than like, going down, almost dying, going down the giant hill on a skateboard.

And he was like, dude, you should try playing an instrument. Like this, playing guitar is pretty awesome. I get, it's the same rush and a lot less, you know, scraped knees and elbows and foreheads. And I was like, all right, let me try it. And I remember I picked it up and I had this, like a CD of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. And if you look in the little booklet Which by the way, for people listening that are under 35, there was a little book that you could slide into a compact disc and it had all this information in it. And so I opened it up and it had like just the main line from voodoo child.

And so I got the guitar and I followed along. Just the tab that had in there and I just, it's just, you just match the notes and the strings. And I was like, whoa, and it just blew me up. And so I became obsessed with guitar. Then I was, again, I was playing that four or five hours a day. It was all autodidactic.

I would put on whatever band and I would just play along with it and figure it out. And I just listened to the same song and play along. And I learned really fast. I could play like all the Metallica albums and the solos after playing guitar for about six months. And my brother was just like, dude, this is insanity. Like, how are you getting, you're so good so fast. And I was like, I don't know, just locked in with it, you know? that, was how I got obsessed with guitar. Then again, as a teenager, I was in like death metal and grind core bands, I toured all over the place opening for like bigger bands and stuff. But at the same time, like it was never like, I was trying to push it really far and I kept trying to push the music further and further, like the complexity and to get to a place where it was basically just like white noise. And I was reading a I was like really interested in like in minimalist art at the time, I still am, but I was really interested in that.

And I read this line about how on a white canvas, a red dot, one small red dot has more energetic feedback to the eye and to the receiver than a canvas that is like, then like a Rembrandt or something that's like a a richly textured, deep and nuanced picture. And I started thinking about that. It's like, oh, right. Because the negative space is also a part of the equation and the red dot, like the cast, the energy through that negative space, it becomes immensely powerful and I'm very simple form. And at that moment, I just stopped playing guitar because I realized that I was trying to like solve this musical equation, my mind through maximalism.

And what I needed to do was learn minimalism. And so that's where I started composing music and yeah. And I could go on and on about it, but I basically, just from there, I started composing minimalist music and got obsessed with Terry Riley and Philip Glass and Steve Reich and Lamont Young, of course, who was the four first generation American minimalist composers very crucial  people. 

[00:36:36] LW: You kind of developed a reputation for having a special ability to create a certain sound and then people started hiring you to create this sound.

[00:36:47] CA: That's interesting to bring that up. Okay. So, while I was composing music, basically, so, as I just talked about, I had to hide this inner life pursuit thing whenever I was younger, but music was fine. Like I could do music all I wanted. So that's what I did kind of out in the open.

What I was actually doing was trying to figure out a way to connect. The music to the inner exploration I was doing. So even whenever I was a teenager, I would do things like I would like do experiments and see how the vibrations of like a guitar string or something like that would affect the feeling.

Because I noticed, you listen to death metal, you feel super energized and like powerful. You listen to hip hop. You feel like, just think again, powerful. It makes you feel smooth, but also calm at the same time. Listen to, like ambient music. It's very calming, very relaxing.

You listen to like electronic music. It makes you want to dance. It gives you energy. I just started noticing correlation between how music can could make me feel. And I started really thinking and like drilling down into that, like, all right, what's not only is it of course the rhythm that has a lot to do with it, but there's something about the way that what sets music apart from every other art form, it is the only art form that physically touches you.

So you can watch a movie, you can look, read a book, you can look at a painting, but sound is motion coming out of the speakers, moving through the air and touching against your skin and funneling into your eardrums and resonating, like literally vibrating into your brains. Totally blew me away whenever I realized that.

And so I started thinking there must be a way to create to understand the root resonance in every form of music and why the vibration in that music is touching and moving the nervous system of an individual and causing to have a change, an internal change. And I just got obsessed with that. So I started experimenting with that, like crazy, trying to figure it out and taking notes and stuff like at all these notebooks whenever I was a teenager.

And in my early twenties of like figuring out frequencies and like, and this isn't like a 432 Hertz type of thing I'm talking about. This is just a literal science. And like, here's sound wave moving through space. And how does that make you feel in your body and which ones can we put together? And how does that make you feel? So anyway what I started doing was I discovered binaural beats, which is like whenever you have one tone in one ear and a slightly different tone in the other ear, it creates two sound waves that are beating against each other. So if you were to touch like a white key and a black key on a piano that are right next to each other, you hear that like vibrating sound. That's because the sound waves are very close. And so they bump up against each other whenever they're moving and create that vibration in space, and so binaural beats are basically doing that, but then intentionally setting it to where the vibration is the same speed in which your neurons fire whenever you're in particular brainwave states.

So the idea is that you entrain the brain into desired brainwave states by listening to these tones. And so I started creating these tones, but I had been composing like minimalist ambient music thinking about the emotional side and the consciousness shifting side of sound already. And so I was making these things that I would meditate to, or that I would like, I would make like an eight-hour version of something and then just listen to it while I was sleeping and wake up and be like, okay, how did I feel? What happened during the night? It's like, what's my consciousness like now? 

So then probably like 10 years later, a friend of mine at the time was like, hey have you ever heard of binaural beats? And I was like, yeah, sure. I like I've experimented a lot with them. He's like, could could you make some, I'd love to hear some. I was like, yeah, sure. So I made a few and I hadn't tried to make any in forever, but obviously that 10 years I had spent producing music for a living and also my internal pursuits, I've gotten, much richer. And so I made them and they were very powerful. And what's crazy about it is that it was so fun in my studio. Like as I was making them, I was like, I'm tuning the frequencies and the vibration and producing it all. And I was like, noticing, like using my ultimate access concentration in my mindful internal awareness to observe how the texture of my consciousness is shifting as I'm producing the track and noticing wherever it gets to the space that I want it to be in. I'm like, now it's done. Now it's perfect. And I was like, wow, this is so weird that I'm literally like composing like a mental state like a texture of consciousness in mind, it's it's almost like trying to compose like a spiritual state, but knowing where to take someone with it. And so, yeah, so I did that.

And then this friend of mine, I, he was like, we should try and sell these cause he was like, he had like a decent sized platform and I was like, yeah, sure. That'd be cool. Like offering to people. And then they like went yeah. Kind of viral. And just like they exploded. And then I made like a bunch of other additions of them because I had so many people hitting me up.

And so yeah, that's pretty much how how those came around. 

[00:42:02] LW: I found it noteworthy that you were reluctant to even charge what people were willing to pay you because it was so easy for you become such a master at them. And uh, people keep wanting to offer you all this money and you kept discounting yourself and you had to learn to start to, to let people, exchange what they wanted to exchange for this music.

[00:42:24] CA: Yeah. Yeah. That was huge. That was like, basically whatever those tracks that you could buy went pretty viral then, I started having people from all over the world hit me up personally and they wanted custom tracks for themselves. And that's whenever that started happening is I would think, all right, well, what do I charge someone that wants, they want four specific tracks just for them.

That's not going to be used for public use or licensed or sold or anything. It's like, I don't know, like how many hours does it take me? I guess, how much per hour do I want? And yeah, and it just, yeah, as you said, it felt odd, like charging, that much for something that was so easy for me to do.

And then as it continued on people started appearing out of nowhere and offering me, they would just, they wouldn't even ask how much it costs. So I'll give you, X amount of dollars to make this, track or whatever. And I have like sports stars that were in, people that are like a lists, famous sports stars champions hit me up directly and be like, a couple of the guys are listened to these tracks before they go out, play, I want mine, I want to buy some, make some for me.

And some of them that can you make some for me? And then can you put a affirmation over it for me? I'm like, sure, and that's what around that time. And then famously, this dude hit me that he had on his Gmail avatar. It was him sitting on a Ferrari and had a lion next to him. And I was like, okay, like we're in a weird territory now.

I've got champions and dudes with lions and Ferraris emailing me about these tracks. And that's where it was really hitting me like, Oh yeah, it's not that I'm overvaluing myself. It's that everyone else is valuing me appropriately. I'm undervaluing myself. And why is that? And, it's time to change that.

[00:44:18] LW: What was your meditation like during this time? Were you every day, twice a day, one hour in the morning, one hour in the evening? What were you doing? 

[00:44:25] CA: Yeah, I've always been consistent for I wasn't five days a week because I know I want to do it forever and I didn't want there to ever be a chance that I got bored with it.

And so I just take those two days off. It's what works for me at that period of time, I was doing probably 45 minutes to an hour a day. 

[00:44:45] LW: You're known as an influencer on Instagram, like that's a large part of your platform. And you mentioned these affirmations. So was there a point where you started? Because obviously, I know what it's like to meditate and when you close your eyes that often and you just sit, you start processing things come through, plus you have the whole, Eastern philosophy thing as well, blending into everything. So you get these ideas, these concepts, and you want to start to just, I don't know, jot some of them down. And I'm talking to him now about pre social media days. What were you doing with that information the muse was feeding you?

[00:45:27] CA: I love the way that you described that process, man. And integrating and taking notes. Integrating, you know. 

[00:45:33] LW: A composition book, a little black speckled composition book. 

[00:45:38] CA: You're right. Yeah. I would yeah. And it was always taken very seriously. I love that.

The Allan Watts thing of like, take it sincerely, not seriously. So I should say I took it sincerely. And yeah, because it's literally like, it's your mind. Give our brains are weird because they spend their entire existence trying to get themselves to realize things. It's really strange and whenever it speaks.

You should listen to it because it's trying to make the subconscious conscious, and that's how you self actualize. And I just recognize that from whenever I was a teenager, taking acid in the closet and meditating in the darkness for hours at a time. 

[00:46:22] LW: In 2020 I had a post that went viral. It got like millions and millions of views and I had a commitment with myself to post one video a day. Every day because I wanted to just get better at speaking on camera. And I had already been writing daily, a daily inspirational email for about four years at that point. So I never missed a day.

And so for me, just like putting stuff out there, creating content was just what I did. And so this one video that I put out there that one day, it was just another video. It was just nothing about it. In fact, I was happy just to get an idea. You know how it is. You just have these ideas come through. You go, that's it. You do it. You put it out there. And then I went on with the rest of my day, went to the park for a walk, which is what I really wanted to do. 

And then I checked later and it was like exploding. But I think again, people see stuff like that. They imagine that there's more thought put into it than there actually is. And also if you look closely, there's a backlog of content. 

Even remember that guy with the cranberry juice and the skateboard who went viral over that? 

[00:47:29] CA: Yeah, with Max Song. Yeah. 

[00:47:31] LW: Dogface something or another. So when I saw that, and I went to his account on TikTok, he had done hundreds of those videos with a song playing with him doing something so that was just another video on another day. And you have a story similar to that. You posted this thing where reframing your perspective is a powerful move dot, dot, dot. Talk a little bit about what happened prior to that? What was your agreement with yourself? When did you start posting? What was your cadence like? And then that particular post that went viral?

I'm sure. I don't know. I don't want to assume that it was just another post as far as you were concerned, but just share the backstory. 

[00:48:16] CA: Yeah, no, that's such a great question, man. And how you talked about the process. That is how it works for anyone that's aspiring to get more traction.

It's like, that's why could call it genius or a good idea or a powerful insight or whatever. But if you don't show up and create the space for that thing to arise, then it's never going to arise. So you have consistency is everything. It's like you have to show up and make yourself available for the, for it to come through. And eventually the right thing at the right time and the right words that you won't expect will come through, but you have to make yourself available. And that's the key to, I think, in my mind, creative success. But yeah, so for me, I was not really messing with social media too much, you know, because had my podcast and I will say as a quick side note, like I've had a few good close friends of mine over the years.

They're like, you just it's like a, it's like a weird pattern of mine where I get interested in something and start working on it. And then like, there's just like a weird, like, just like a quick breakthrough into the whole another thing, just this happens quickly, in a way, I don't know.

Anyway I wasn't really messing with social media because, look at me, you know. No one wants to see pictures of me posted on Instagram every day. And I don't think in pictures, like, I don't take pictures. I don't ever think to take them. And so I was just sort of like, it was people that were like serious fans of my podcast followed me on Instagram, it was like, I don't know, like 10,000 people or something.

So it was like, I never even promoted everything, the link to my website. It was like, people had to go search it and to find it or whatever. And so I was sitting around and I was doing my podcast and all that, and I always had this pressure. I had like a guilt in the back of my mind about not releasing music because I released so much music in my twenties and thirties, like dozens of albums.

And there's a lot of people out there that liked my work and friends of mine was like, dude, where's the new music? People would hit me up and be like, where's the new music you haven't released anything in like four years. And I would just be like, okay, I got to release something, I got to release something.

And I always had that in the back of my mind. And I still had this idea of like, I'm going to be this successful, like music guy. And I was like, what am I talking about? Like, I'm a successful podcaster and, a public figure that talks about meditation and like the philosophy of consciousness. It's like, why am I having all this guilt that I'm not as well known for music? And I really looked into it. I stopped and thought about it and reflected on it. And I was like, oh, that's because this is like a story I told myself about my identity whenever I was like 14 years old. It's like, you have to become like a famous musician. And that was still in the back of my head of like, that's what you have to do. And that process was still running. And I realized oh, I'm just still identifying myself as that. Like. It doesn't have to be that I don't have to aspire to that. So how about I just get clear on what it is that I do want to aspire to be and do from here on out and let go of that previous story.

And so I sat down, I was like, what is it that I really want? I thought I want to, if I could do nothing but just write books, that would be my choice because I love doing it so much. I could write three a year if given the runway, If there was the need, and the invitation to do so.

And I thought, that's what I want to do. I thought, okay, well, instead of like messing around with my modular synthesizer and making weird sounds that I never do anything with all the time. Let me put that energy into writing and let me make, just do a daily. creative practice. So just like you were saying, one of those like meditative thoughts that arises.

Let me just write one of those a day and post it and just for myself, like just to sharpen my writing, just to, post things online. Be cool. Be good. Good practice. And so I just started consistently posting them every single day. 

[00:51:15] LW: When was this? 

[00:51:17] CA: Probably two and a half years ago. Okay. 

[00:51:19] LW: So it's recent. 

[00:51:21] CA: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was posting things every day and then I started like, iterating the look because I was like, yeah, this doesn't really feel like the aesthetic, the visual language didn't feel right. And so I started messing with it. 

First, it was like a color and then some text. And then it was like a different color and some texts, different texts, watch out everybody, and I was thinking like, Oh, I gotta give variety because I could eat the same thing every day and not get bored of it. But people I know they need variety and this is like a key thing to tag here is like me thinking about people, what people I thought people wanted, so then I continued on iterating, writing the thoughts and I was like, well, maybe what I should do is a little like fake Twitter picture, but I'll do like a white internal box with a nature picture like around the perimeter and I can do like a different nature picture every day underneath there and that'll keep it fresh. That'll be beautiful looking. And then after doing that for like a week or two, I was like, I'm not in doing like the work I want to be doing is not Googling beautiful nature pictures. This is not the kind of pursuit I want to be doing. This is annoying. It's not where I want to be doing. 

[00:53:51] LW: What was the traction like in that first week or two? Was it crickets? 

[00:53:53] CA: No, it was getting better. It was actually the Twitter picture with the nature photos was doing better. So that was like, this is cool.

And I was just like, fuck this. Okay. All I care about is the writing. I don't care about what it looks like. I don't care about what, like, I think people want. What do I, what represents me? What do I want? And that's just minimalism and all black, like I've always worn all black and I like minimalism and so it's like, I'll just do the same thing, but I'll just do all black and I'll just use that every day. I don't care if people don't like it, it's what I like and I'll focus on the writing. 

The first day I posted one of those, my engagement went up like 500%. So that is a lesson for people. And this is not just me. It's not just in this experience of mine, some other experiences, it is every person I know that has had a breakthrough, creatively the moment when you can let go of the idea of what you think that other people want from you and you do exactly what feels right to you, which you want to see in the world. That's whenever things start happening. But it's scary because it's why it works is because it's like, well, this isn't out there. Like people aren't doing this. So there's nothing, I'm not really copying anything. It's not safe. It's like, well. That's why whenever you get fed up enough and you just go, whatever, I'm just going to do what I want. Who cares? That's why it's popular because no one's done that. It's new. And so it hits people differently and they get interested in it and it, it gets traction. And so that post did well and I continued writing with that and what I did was every month I would look at my Instagram and now we're back in my, robot brain, I would look at my Instagram analytics and I would look at the top three performing posts over the last month and I would look at.

I would take the writing from each one and put it side by side and analyze. I look for like patterns of like language, of meaning, of the way in which I was speaking to the reader, what I was talking about, the themes I was touching on, really just figuring out, analyzing what was similar in these three posts, and I would extract.

What I perceived to be the similarities and I would start writing new posts with that thought in mind. Then another month I do the same thing. I'd go, what are the top three performing posts? What's the same about these? What do I need to change and evolve to try and write more in this style? And I repeated that process for a few months the whole time. Every time I did it, my engagement got better and better, more likes, more following, more shares. And I was like, I think I'm onto a process here. And I kept doing that until then I was like. I'm like really obsessed with like functionality, you know, in things. And so I started reading these, I dusted off my books on logic and I was like, let me read like just logical arguments and the idea of, and just some deep background on logical arguments and let me get into that way of thinking because ultimately what I'm trying to do here is present like inner life, logical arguments to people. I'm like, here's the premise. Here are ideas that support that. And here's how you can prove it to yourself by taking it into the world. That's pretty much the formula that I think and write in. And I was like, well, let me be intentional about that. And so as I started doing that, the, it started growing and growing, and then that's whenever, as just as you said, I started as a creative person, I would say another thing at scale can be useful as batching your work.

So then at this point I was writing like five posts at once, scheduling them all with like an auto poster. And then a couple of days later I'd write five more which is good because one, it saves time and you can batch the various things you need to do as a creative person and groups.

Also, you get deeper into the zone to the flow. If you're writing one, you have all the time it takes to get the plane into the air, get the creative juice flowing. You write one and then it's time to land, take away the drinks seats up, we got a 15, 20 minutes to descend here.

But if you're up in the air and you do 5, 10 you're in that space, the brain shifts to be in that mode and you can get better work done that way too. So I had these five scheduled and I was like, not even thinking about it, just like, oh, this is cool. And then one of the posts did really well, for me at the time, I was like, wow, that was crazy.

Then a couple of days later, the next one did really well. And some friends of mine, people that are influencers, I know, shared it and then the next one did really well. And it just went like, did like a hundred thousand likes in one day. And I was like, wow. Then the next one did like 200,000 likes on the first day.

It just kept compounding and then it just all hell broke loose. And they all like these three posts in particular went like crazy viral all at once. And I don't know how much you want to nerd out on the algorithm, but we could go into that as well if you want.

[00:59:17] LW: Yeah, I love it. Let's go deep as you want to go into it. I think this is very insightful and helpful for people out there. 

[00:59:24] CA: Yeah, cool. Cool. So basically what happens is like, once you have a post Instagram shows some of it to non followers and some of it to your followers.

And basically it's like the stock market. It's testing the top and testing the bottom. So it will go, how much traffic can this account handle? So we'll show it to followers. How much is it worth showing it to? And I'll show it to non followers and I'll go, how much is it worth to me? How many non followers is it worth showing to how many people engage when they see it?

And that's testing kind of the ceiling of what they perceive you, the traffic of your account to be. They also do that with the bottom. They also become stringent with your reach to test how many people are really looking and really want to find your work. So what happened is that I had these posts that were doing well because it as my formula got better, this Instagram, so didn't testing by showing it to more of my followers and showing each new post to more non followers and the people that were coming to the page were engaging. 

And so the Instagram is like, well, let's see if this page can handle even more traffic. And so then right as it started organically testing to see if they should start showing myself my stuff to even more non followers, then yeah people, friends of mine who were influencers on that day happened to share the stuff in their stories and tag me. So it brought in like 10,000 percent of more non followers. And that told the algorithm, holy shit, we need to really feed this to non followers because look how many people are coming in that testing period. 

I started popping up in people's suggested feed because of that because then the next stage of them showing you to non followers, like, of like communities is then popping you over to like, here's. It's going to be in people's feed now that are like two levels removed from you, like someone that, you know, that someone that doesn't follow you is going to get your posts in their feed.

And then if that's successful, if people then like, and follow and engage with that, the next step is to. Is it pushes you out to like all of Instagram. So you go into just the ecosystem of explore and to people who aren't even interested in like wellness or personal development stuff, they'll see your sting suggested and that's how something goes viral.

So in my case, what happened in, in actually manufactured this on a second go around, so I started noticing this happening. And so that was like two or three days. And then I posted another thing and as it started taking off, I then asked every big influencer person I know to please share it in their stories and tag it.

And then that happened. And that post just like totally exploded because Instagram was already getting horny for my, for my content. And then that's one of those posts really blew up and. You'll notice bursts of three as far as engagement goes on Instagram. Like if you post one thing that does really well, the following two posts will also do pretty well. And then inevitably post four will not do well. It's because it gives you, and like, you could go back and look at your own stuff. You'll see patterns of three in this and basically, it's doing that process I was talking about, but it's like a sawtooth wave of like going up, up and it cuts it down and cuts your engaging a little bit and it'll let you thrive whenever something else hits for three posts and then cut it off and it'll do it every time you get like a good boost. But I noticed that like the previous post was at the bottom where it had gone down again. So I knew the next one of the next two, I had an opportunity to really hit it. And so I had everyone share it that when the posted, well, boom, it went viral. And just like my account, I gained like a hundred thousand followers in like a week.

[01:03:24] LW: It's fascinating, man. Talk about how often are you recycling posts? If you don't mind sharing that. And can you give us like the gist of the formula that you sort of honed in on from your research that worked for you. 

[01:03:39] CA: Yeah. So recycling post is it's interesting as I've had a few meetings, like Meta has reached out to me and I don't know if you've had that, but they've reached out and asked me just, I could have a talk with one of their data analysts and basically just ask them any questions.

And they said that they've done deep dives in my account and they'll say like, here's what we see. And so I've had a few of these conversations that are really interesting. And what's fascinating to me about the algorithm is that they don't control it. Like they don't know what's happening. They're researching it. So they're studying it. That's why any listened to the languaging. Iyou look at the creator's page or something, or Missouri talking about something, he'll go, we find in our research shows that people that post five reels a month or whatever, do better, that's what they're talking about. It's like our research shows they're studying what the algorithm is doing because it's like alive and it's self evolving. 

[01:04:37] LW: It's like Frankenstein. 

[01:04:38] CA: Oh, he sure is. But yeah, so it's really interesting to just talk to those analysts and get feedback and stuff like this. So as far as recycling posts, I asked them directly one of their data analysts, if that was a good idea or not, because one of my strategies is that like if your account is always growing and you have posts that do like really well, so I'll have some, an average post that's just does fine for me is like 10,000 or 12,000 likes a post that does like pretty good is like 20,000 or 30,000. One and ultimately goes up, but one that is doing like great is like 200,000 likes or something like that.

That's one. I'm like, Oh, nice. So one of those that just like really hits and does like 150 or 200,000 likes. I'll be like, okay, point taken. And I'll remember that one. And what I do is I wait, we'll wait three months. And then I'll post that one again and see if it gets the same type of engagement.

And if it does, I'm like, it's a hit song. I have evergreen, I have a hit on my head and it's people like hearing a hit, and also the way that the algorithm works is they don't show, so if I have 500,000 followers, They show a new post to 50,000, they show it to 10 percent of your following. And so that's why I get 10,000 likes on a so so post. But every time that you post, they show it to a different 50,000 people. So if you have one that's a hit, then three months later you drop it. And then a different 10,000 or 50,000 people see it yhou got another hit and it brings more engagement to the account organically as a whole and people that have already seen it.

It's a good reminder. that if they comment about it, they'll be like, Oh, I love this one. This is one of my favorites. Thank you for posting. It's a good reminder. So what I do is I will have a have a folder, which is basically a collection of all the hits. And I think about, sorry, this is so complicated. Think about multiple spinning, like timelines all lined up that are syncopated together. So if I have like 30 posts, I know that always crush and do, six figures whenever I post them, as far as engagement goes, if those are spread out every like, 10 days, two weeks, and they are repeating every three months, but you have them all in a timeline where they're staggered. You basically repeat the same post every six months or every eight months or something like that. But in the meantime, another hit is going to be going and then you'll see that one again and eight months from there and then another hit and you'll see that one eight months down the line. So you're not just posting the same thing over and over. You've got these multiple layers of things that are always syncopating over time together. 

So it's fresh and you're always drawing in that kind of rock star engagement, so that's telling as a whole selling Instagram, like, hey, send this account traffic because every time you've got these big songs that are hidden, and so I explained that to the, one of the data scientists I talked to and he was like, huh, well. I've never heard of anyone doing that before, and I normally advise people not to repeat content. He goes, but if it's as long as they keep hitting, keep doing it. He's like, if it's that's working, like, that's just something that we haven't really studied or thought about.

But if it's working, keep doing it. But I would normally say don't. So I was like, cool. So that's like, as far as reposting content that's what it is. 

[01:08:13] LW: And what about the gist of the format that you have honed in on? 

[01:08:18] CA: Yeah. As far as the writing format goes do you mean the writing format or just the overall, okay. Yeah. It's basically, it varies. There's a couple of different types of posts. Some of them are very instructive. And I'm trying to basically give, everything I talk about is ultimately has to do with mindfulness and self awareness. I remove the wallpaper of language and the kind of the buzzword terms, because that creates a barrier between a lot of people. And also people have a preconceived idea of what those things mean. And so I talk about it in a different way, but I'm still talking about the same thing, the same. So generally some of them will be very instructive, mindfulness things. And then I have the anthems, it's like a shorter thing, a shorter writing. That's like three lines. I found that in the size of my font on my post, two lines doesn't hit three lines. Is like, that's the magic formula. And I believe it's because, and also this is, sorry, this is so nerdy. But also if you look at the structure of the sentences of the ones that like the three line ones that I posted, like really hit really hard, they don't really. They generally don't have commas and they are like a parallel sentence structure. So what's happening is that like, if you were to take an inhale, you could say that sentence one time with one breath as you're exhaling. And there's no linguistic or syntax resistance in the sentence. So there's never like a You could do this, but you'll do this and you'll do this.

That's two points of resistance, but what doesn't have resistance is saying, the same courage that you have to leave behind what's longer for you is the same courage that'll take you to what is. Like you feel the difference.

[01:10:12] LW: Man, I love that you put that much thought into it and it's like your own version of a haiku. But again, I post a lot and people don't realize how much work it takes to create something.

To shorten something, because they'll get in the comments. Oh, well, you didn't mention this exception and that exception. And it's like, I definitely thought about those exceptions. Trust me. I thought about them four levels deeper than you have, just casually glancing at it, but there's an art to this as well.

And it takes discipline. It takes discipline to, to simplify and to err on the side of efficiency and to honor the tone of the overall platform, which is, look, this is fucking Instagram. I'm not a therapist. This is not United and Ashram and in India, this is Instagram. The post just before this one was somebody's tits. The next one is a pug, you know, you have to play to the audience. And I just, I love hearing all of these details because it just, it makes me feel like I'm not the only one who puts this much thought into these things. 

[01:11:20] CA: Yeah, man. I'm, I love hearing that you think about it as well, and it is hilarious.

People are like, you know that, like you said, like, what about this exception that's like, look, that's what the book is for. Okay. You know what I mean? This is what do you want? If it were, if I did write 10 carousels of texts with all the angles and exceptions, you wouldn't read it.

Yeah because that's what you're here for. You're here because you're looking for, this is a form of avoidance for you. You're not dealing with what you wanted, something. So you pick up your phone to look through Instagram. You happen to follow these accounts that help you think in different ways or make you feel better about yourself. And you're looking to not do thinking. You're looking to receive information because you're here because he's looking to avoid and you're tired. And so you don't want to have to think hard, but now that, so you can raise exception with something now, that's a form of you furthering, actualizing and expressing the suffering that you were already feeling whenever you came here in the first place.

It's why you came here. And so now you're just offloading the suffering as opposed to working through it and letting it yourself through trying to raise some exception that you know. Is a fallacy. 

[01:12:29] LW: I don't see you in the comments much. Do you have a policy for that? Do you go into the comments?

[01:12:33] CA: No, yeah. I comment. I normally try and just like high five people that post on my stuff. Say thank you or like, appreciate it or get dropped little emojis or something. I don't get like crazy with, I do like every once in a while I comment on other people's things. But really I just I just I try and hit the first, 10 comments that I see and just respond to them.

But you know how it is, man, this, it's just like an endless river. You can never see it all or get to it all. 

[01:13:02] LW: Let's talk about the book. Brave New You, which is your follow up to now is the way these are such like be here now type of titles. I love it. When you're writing these books. Which, again, I've written books and I have books in mind, like, I want this to be the next be here. Now I've written a book that I wanted to be like, be here. Now I've written a book that I wanted to be like David Lynch's catching the big fish because I'm a big fan of his work. Nice. Steven Pressfield's the war of art and you're, You're all of those books are like manuals. They're like life manuals. Some told in a more casual way. 

Yours also is very much a life manual. Like somebody with say, like how you described yourself, when you were younger. Someone who's just trying to find their way in the world and develop a level of self confidence could pick up your book, particularly your most recent book.

I haven't read the the first book, but Brave New You and from A to Z. You have a roadmap on how to practice mindfulness, how to show up in everyday life, how to interpret various situations. So what were the avatar books in your mind when you were writing this? And who, who was it written for specifically?

[01:14:21] CA: Yeah, well, firstly, just thank you so much for actually reading it. I really I appreciate that. And I'm grateful you put in the time to do that. And yeah, here's what's. interesting is I actually don't use like kind of the avatar book model. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

For this book, for example, I wanted to know, like, what is it that people actually need? That I don't know that I'm not aware of because, we can, we think we know what people want, but that's what we think what they want. It's not what they actually want or need to help them.

So what I started doing is I started looking at my comments, the engagements on my posts on like my newsletter on Instagram, what themes and different things that people are interested in what people, the DMS, like what people are asking for, how they responded to things. And I started just taking notes. And I'm like, okay, this topic, every time I talk about this, people really respond. It means that like culture as a whole needs information on this right now. This is a problem. And I did that again. So every single thing I touch on on there is chosen by me fishing in the ocean of people that are out there, and have like my content reaches like a million people a week. That's a pretty good sample size of, of humans. And so I started just doing that. I did it for like over a year of just like writing this down, like, and then the biggest thing, and this was surprising to me, the biggest thing that people really struggled with overall was people felt like their life was destined to be, it was, could be a little, not even crazy, but a little bit better. Like they could just make this one move that it would really improve things and make them happy and make them feel better and et cetera. But they felt like there's this barrier where it was just out of their fingertips.

They could feel, they could almost see it being possible, but they just couldn't quite find the map there. And that's why I was like, all right. Here's what we need. Of course, it's all written through the, ultimately I use the tools of mindfulness and some psychology that, I know people will, that's the, I suppose the the engine behind it, but I'm like, let's write a book, the roadmap from someone who could start today and how they could get to that place where they could really step into a world in which they could get to where it is that they want to go in life.

And, we started this conversation talking about me not sharing stuff in public, About myself, but all of my stuff actually is me doing that, but like my identity isn't connected to it. It's like, so I basically, I'm like, here's my roadmap, here's what I did in this order and here's the pitfalls that I ran into, here's the barriers, here's the dumb shit I did along the way. Here's how to not do that. And here's how you can get to where I am today. 

[01:17:39] LW: That's beautiful. And I just want to read through some of the chapter titles, because I think it gives people an idea of what we're talking about. Overcoming mental stories, creating the reality you want. And these are, you actually give very practical, accessible tools and resources for doing all of these conquering self consciousness, focus on what matters to you. Don't settle, make real progress. Use your past to power your present. If you want to be helpful, help yourself. 

So question, I hate, I hate these questions personally, but I understand why people ask them. 

You have a lot in there, right? And people will ask me sometimes, like you meditate, exercise, you do all the things. If you could only do one thing that could make a profound difference, what it'd be. And you know what I say? Stop drinking alcohol even more than meditating because if you meditate and you still drink alcohol It's still going to dilute things a bit, but I think if you just cut that out of the equation, it opens you up and opens your awareness up to so much more.

And so my question to you is from this book, if someone could take one thing and really like go all in a hundred percent on it, what would you say? 

[01:18:50] CA: I would say it's the choice is very clear to me and that would be meditate while drunk. Yeah. 

[01:18:57] LW: I'm going to say aside from mindfulness because obviously mindfulness would be probably at the top of the list.

[01:19:04] CA: Yeah. Meditation is number one, of course. And it's basically achieving the same thing that you were talking about. Let's see. I would say stop making assumptions about reality. I think that's probably the most powerful one, the most important one, because it's the fountainhead of most of our suffering. And I could just, give an example of very like light example, no pun intended. About, about this is like, one example would be, If you text a friend and they don't respond and a few days goes by and you're like, huh, like, that's weird. They didn't respond. Like, did I, are they mad at me? Like, did I say something weird to them last time that a week goes by and you still hear from them and then you flip over to like, well, screw them, like if they're too good to respond and then they, they hit you back and they're like, Hey, man, I was traveling. I'm so sorry. I didn't see my text. I'd love to. I can't wait to see you. Like, I got some awesome stories to tell you. 

Then you're like, Oh, right. So in that week period, what happened is you created this narrative in your mind about what was happening based on no facts, nothing about reality. And in the meantime, the way that you were thinking influenced how you were feeling.

The way that you were feeling influenced how you're acting in the world and how you're acting is who you are. So the other people that you're engaging with, the general kind of feeling a texture of your life in your mind was influenced by the frustration, the suffering, the tension, the resentment, any of those things, the anxiety that you may be holding in the meantime until that story, that false story is resolved.

And so that can go for something as simple as that, or in a relationship and the story you tell yourself about you, about whenever you go, like, I'm going to go, do this thing. And they're like, no, I can't do that. Like, not me. Why would I think I could do that? I'm stupid and ugly and no one loves me, you know, that you.

Stop being like, wait, I'm just creating a story. That's all based on assumption. I have no proof that the thing that you want to go do isn't doable. You get no facts. Look at, so go try it. Then you'll have some information, so not assuming things about reality. That's why, I opened the main part of the book with clarity is realizing your mind is full of assumptions.

Yeah. Again, you listen to that sentence. No comments, no resistance. One say, one exhale of one breath. 

[01:21:32] LW: I would even say on the other side too, when you look at people on social media and you create stories around how wonderful their life is or how wonderful their relationship is, it's like, you have no idea what these people are experiencing behind the scenes, definitely don't feel bad because you're not where they are because you don't know what they're experiencing 

[01:21:47] CA: A hundred percent. And most times those people are worse off than you are. There's just as an insider secret, like so many people that are, very well known public figures, the thing that they're talking about is the thing that they're actually struggling with.

[01:22:09] LW: The Book is Brave New You, the other book is Now is The Way. Brave New You is coming out in a week, a few days.

[01:22:17] CA: June 25th. 

[01:22:18] LW: June 25th. Awesome. Awesome, man. Well, congratulations on book number two. Congratulations on all of the work that you're putting out into the world.

And I'm super excited that we got a chance to go a little deeper into your backstory than I think you're used to going. So thank you so much for being so generous and sharing that. And I'll have to reach out to you next time I come to Austin and and we'll connect in person hopefully.

[01:22:43] CA: Yeah. Please do, man. And thank you so much for having me on. This was such a beautiful conversation and so wonderful questions and insights and just kind of space creation on your part. So, thank you so much for that. Yeah. It was really enjoyable. And I had a great time hanging out with you.

[END]

Thank you for tuning into today's episode with Cory Allen. You can grab a copy of his book, Brave New You, everywhere books are sold. You can also follow Cory for more inspiration on the socials @HeyCoryAllen. Cory's spelled C O R Y A L L E N. You'll also find links to our discussion in the show notes at lightwatkins.com/podcast. And if our conversation happened to spark some other ideas of people that you would like to see me interview, then I want to hear your guest suggestions. Just email me at light@lightwatkins.com. 

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So look out for those every Friday and otherwise I hope to see you back here next week with another inspiring long form episode about ordinary people doing extraordinary things until then, keep trusting in your intuition, keep following your heart, keep taking those leaps of faith. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic day and see you for the next plot twist this Friday.