Eliot Aronow on Spirit & Genius

Eliot Aronow is a former GQ columnist, fashion editor, and music industry innovator, he is the world’s first Spiritual Creative Director™ and founder of minor genius, blending creative vision, spiritual leadership, and business strategy.

Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. Happy to be here. So I start all of my conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrow from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But it's a big question. So I kind of over explain it the way that I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it is impossible to make a mistake.

Sounds good.

The question is, where do you come from?

I come from spirit. I have incarnated here as Eliot. And in a more mundane sense, I come from the cultural mecca known as Staten Island, specifically in the early 1980s, the son of two English teachers.

What was it like growing up in Staten Island?

I loved it. I mean, I always say kind of half jokingly, I think the great tragedy of my youth was moving to New Jersey in 1991. I felt very in tune with Staten Island as a kid. You know, I've always been really interested in style and fashion. And I guess as compared to New Jersey, it just seemed like people had more of a sense of being put together or more sophisticated. Perhaps that's due to the proximity to what we all call the city.

I don't know if that applies to people that are not from New York, but anyone who's from New York just always calls it the city. We never call it New York or Manhattan. But yeah, I would say all around. I really enjoyed it. You know, I think like a lot of folks that were living there at the time, you know, my parents have been Brooklynites and raising a child. Staten Island was like the closest thing to the suburbs. And so a lot of people left the city and Brooklyn and Queens and moved there in the early 80s because, you know, you could be an English teacher and buy a condo.

Do you have recollections of what young Elliot wanted to be when he grew up?

Yeah, I would say I think I always saw myself as an entertainer of sorts. You know, I think ever since I was little, I was always drawn to the aesthetic realm and sort of the arts. You know, my father taught theater appreciation at John Dewey High School, which is a bit of a famous high school in the New York public school system.

It's a lot different now, but back in the day, it was kind of like a hippie magnet school. Spike Lee went there and Larry Charles, who is the co-creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm, or I think it was Seinfeld. Anyways, the guy that was the other Larry that wasn't Larry David went there.

Foxy Brown, the rapper. And so for me, like that was just kind of always in the air as a young kid was being interested in aesthetics and colors, music, all those sorts of things.

Yeah. Was there an entertainer that you looked up to? Like what was an entertainer to young Elliot?

That's a great question. I think at the time, I didn't really understand entertainers as maybe performing. Like I thought that they were just like that permanently.

But you know, again, I'm a child of the 80s. So for me, I think a lot of it comes down to like, you know, Michael Jackson, Prince. I remember the first cassette that I bought was like, Huey Lewis in the News 4.

So, you know, I didn't quite understand that there was a difference between like the entertainment industry in real life. I just thought that like, yeah, those were who those people were like all day. You know, although if I'm keeping that a buck here, I would say that, you know, the 90s when I was a teenager, of course, had a much more powerful impact on the way that I saw entertainment and specifically like music and fashion. You know, I think like most middle class Jewish kids, like I wanted to be a Beastie boy more than anything. And I think as a 44 year old man, I'm still kind of on that vision quest.

Yeah. What does it mean to be a Beastie boy?

At that time, I remember that moment. I really saw it as successful weirdos. It's the best way to describe it. It was like, I was never really drawn to things that are too, you know, mainstream. And so I think like, again, growing up in the 90s, you had such an interesting cultural moment where things that were weird and things that were popular live together in the same cultural conversations. I mean, like I'm kind of dating myself here, but like Primus. In what world are Primus like a successful band that has like top 10 albums? You know, these guys have like a lead bass player, like it's crazy, you know? And so I think that cosmology that you could be weird and outsider, but also in mainstream culture just had a really profound impact on my psyche and really my professional ambitions.

Like, where do you, where are you now? And what do you do? Sure.

Well, I'm the world's first spiritual creative director. And what I do is I help people get paid to be themselves.

And how does that work?

It's a great question. Well, in order to do that, a couple of things need to happen, right? First, you have to uncover who the yourself part is. So in my framework, that's a spiritual transformation. Then once that has been kind of unfrozen and you get a sense of like, oh yeah, like I've actually been masking for my entire adult life. Then that informs the second aspect, which is creative.

So I partner with people to make stuff. So I've helped people make short films, magazines, brands, websites, fashion companies, really anything that would fall under the traditional reins of a creative director. I partner with them to create a project and get it out into the world.

And then the third component is entrepreneurial, which is once you've become the new person and you've made the new thing, you have to package it up such in a way that people want it.

Yeah. And how long have you been doing this? When did you first discover that you could be a spiritual creative director?

Well, the creative bona fides have really been there since my early twenties. You know, I came up, my first job was working at the Fader magazine and I had a music startup called record label, which was one of the kind of medium to bigger size music blogs back in the indie sleaze era. I had hosted a television show of my own called our show, which was kind of like my homage to Glen O'Brien's TV party, which had like LCD sound system and the yeah, yeah, yeah. And DAS racist and pretty much all the, you know, kind of indie heartthrobs of the time.

So in terms of the creative stuff, like that was always kind of second nature to me. I think the spiritual part was a lot harder earned, which was that basically like in my thirties, like none of my dreams came true. And I felt very lost and washed for many, many years. I had different entrepreneurial ventures. I had a tie company and I had a creative consulting agency. Neither of, I mean, the Thai company did a lot better. Like we had a collaboration with the strokes and we're sold at some of the more Shishi stores in NYC. For those who remember Odin, we were sold there and like The Standard Hotel.

The creative agency maybe had less of a success ratio, probably because I didn't really know like how to sell anything. Like I think I understood the contours of like how to make things cool, which is very different from like learning how to sell things. So anyways, I'll try to get through this with as much alacrity. Did I use the right word there? I'm not sure if that's, is that it?

Yeah, that sounds right to me.

Yeah, okay. It's always funny when you use a fancy word, but you yourself, I mean, yeah, it's a weird, weird thing to use a fancy word and not even be sure if it's the right one. Anyways, I'll try to get through this a little succinctly. Um, you know, uh, at the time I didn't really know what it was, but looking back, I can say that I had a very profound ego death in my early thirties and it really rocked me to my core. And this kind of foundation that I had built, part of which was my public persona of like fashionable cool guy wearing suits, music, dude, Glen O'Brien protege. Um, that kind of all got burned down.

And so I had to figure out, well, who am I without really any money, any success, any of the social clout that I had. And so having rebuilt myself from that hole or that, uh, dark place. Uh, I feel like I'm really able to work with people on both sides of the equation. Like I understand what it's like to be in the game and be working with people at the height of their creative powers. And I also know what it's like to be so depressed that you don't brush your teeth until three o'clock and you have $20 in your bank account. So mountains and valleys, mountains and valleys.

And when people, what's an example of, uh, of an engagement, like in terms of how does it start when people call you? What's the, why are they coming to you and what kind of conversation do you have with them about?

Yeah. Um, there's usually two really distinctive profiles when people enter my world. Um, one segment is people that are making a lot of money, a lot of money, but not to be themselves.

So in other words, you know, they're your classic, like successful, but miserable person who's at a big brand. They're a CMO, they're the head of a startup, but they sort of feel like, again, you know, this isn't it for them.

They know that there's something that's a lot more expressive and creative than what they're currently doing. And the other side is people that are just not getting paid at all and say, Hey, like, I really actually have no idea how to sell myself. Can you help me in that process? So those are usually the two main archetypes. You're either getting paid a lot to not be yourself or you're just not getting paid at all.

Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?

You know, I think that when people can have a good humor about their shadows and failures and resentments, um, you really see them come alive and realize how much potential and creativity they really have. You know, I think that in our culture, we of course tend to hyper optimize for impressiveness and efficiency. And you know, all of us in one way or another sort of buy into the cultural myth that, as long as we're rich or cool or impressive enough, nothing bad will ever come.

Right? Like we can insulate ourselves from the vicissitudes of life by just being powerful and accomplished. And I think that once that lie has been uncovered, and then you're forced to deal with your core material, of course, in the short term, it can be a little ouchie, right?

There's some, there's some cosmic booboos that you got to work through. But I think on the other side of it, people are just like, man, I didn't realize how dope I am. Like, I didn't know that I could take this idea for a really fringe brand, and I could actualize it. And now it's out in the world. And now I'm making friends. And my wife looks at me differently. And my kids see that I'm, you know, I'm lit up, I'm engaged. I'm not just like this broken, resentful, jealous person. So for me, that's really the miracle of the before and after is you sort of come in like cold, and like hunched over and like sort of broken. And you leave feeling hopefully invigorated. And with a little light in the door, from what used to be a pretty dark place.

Yeah. I love the way you described earlier, the possibilities of the I guess the 90s, when Primus could be popular, I want to return to that notion, what was it about the 90s that made that kind of thing possible? And how do you think about where we are now?

Great question. Honestly, I think what made that moment possible is it was the last time that corporations didn't really understand how to market to kids. Like, they still had to use music as the driving force through which they could kind of see their messages.

So basically, what I'm trying to say here is that lifestyle marketing of which I was a participant in in the 2000s, was basically the filleting of subculture from aesthetics. This is like what Fader and Weiss and all those companies did is like, you could dress like a mod or a punk or a hip hop person, but there was none of the friction of actually thinking or being different. You could just get the look of it without any of the messy parts.

But in the early 90s, you still had to deal with messy parts. Right? You had Kurt Cobain very famously like in the liner notes of Incesticide. Right? If you're racist or homophobic or don't like women, don't come to our shows. We don't want your money. Or even hip hop having a very articulated anti-establishment point of view. So companies still had to deal with all that stuff if they wanted to make money and sort of attach their brands to it. Right? So you got this really interesting alchemy of like very kind of subversive, sexy, weird fringe stuff being bankrolled by all these enormous companies because they saw that there was an appetite for it.

Whereas now, you know, subculture and the aesthetics of subculture have been disembodied from one another. And so now you just have the, you know, this kind of, you see this on TikTok, where it's like the dark academia look, or, you know, the punk look. It's kind of just like a thing for people to cycle through as opposed to something that your whole life is filtered through. Right? Again, in the 90s, I think, again, that was the last decade when music was, is the last time that music was the main driver of culture, you know?

When I was growing up, especially in the hardcore scene, what you wore, the kind of people you dated, what you did every weekend, obviously the music you listen to, your entire social network, your entire social world was determined by music, you know? And that's not really the case anymore. You know, now it's kind of like, I was talking to my friend yesterday, I was like, what? It's kind of like the internet. It's like the internet is what determines what you wear and what you eat. I don't know. Like I don't really have a good answer for what has replaced music and fashion as the main drivers of my world, you know? Yeah, it's interesting. I was going to ask that. And you mentioned Primus, you had Kurt Cobain, Nirvana.

What other things from the 90s are examples of this, what you're describing?

Yeah, well, I got really, really deep into hardcore when I was 15 and a half, so 1995. And at the time, you know, hardcore was still a very fringe, underground culture. Like people felt bad for you if you were a punk rocker. It's not like today where like, cool, Machine Gun Kelly, or like, oh, yeah, man, I'm punk. People were like, yeah, cool. Like you wear hoodies and go and slam dance on the weekend, like get away from me.

You know what I mean? But in that moment, everything that I learned about being an entrepreneur, being a creative person comes from that scene, which is like, do it yourself. You know, by the time I was 17, I had booked like 10 underground shows. I had released like four fanzines. My friend and I had to put out a record together. I mean, I went on tour with underground bands from all over the country.

And pre, I mean, it's funny when you say like pre-internet, I mean, obviously the 90s weren't like pre-internet, but it was like the stone age of the internet. And so that for me was just a, you know, a magical, magical time that I think has never left my philosophical or creative world. You know, like there's two things about it that I really liked that I still seek out now in my grown up life, which is number one, like a self selecting community.

So in other words, it's so strange or off putting to other people that you're only there because you want to be like there's no, there's no reason to. I found this in jujitsu. You know, like I'm a middle aged person performing like a very violent ego destroying sport, and everyone else in the room, it's like, you don't do this because it's easy, or because you know, your wife thinks it's cool, you do it because you want to be there. So hardcore kind of instilled in me the values of being part of a self selecting community. And then too, you know, I've always considered myself to be an outsider. The people that my work resonates with also consider themselves outsiders. And all my creative heroes have been outsiders.

So, you know, like, when Poptimism took over, you know, you know, when everyone was trying to be like, Poptimism was like, you know, a sort of movement in music journalism away from the traditionally like white male raucous point of view and being like, Oh, like, there's real value in Taylor Swift, like, there's real value in, I don't know, insert pop person here. And while I respect that, and I think it, you know, had its time in its place, I just have never been like a mainstream person like I'm not, I don't know any celebrities like if the most famous people walk by me on the street, like I would have no idea who they were. And I think coming up in hardcore, you kind of have more appreciation for like, the people that you can touch the people that you can like talk to at a show, rather than people that seem like they're out there like a million miles away.

This conversation about being an outsider and the strangeness of the 90s being able to be weird and popular at the same time is so interesting to me. I was on the street corner in Hudson with some friends, just talking s**t. I guess David Lynch had just passed and they were, they were basically saying, and maybe so my two, two friends are saying, David Lynch is very mainstream. And I was like, no way, there's no way you can consider David Lynch mainstream. It's certainly not very mainstream or extremely mainstream. And we never really resolved this question, but it seemed to be about the same thing that you and I are talking about. Do you, what, how do you respond to the notion of David Lynch? Not that I need you to affirm my position, but do you see how that conversation fits into this question of being an outsider and the mainstream?

Well, it's interesting to me that people would consider him mainstream in that his body of work, I think overall is pretty challenging, strange. Some might say Lynchian, right? But I think maybe what the, what the shock is, is like, I can't believe this actually got popular or maybe it'd be a little bit more crass. I can't believe other people thought that this s**t would make them money, which kind of goes back to like our nineties Nirvana conversation, right? Is that the reason that all those weird bands were given record deals and MTV coverage and all that is because post Nirvana, people were like, yeah, we can make money on this strange, strange stuff. And that vibe of weird and profitable are not at odds with each other.

In fact, they might be combined to create a third way. You know, to me, like Nirvana and the Beastie Boys and even like, you know, reservoir dogs, they're all kind of like third paths, you know, they're not totally insane. It's not like just completely unwatchable or unlistenable, but they're far enough away from mainstream where there's like a new idea or a new thread that people can kind of catch on to, you know?

Yeah. I always think about it probably and it's probably too simple, but I always feel like that there was, and I want to hear your thoughts. Like how do you, so I, my feeling on one level is that in the past there kind of was a mainstream and there was a mass culture. And then so you could have a, you could have a counterculture. And so you could be outside of something. There was something to be outside of or against, but so you could be a sellout. So there was a lot of conflict around the idea of making money as a badass musician or something. But all of that stuff has been rubbed clean. And it's kind of, we went from a counterculture being interesting to just being, it's almost like it's subculture all the way down. Do you know what I mean? And there's no friction anywhere. You just need to be kind of the most interesting embodiment of whatever subculture. You used the word filet earlier. Is that what you're describing?

Can you ask the question in a different way? I just want to make sure I get the spirit of your inquiry.

Yeah. I guess I'm, I'm sort of wondering if my, if, if the way I describe the evolution of culture and the role of the outsider resonates with you and the idea that there used to be a counterculture and it maybe was easier to be an outsider and that now we're in this position where it's, there isn't a mainstream to be against. So it's sort of all subcultures all over the place. And the question isn't kind of what you are for or against. It's kind of, are you the best or most interesting embodiment of any particular subculture? And then you had used the word filet for that period of time that those fades, the music scene, they had filtered the subculture from the messy, from the messiness. So I suppose I'm just laying that in front of you and wondering what it makes you think of?

Yeah. You know, having been on a bit of a spirit quest the last 15 years, I actually think that the mind and the spirit is kind of the new realm of subculture. And what I mean by that is when you can really anchor into your truth, your divine mission, to me that seems to be like what punk used to be. Not to say that like this culture, like I'm not like some guy in his mid 40s being like punk isn't valid anymore, like having a spiritual awakening, you know. But I think for me, like the edge or perhaps the territory in which the road seems the most unpaved for me over the last few years has been in the spiritual realm. Because I think that it kind of goes against everything that you're taught in the social media world, which again is like, be cool, perform, number go up equals you're awesome.

The best thing in the world is to be famous. And again, when I look at my heroes, Glenn O'Brien kind of comes to mind. For those who don't know who Glenn O'Brien was, he was a downtown New York fixture, responsible for the style guy in GQ, as well as a TV show called TV Party. And he was sort of like a man about town for the better part of four decades in downtown New York and was kind of a mentor figure to me. Anyways, I think that someone like Glenn represented a person who had work for the rest of their life, but wasn't famous, per se. And I think that's more what I'm interested in pursuing.

And I think that the kind of spiritual component to that to make a sort of sloppy thought jump here is that once you can separate yourself from the constant need for like a big audience or a lot of cultural influence or a ton of money and figure out who you are outside of those things, to me that seems very subversive and sexy and exciting because when you're not ensnared by those distortions, you don't have to do the thing that I think so many of us have been conditioned to do, which is like trade your authenticity for the illusion of acceptance.

Yeah.

Lots to unpack there.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's funny, I was just... Well, tell me, I was going to ask you about mentors and touchstones. I have a question. Are there things that you return to quite a bit? And you talked about Glenn O'Brien. How would you describe, I guess, maybe his impact or influence on you and your work?

Yeah. Well, you know, I came up at a time when I think towards the end of the 2000s, just the idea of masculinity was coming up for debate, I think post-great recession. And the thing that I had found is that in the culture, there weren't really many men who were offering a vision of masculinity that resonated with me.

Our viewers can't see me, but if they could, they would see they're like, I'm five foot five and 135 pounds. And so let's just say, I wasn't picked first for the football team. And my way of asserting myself in a group was not to be the most physically dominant, but rather to be cool.

So as a teenager, the way that I survived was by being really cool. I would tell people, oh, yeah, you got to get the Agassi Nikes. Don't buy Adidas. These are whack. I wouldn't wear those pants with this shirt. You should wear that instead. Don't listen to the Rollins band. You want to check out Black Flag. That's the real s**t.

And so I think that Glenn was a person who said, hey, you know what? You can be a guy who's into clothing and art and it's okay. You're not soft. There's nothing to be ashamed of. And in fact, you are a higher octave of man when you can be in touch with the fineries of life. And I think that an underappreciated aspect of Glenn is that I think he was very forward in his opinions, like without being a jerk.

And I think that that's a really hard mix to get today when social media, of course, is wired towards outrage and just people saying the most ridiculous things to rile people up. Like I always got the sense that Glenn was shooting from the hip, but he wasn't so attached to it or so obsessed with his own point of view that he couldn't understand other people's positions either. And I think that that made a really big impact upon me as a kind of a young magazine editor, a young writer, a young guy in the scene.

Yeah. Yeah. What was it like? I mean, you've had so many, you've worn so many hats. You know what I mean? What was that period of time like being, you were at GQ for a while, you were in the magazine space, you were in the music space. What did you do, what do you enjoy about that time and that work?

I enjoyed the sense of possibility that came every day. You know, like there was just such a vibe in the air that like anything could happen. And because I had a mixture of a really supportive community around me, as well as the economic means to go and enjoy myself, like the overlap of two things led to a really exciting life for me.

You know, my only job was working at the fader and I got fired on a really strange, technical difficulty, I suppose. And so I've always been an entrepreneur and I was always kind of reinventing myself. And it seemed at the time that whether it was like a new kind of music company or my opinions on fashion or my television show, it just felt like there was a kind of appetite for what I was interested in exploring in the culture.

And thankfully, there were a lot of other people around me that were creating at a really high level to kind of create that Scenius, right? Shout out to Brian Eno -

Can you talk about Scenius for those who may not be aware.

Yeah, I'm not doing the best job of explaining it because I've been asked this a couple of times, but I think the main idea is that instead of like genius being the product of one solitary special person, it's the collective vibe, the collective intelligence of many artists working together within a shared space.

It's funny there. Oh, keep going. And you were, I think.

Well, I was going to get into the shadow aspect of all this time in my life, because it took me a better part of 15 years to understand what it was. And for me personally, I was in a tremendous amount of pain being in the entourage as opposed to being the kind of main person myself. Right.

And what I mean by that is, you know, I was always like, sure, I was like hanging out with the James Murphy's and the Mark Ronson's and the, you know, strokes and all those people, but I hadn't really found my medium for being a visible creator myself. And so on one level, like my life was very sexy and cool. And when I look back on the stuff that I did, I think it's amazing, you know, it's like winning some kind of a lottery ticket.

I was just some schmuck from New Jersey who went to Rutgers. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't it wasn't like I had any kind of family connection that propelled me into this lifestyle. And so in that regard, I feel very fortunate that I was able to completely invent myself from basically nothing. But on the other side of that, you know, there was a tremendous amount of shame and pain and resentment that I had basically allowed all these people to become my avatars for the s**t that I wanted to do, but just hadn't found the way to do it yet. And so a lot of my work as a grown up now is, A, helping people correct those distortions within themselves, but also me doing it myself in my own work, you know?

Yeah, it's funny just to, on the topic of Scenius, Ian Leslie had just had a post a couple weeks ago about the death of seniors such as and worth a link to it. But this, again, it's sort of a shift. I mean, his hypothesis is that, yeah, the conditions for that kind of social scene have gone away for a variety of reasons.

I would agree.

Are there any projects? Is there any dream clients or fantasy projects that you would love to work on?

Yeah. So, you know, parallel to my one-on-one work, for the last year and a half, I'm building out Minor Genius as a Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart style lifestyle brand.

Oh, nice.

Because, yeah, my dream in life has always been somewhere along the lines of, you know, just being a person who could communicate from one to many. And so I just hired an editor to work with me on a series of short form Instagram videos. We obviously know each other through LinkedIn. So that's been a big part of my life is getting out there and contenting and sharing and creating. I'm doing a print minor genius zine, which is going to come out hopefully around Valentine's Day and a larger format kind of fancier, sexier, full-size magazine, hopefully by April, April, June or so. But yeah, that's kind of the dream is to take what I've been doing one-on-one institutionally.

Talk to me about minor genius, that name, and what does that mean?

Yeah, so a minor genius is someone who gets paid to be themselves. So rather than living in a world in which only full-fledged geniuses are entitled to prosperity and to go live the life of their dreams, I think that I want to live in a world where like, you don't have to be Picasso to earn the right to create something. And so again, it's kind of this idea of, you know, rather than frittering away your days working on your magnum opus by yourself, why not be a minor genius and publish your first fanzine or your first three videos on YouTube or the first three t-shirts of your burgeoning fashion empire.

What have you learned about creativity in this work? Like, what do we get wrong about it?

Yeah, so what we get wrong, there's a few things, but A, what we get wrong about creativity is that it can be strategized and productized and controlled. And this to me is the dilemma of every kind of unhappy, overpaid, creative director in the world is that, you know, they're tasked with basically being an idea cow, right? But the truth is, they're not really encouraged to create anything because all of the main assets and so forth have already been predetermined by their clients or overlords.

And so for me, you know, I think that creativity needs to come from you from a very feral, wild, you know, uncharted place. And I found in working with people one-on-one that when they have a collaborator to bring that out of them, they really see how alive they are and how creative they really are. Because, you know, again, I think there's a certain, it's almost like sort of Dante-ish, it's a certain ring of hell to have a job that's close to being creative, but, you know, deep down is actually not creative at all.

And I think that's the dilemma that a lot of folks in our age bracket are facing, because, you know, we're at the age where we're now becoming more like managers, overseers, bureaucrats. We're not really in there like getting our hands dirty and like making the wild stuff anymore. So, yeah, I think that creativity needs to come from a very wild and feral place inside of you.

And then secondly, to kind of touch on the spiritual aspect, you know, I, having been there myself, like I, I don't shame someone when they say that they just don't make stuff anymore, because when it comes to our physiology, creativity is kind of a nice afterthought of feeling safe, right?

When you're in survival mode, when you're living paycheck to paycheck or just under a tremendous amount of financial or physical or spiritual stress, art making is not at the top of your list, you know, paying your rent or getting your kids into private school is. And so I think it's just important for you to understand that if you're in a time when you're feeling cold and just not in the mood to create, it's not a personal shortcoming, you know, it's not laziness. It's not that there's anything wrong with you. It's not a character flaw. It's more likely that you're in an environment where your nervous system is so taxed that it just can't get to that next octave of living.

How do you help people get into that wild uncharted space to the degree that you can share? I'm just curious about what the work looks like when to get there or help people get there.

Yeah, so I use a variety of diagnostics when people first enter into my programs, and some of them are a bit more material, but a lot of them fall into the esoteric or spiritual side of things. And so once people kind of understand why they've incarnated here and what their divine gifts are and what their intrinsic shadows are, it makes it much easier for them to have permission to create because they're creating in accordance with their own rhythms and their own style. You know, like one of the things that really sucks about corporatism is that it tells everyone this is the way.

And if you do not follow our scriptures, we will punish you, right, and take away your means of living if you do not do what we say, right? And so people need to be unwired from that and invitation into a space where it's like, hey, all right, cool. Based on these things, you're really good at being a supporter of performers.

Let’s figure out how that looks for you. Or in the case of a lot of my clients, like, your wealth paradigm is actually for you to be the main character, right? The way that you're going to have the most fun is not to work at an agency, you know, being a deck monkey, it's for you to get in front of the camera and share your opinions with the world, right?

You need to be a private, a public speaker, not a private sector employee. So that's usually the first step is like, helping people see who they're not. And then once we've chiseled away enough of that distortion, who they are comes through almost instantly. You know, it's a very like, kind of a thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what have you learned about the people you work with or the state of creativity? I'm just like, how are they, how is everybody doing? How is everybody managing with the state of work today? Do you have a feeling about that?

I do. Yeah, it's a great question. I think that the central dilemma that all humans, much less creatives, but that all humans are going through right now is we're in a crucible as a society, as a collective, as a consciousness. And there's a lot of pressure to kind of shrink yourself back into the old world that's dying or kind of jumping into the unknown and deciding that at the end of the day, you know, it's probably the best bet to bet on yourself. Right.

So again, if we look at the main promise to me of corporate advertising and technology for the last, I don't know, 50 years was basically like, okay, listen, buddy, you're not going to be a painter or like a director or like a rock star, but like you can come work here. You can do something vaguely creative and exchange for kind of compromising dream in life. We're going to give you a 401k and a paycheck and you can move to the suburbs and put your kids through college. Right.

And now that that bargain has completely been immolated, right? Like there's no job security. There's no sense that the man is going to take care of you. The state of creativity is like, all right, F it like these big brands don't give a s**t about me. They never have. Right.

At the end of the day, like I'm just a number on a spreadsheet to some person that I've never met. And the moment that they think that they're better without me, they're going to take me in the alley and shoot me in the head. And that's what we've seen in the last 10 years. Right. These places that used to be sanctuaries for successful weirdos have become hostile environments, right? With a ton of turnover, very toxic work cultures. And so the state of creativity, I think, is people saying, you know what? I'm going to do me. I don't know exactly how it's going to work out, but I know that I have enough of a skill set and network that I'm going to go and try and figure out what it looks like on the other side.

Elliot, I want to thank you so much. This has been so fun talking to you. I appreciate you sharing your time and all your wisdom, your outsider wisdom. That's a tactical way of saying it though, but it's been fun.

Has this historically been the first pod that you've done that mentions Primus?

Yes, without question.

Excellent. Well, I've loved following your work online, and I'm glad that we've struck up a friendship, man.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All right.

Peace and love. Be well. All right.

Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe