Robert meets World Podcast

As I sat at edge of Toronto's Harbourfront looking onto Lake Ontario, the grandfatherly words of Alan Watts entered my thoughts: The point of life... is to be alive.. that's it. I had heard this and numerous bits of wisdom like it before: koans, proverbs, dictum; all of which I yearned to live authentically by, automatically even, but never quite feel them at times. There is a superficial...

I tell people I lost my heart in Ericeira. The ocean swept up my recklessness one June morning as I leapt forward into the freezing water—missing the icebaths back home. Exiting the freezing Atlantic to the crisp breeze of Portugal’s coastal surf town, I lost something without realizing it.  Grief struck later, searching the mirror with a phantom touch to a beloved Malachite necklace, missing; the...

Is programming a way to avoid making art, or a strange way of making it anyway? Drawing on Julia Cameron's concept of the "shadow artist," this essay traces Robert's path into software, past the AI hype, the technical debt, the algorithm interviews, toward Turing's original insight: that almost anything can be symbolic manipulation, including, maybe, creativity itself.

I’m sitting on a worn-out, low, crimson couch cushion. Around me are multi-dimensional prisms, astrology books, tarot cards, and metaphysical conjectures by philosophers and lunatics alike. Ahead, the corner holds a crew of three: a young man and two women volunteering to serve tea. Pure volunteerism runs this teahouse, an unassuming backyard basement. I do not know who owns it or pulls a profit (...

I watched the teenager pull a copy of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus from the shelf and glance it over with passive interest. Front to back, back to front, then opening a section in the middle to inspect if it sparked any curiosity. I always enjoyed this part of visiting a bookstore, people watching as a cursory delight; It was the complimentary champagne offered at the entry hall reception be...

There is a simple way of looking at life. You feel joy, and call it joy. You see a sign and read the letters as they are written. There is a second way of viewing life which asks, what is this sentence hiding from itself. The second way is known by Ricoeur as The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

On the Eastern edge of Bali, a few hours from the bustling draw of Ubud is the small rural area of Sidemen. A population of 39,000 split across 10 villages, some people say that Sidemen reflects Bali from 20 years ago. A place before the influx of investment capital into hospitality to support the growing tourism surge on the island. A place of massive rice fields, subsistence farming and the clas...

A quiet afternoon DJing in Golden Gate Park took an unexpected turn when a park ranger approached me—triggering a wave of immigration anxiety, panic over losing my visa, and an unexpected dive into legal philosophy. In this video essay, I share a personal narrative about playing music along JFK Drive in San Francisco and how a brief encounter sparked a deeper realization about the "spirit of t...

To do a plank.. Correctly.. Is a hard thing to do. The instructor announced as we listened on the veranda of a steamy Costa Rican morning in San Jose. Often, it looks easy to do from the outside... Because we do not see the effort required, From the inside. Immediately, a Tibetan singing bowl was struck in the background: an elongated ringing followed by a trailing silence circling off into eterni...

CHAPTERS 00:00:00 Introduction & What is Climate Adaptation? 00:03:15 The Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation 00:07:15 Insurance Trends as a Climate Risk Proxy 00:15:30 How Flooding Impacts the Housing Market 00:21:07 Home-Level Flood Protection for $0, $250, $250+; Municipalities offering $3K+ in subsidies to prevent flood 00:26:52 Extreme Weather Risks Across Canada 00:34:08 Corporate Risk...

My heart felt just about ready to explode out of my chest. But, before I could catch my breath, Kru Top ran to the push sled. Standing on top of it and yelled out to me: TAXI ! I pushed the 75kg fighter across the gym and back in genuine difficulty, as I gasped for air. But, Kru Top’s amusement from his taxi trip was short lived. Despite being one of the more brutal striking sports in martial arts...

What reason is there, really, to do all this writing you ask? Is it perhaps because on the empty pages one can, as Robert Johnson puts, in the domain of the psychological unconscious, “Clothe the invisible forces [unseen and] to make [them] visible.” ​​ Inner Work p. 21 That is, one can make apparent the continuous inward monologue of the skull and enliven it to reality. But surely it is not only...

I’m standing alone in a University Community Center basement classroom. Beige, brown and black tiled, dull, and lifeless walls enclose the space with a cast of around 18 empty chairs and tables. Overhead, a projector scatters light onto a white screen with a PowerPoint presentation reading “Expect The Unexpected” in black font to an orange background (apparently I failed the Intro to Perfect Power...

Who are you when you stop becoming? It is common in social groups to give a role to a given person. A role is a box. A safe, bounded, predictable box. The mind is a sophisticated categorizing, perimeter and box constructing machine. It draws divisions on the continuous to create order, logic and reason. Once a box is drawn around something or someone, the mind is set at ease. It no longer says: “W...

Everything today seems to come with a number attached. Followers, likes, watch time, sentiment scores, even influence itself, quantified and ranked. What would happen if we took all of that away? This episode is an open inquiry into a world that has learned to measure almost everything, told through verse, and what the implications may be.

The story of a decade long, still unresolved fight to quit social media, from deleting Facebook in university to running Instagram ads for a DJ business years later. A honest look at notification loops, comparison, and what it actually costs to live inside the attention economy, even when you know exactly how it works.

Several months ago I became a bit obsessed with understanding Human Design (HD), a neo-typology that has emerged in the last 40 years combining Jewish Kabbalah with the Chinese I Ching and Vedic Astrology. While I do wonder if it was an immaculate conception born of counter culture in the bohemian refuge of 1970s Ibiza (the founder “Ra Uru Hu” lived there during his “revelation”), it has stimulate...

The quiet voice in my head hummed along as I walked. Notice the “I” and the “Me”. Pay attention to the "Me" In a dream-like state, the sound of my footsteps down Fillmore street filled my ears with a predicable click and clack noise providing a background note for the inward process that was taking place. A process in which I found myself catching each and every thought that the mind attem...

Jung personified that place, the Shadow, which Robert Johnson playfully describes as: “[the] unconscious dumping ground for undesirable characteristics of a personality” As a collective, we’ve developed different sanctioned places for those parts of ourselves, and for me, that’s always been fitness and performance training. The gym has always been the place to find comfort in breaking myself down...

I laid on the floor in a heavy state as a dark wave of depressive fatigue and heaviness washed over me. A massive pressure weighed on my head, and that characteristic optimism telling me there is always a way out, reframe or way to step back to see the bigger picture, seemed to be failing me. I didn’t see a way out of what was happening to me: the seeming hell of a mind viciously swirling in an an...

In this side quest, Robert unpacks the chaotic, messy, and deeply human struggle at the intersection of ego, detachment, and higher minded ideals. Starting with a late-night standoff with a spider, Robert discusses internal conflict between three distinct modes of being that we all cycle through: The Personal Ego: Our defensive, flawed nature trying to get ahead. The Spiritual Ego ("The Yogic...

We stood facing the water basins as faux candles let out a soft glimmer in the dark room. Like a 1500s secret Gregorian chanting chamber (or potential incognito cult initiation), four rows of partnered pairs stood above individual plunging pools as sweat dripped off our bodies from the prior sauna session. Inhaling and exhaling deeply into the diaphragm we stared directly into our apparent fate: i...

Drawing on Sherry Turkle's observation that smartphone-raised kids "know how to be lonely, but not how to be alone," this episode explores what Jungian psychology calls the vas hermeticum, and it's antithesis the validation hole. The validation hole represents the impulse to reach for our devices the moment internal tension rises, bleeding pressure through likes, comments, and digi...

When we feel our emotions like a piece of music, rather than a still photograph, we allow them to move and layer, rather than being pinned down and lodged for inspection; in doing so we're practicing a form of emotional polyphony. Emotional polyphony is the capacity of both the human mind and masterful artwork to sustain multiple conflicting emotional registers in parallel without forcing reso...

"'A genuine inspiration has visited me’, he wrote to his friend in October… Stavrogin is everything", Dostoevsky wrote in a note dated August 16, 1870. Once the true protagonist appeared, the materials of [Demons] began to compose themselves around him. The result: neither pamphlet nor poem but recasting of both, to a cost of another two years of work. What is it about the creative pro...