You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I met Phil years and years and years ago, although he probably would not remember. He was part of an event that I put on and I got to witness him and Barry Michaels, he is a therapist and Phil's lifelong collaborator. They wrote The Tools and Coming Alive together and at this event, they did a live session. They just invited someone up from the audience and worked with her and it was stunning. I'll never forget it. I think many of us generally in the culture are aware of Phil's uncanny brilliance and his ability to take what feels like deeply spiritual heady concepts and ground them in actionable tools to help people really get momentum in their own lives. He has been known for decades all throughout Los Angeles and Hollywood as the person who could transform the lives of screenwriters who were stuck with writer's block.
He has worked with mega mega industry leaders, politicians, what have you, and what has made him notable is that his brand as a psychiatrist is anything but what you would normally expect from a psychiatrist. Now we have legions of life coaches and other modalities where people really get in there with people and help them problem solve, but when Phil started working, he's in his seventies now that didn't exist and he in many ways created an entire field That's very Phil. He just sees reality on a different plane. He became more famous recently when there was a Netflix documentary called Stutz about his life and people really got to him because, well, actually he just joined Instagram, follow him on Instagram, but there's not that much from Phil out in the world, and I interviewed him for Pulling the Thread a couple of years ago when he released a series of essays that had written early on in his career called Lessons for Living.And in that conversation he was sharing all of these tools that I had never heard of. The Tools, which was a massive New York Times bestseller is really about these five mega tools for igniting creativity. It's a really valuable book, but Phil's mind is much more spiritual and much wider than that. Phil has very advanced. That's why the audio might sound a little shaky at times, although I think we finally figured out how to really record him and he's physically quite limited, but his mind is a steel trap, and so I started on this adventure with him. Originally we were going to just create a simple workbook for The Tools and I thought, oh, maybe it's a deck. And I had all these ideas and I brought all of these examples to our first meeting where we were deciding whether we wanted to work together, and it became quite clear within the first five minutes that we were definitely not doing anything simple.
No. Instead we were going to write what is essentially a hybrid between a book and a workbook: True and False Magic. Though it's really not a workbook, it's not a very long book, but it's something that you can work with. It's Phil's larger philosophical model though. It's the way in which all of these tools, these short actions that you can take in your life to move forward, fit into a much larger framework that is deeply, deeply spiritual. Phil is a student of Rudolph Steiner. He has his own theories about God and energy and higher forces as well, and we did not hold back. This will surprise no one who listens to this podcast, but I really wanted to understand and pushed him hard to explain that even though what is ineffable and impossible to explain does arrive at some sort of conclusion. It was so fun to work with him.
We became great friends and again, this was supposed to be sort of a quick and short project, but Phil and his assistant Sarai Jimenez, who I adore, who is a young mother and therapist who will do incredible things in the world, particularly with children as her career unfolds, was such a fun co-pilot. We were like the Three Musketeers. We really had an incredible time over many, many, many, many sessions. It was a deeply nonlinear experience. We went back and back and back into these tools and concepts until we put them where they needed to be and I played the role of the reader or the patient asking all the questions until we had really clearly articulated concepts. Concepts that cannot at times feel quite abstract that we then needed to ground with stories from Phil's practice and life. I learned so much. There are so many concepts in this book that I use all the time.
He's just a giant in his field and singular and surprising and as you will see in our conversation today, we go into some of the concepts in the workbook and then he turns to bossing me around a bit as a proxy I think for all creatives and for all of us who feel unsure how to assert ourselves in the world. And his answer to me and his advice to me will definitely surprise you. I'm still thinking about it. Let's build some energy around Phil and his work because I really think that the more of us who can access and build our life force, the more of us who work with higher forces, the more of us who are building fields with each other across space and time, the more formidable we become in all actions of co-creation. And as Phil says, the opposite of evil is not goodness. It is creativity. We need more creativity in the world.
MORE FROM PHIL STUTZ, M.D.
Follow Phil on Instagram
Phil’s Website
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
STUTZ: