A couple of years ago, the actor and filmmaker Jonah Hill made a documentary about his psychiatrist, Phil Stutz. In the film, titled Stutz, the two men do all sorts of things that therapists and their clients usually avoid. They say “I love you” to each other. They joke like immature schoolboys. Stutz makes a crack about banging Hill’s mother. At one point, Hill says his previous therapists kept him at “a massive distance.” What he always wanted, he says, was someone who would tell him what to do, but they would all just sit and listen or ask him how he felt. Stutz, charismatic and gruff, is different. As he puts it in the film, he tells patients, “Do what the fuck I tell you. Do exactly what I tell you. I guarantee you’ll feel better.”
Over the past decade or so, before this film and certainly afterward, Stutz has become one of the most famous therapists in the world, if not quite as famous as his celebrity patients. They include John Cusack, John Stamos, and Joaquin Phoenix, along with many actors, studio heads, writers, and agents who prefer to not speak in public about their therapy. Since opening his practice in Los Angeles in 1982, he has treated so many Oscar winners that he formulated something he refers to as the Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle (by the fourth day after winning, life sucks again). His popularity derives in part from the perception that he is something more than a therapist, something akin to a spiritual guide. Cusack called him a “wizard in the heart of the make-believe factory.” Erin Cressida Wilson, who wrote the film Secretary, described feeling like Stutz was going into “a sort of trance,” as if he were “casting a spell.” Given his clientele, Stutz has, perhaps inevitably, inspired depictions on the screen. Last year’s feel-good Apple TV+ dramedy Shrinking was loosely based on him. On the show, Harrison Ford plays a therapist who has Parkinson’s, while his young protégé (Jason Segel) breaks typical patient-therapist boundaries.
Hill began seeing Stutz in 2017, three years before they started making the documentary. In the film, Hill reveals he had been an insecure kid who hated his body; success only made him feel worse. Stutz helped him in part by giving him “tools.” “The Tools,” which Stutz and his protégé, the therapist Barry Michels, describe in their 2012 book of the same name, are visualization exercises designed to let patients navigate a range of common challenges, from insecurity to addiction to loss. Part of what distinguishes them from exercises provided by, say, cognitive behaviorists is their mystical imagery — black suns, hollow towers, realms of “pure light.” Stutz claims they can help patients access what he tends to describe as a “higher world.”
Some therapists were troubled by Hill’s film. The American Psychological Association’s code of ethics instructs therapists to avoid “dual relationships,” meaning they should not engage with their patients outside the therapy room, as such behavior can reasonably lead to conflicts of interest, role confusion, and boundary violations. Wasn’t the documentary itself — a collaboration between the two men — an example of that? At one point in the film, Hill confesses to Stutz that he has been lying to him during their regular therapy sessions because he doesn’t want to admit that the filmmaking process hasn’t been going well. “This is clear evidence of the dual relationship and part of why the whole situation is so wrong,” one therapist wrote. A clinical psychologist pointed out that the danger with Stutz’s directives — and directive therapy in general — is that the therapist’s goals become the patient’s. “And the client’s role in his own life would become secondary,” she added.
Still, the film resonated with many people, and the unusual relationship between the men was part of the appeal. For both patients and therapists, it fulfilled a common wish: that it should be permissible, even critical, to erase the sorts of interpersonal boundaries the therapeutic Establishment regards as sacrosanct. “It confirms what I professionally believe about the importance of authenticity in our contact with clients,” one therapist wrote. At Hill’s prompting, Stutz had shared details about his own fears and hopes, his dysfunctional family history, and his difficulties with women (he’s a lifelong bachelor). Since Stutz came out, interest in the practice has exploded, and Stutz has added to a growing group of coaches and therapists versed in the Tools to handle the overflow of new clients. The film is now used to market the Tools; a trailer sits at the top of the website where Stutz’s books and seminars are available for purchase.
For a few days this winter, I attended an 88-person retreat in Ojai dedicated to Stutz and Michels’s techniques. The retreat center is on a secluded hilltop in a valley where alleged geomagnetic energies have drawn generations of spiritual seekers. The crowd was middle-aged and overwhelmingly white, dressed in clothing appropriate for the mountains — fleece pullovers, hiking boots. They were mostly successful professionals, veterans of the search for mental well-being. They’d done 12-step programs and Landmark and a lot of therapy. But they were still looking for answers when they stumbled upon the documentary on Netflix, which had led them here. There was a whiff of cultish devotion in the cool mountain air. On the buffet line at dinner one night, a sex therapist from New Jersey compared the development of the Tools to the discovery of antibiotics. She asked if I’d been “indoctrinated.” (“In a positive way,” she clarified.) A former Mormon confessed she had been looking for meaning since leaving the church; what appealed to her about Stutz and Michels, she said, was that they seemed to provide a path toward spirituality without the oppressive authority of a religious institution. “They don’t make God or higher powers anything other than what you’re making it,” she said.
Michels and his own protégé, the therapist and coach Kristan Sargeant, started this retreat a few years ago. Sargeant met both men at a workshop Stutz gave in 2019. “I sat next to Barry, but when I took in Phil, I was like, Wherever this man is — until he dies — I have to be,” she told me. Today, opportunities to learn from Stutz are rare. In his late 50s, he, like Ford’s character in Shrinking, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which has significantly restricted his activities. Managing the symptoms, which include crippling exhaustion and tremors, can feel like a full-time job, he says. At 77, he is semi-retired. He still usually sees two clients a day, but most of them are long-term patients he has known for years. New patients, he told me, require too much energy. (Michels, meanwhile, is 70 and was recently diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.)
Throughout Stutz and Michels’s writings, they hint at the idea that the Tools have the potential not just to help individuals but to “heal the world.” They never lay out exactly how. They write only that if people use their methods, they will become participants in the revitalization of society. Now, their time was running out, and society was more fucked than ever. Stutz noted that his patients include quite a few people who have more wealth than they can ever spend and have enjoyed every conceivable pleasure. But they — along with the rest of us — were suffering from a spiritual void, a lack of connection to one another and our environment. In the documentary, he told Hill that his deepest fear is that his work won’t “spread deeply enough into the culture.”
On the morning of the third day of the retreat, the door to the conference room eased open and a small, frail man with a short white beard hobbled in with a cane. He was dressed in black sneakers and a navy puffer, but from the neck up, he looked something like a Byzantine painter’s version of John the Baptist with his long nose, gaunt cheeks, and sunken eyes. He slipped into the room and sat near the door without announcing himself. He might have gone unnoticed by the attendees if Sargeant, up at the podium, hadn’t paused the proceedings. “Sorry to make a big deal of this, but Phil is here,” she said. Stutz waved a hand modestly at the cheering crowd.
After the morning’s session ended, devotees surrounded him on the stone patio, pressing him for answers. When a doctor from Vegas asked how to create a “stable infrastructure” so Stutz’s work would “thrive for future generations,” Stutz replied that he had been thinking about this question at some length, but his response was disjointed and hard to follow. He rubbed his hands, excused himself, and then walked a few paces and lay down on a yoga mat. He felt dizzy and exhausted, but he couldn’t leave now. “The Earth won’t heal itself,” he said.
Stutz lives and works out of an airy high-rise apartment in Century City. From his windows, which run the length of the place, you can see the Fox Studio lot, a distant glimmer of the Pacific Ocean, and Jonah Hill’s childhood home. A flag for Hill’s production company, Strong Baby, hangs over his bed. On a low cabinet in his living room are a dozen pages of yellowed paper covered in small, neat handwriting. A friend found and framed them a few years ago. Stutz had written them as he was “discovering” the Tools, a process he describes as something akin to divine revelation. The pages are covered with private abbreviations, mysterious drawings of circles and triangles in a range of configurations, phrases and bullet lists of words with no obvious connection: magic, virtues, initiation, rebirth, evil, success.
Stutz doesn’t remember exactly when he wrote those pages, but he knows that by the time he did, he was disillusioned with the training he had received as a psychiatrist. In the late ’60s, when he began medical school at NYU, American psychiatry departments were still dominated by the psychoanalytic approach developed by Freud around the turn of the past century. Freud’s most original insight was that human behavior is ruled by unconscious fears and fantasies. Therapists who subscribed to his theories refrained from giving advice to their patients; instead, they prompted them to free-associate, to say whatever came into their mind without censoring even their most despicable thoughts. By listening carefully and offering interpretations, the therapist could gradually achieve the poignantly modest goal of transforming, in Freud’s words, the patient’s “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” Stutz hated it. “You’d send the patient out holding his dick,” he told me. “You gave him nothing, and I just couldn’t stand it.”
He was drawn to the work of Carl Jung, one of Freud’s disciples and the heir apparent to his legacy until their falling out in 1913. Among the reasons for their split was Jung’s interest in what Freud called the “black tide” of mysticism. Freud saw that Jung was moving away from introspection toward a theory of the “collective unconscious,” the idea that each person possesses not only individual unconscious fears and fantasies but universal ones shared by all human beings. Jung’s focus on this idea pulled him away from the work of trying to understand his patients’ pasts; in one instance, he cut off a patient who had begun talking about her mother, saying, “Don’t waste your time.”
Like Jung, Stutz was interested in the Shadow, an aspect of the self that Jung once described as “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide.” The Shadow had to be managed and cared for, Stutz said, otherwise it threatened to become Part X, a self-sabotaging internal force “whose only purpose is to stop you from reaching your full potential.” To help patients work with their Shadows — along with other troubling aspects of the human experience — Stutz elaborated on the work of the controversial occultist Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, a movement whose proponents believed in the existence of a higher spiritual realm that could be accessed through mental processes like meditation. Patients would report their problems to Stutz, and he would reply by saying whatever came into his head — Freud’s “free association,” but in reverse. “It began to feel as though some other force was speaking through me,” he writes in The Tools. “Little by little,” the Tools “made themselves known.”
Looking back on the 20 years he spent in Stutz’s office, the actor Hank Azaria told me “the true miracle of Phil” was less the specifics of the exercises than Stutz’s ability to reframe “Hollywood bullshit” into “spiritual tests.” Nervous about auditions? Picture standing onstage with your Shadow beside you, shouting at an audience. So afraid of rejection you can’t finish your screenplay? Imagine the pain you are avoiding as a cloud in front of you, then run directly into the cloud and feel it spitting you out into a realm of pure light as you say to yourself, “Pain sets me free!” If you suffer from self-loathing, Stutz recommends “Grateful Flow,” a three-stage process. The first stage, listing the things you are thankful for, is a technique common among behavioral therapists. But in the next stage, you are supposed to feel “energy emanating from your heart,” then connect to what Stutz calls “the Source,” an “overwhelming presence” that will fill you with the power of “infinite giving.” The Source, he goes on to explain in The Tools, “created everything you can see. Most miraculously, it created life and it remains intimately involved with all the living beings it created.” The website for The Tools includes 15 different exercises, but Stutz says he has developed as many as 50.
If what he is prescribing sounds familiar, that may be because it is not unlike what hundreds of generations of humans have thought of as prayer. The Tools require faith, he told me. There is no evidence that they work, but that’s just the point. “It’s not the specific Tools that cure you,” Stutz cautioned. This was a common misunderstanding. What mattered was dedicating yourself to the Tools completely, until they became a sort of religion. “What cures you is a gestalt,” he said. “An overall belief in something that can’t be proven.”
If you consider only the content of what Stutz says, you may have a hard time differentiating it from the spiels of any of the countless gurus, healers, and spiritual practitioners who have been channeling higher forces in Southern California since the late 1800s. One essential difference, a key to his appeal, is how he says it. Stutz is a Jewish New Yorker in his 70s and sounds like it. He has the accent and demeanor, surly and jocular, of one of those old-school delicatessen waiters who would disparage you for ordering your pastrami with ketchup. “Out of anybody else’s mouth, a lot of what he says would not work,” Wilson, the screenwriter, observed.
Stutz grew up on the Upper West Side. When he was 9, his 3-year-old brother died of a rare form of cancer. His parents, atheists with “limited emotional resources,” were unequipped to handle the tragedy. Stutz stepped in to fill the void. In The Tools, Stutz wrote that his first therapeutic patient was his own father, a Polish immigrant who would buy “damaged goods from some hellish place down south” and sell them on the international market. “My job was to reassure him,” he said. When Stutz was 16 or so, his father told him being a doctor was “the only profession.” Stutz sensed his father was hoping for a “cosmic reward” but “wasn’t going to do the work for it — I had to do it.” Applying to medical school didn’t feel like a choice. “A lot of things that happened to me feel like they’re planned by somebody else,” he said.
Stutz started seeing a psychotherapist after medical school. He told me what he most wanted from therapy was “some kind of fathering,” which he felt he had lacked growing up. He found that for a time in a man named Alexander Lowen, whom he saw for seven years in his 20s and 30s. Lowen had developed something called “bioenergetic analysis,” a kind of mind-body therapy that seeks to work out unresolved emotional conflicts through the release of muscular tensions and mental exercises. “In some ways, the idea was correct, which is that the deep things that you want to impart to somebody can’t be imparted in words,” Stutz said. He eventually had a falling out with Lowen, whom he came to see as “a narcissist and an all-around bad guy.” Parting with Lowen was critical to his development. “I stopped listening to self-appointed authority figures,” he said. Soon after, he became one.
Stutz moved to L.A. in 1982, when he was 35. For a long time, he had suffered from a “bone-deep exhaustion” that no specialist had been able to treat (eventually, this would be diagnosed as Parkinson’s). To conserve energy, he had narrowed the scope of his life to sleep and work. He hoped the climate out West might improve his health, but instead he found himself sicker than ever, and now he was lonely as well. L.A. at the time, he said, was “a very cold place. If you didn’t have close friends or family, you might as well have been on Mars.”
But it was in L.A. that he found a clientele that was primed to understand his methods. His techniques resembled acting exercises with their goal of allowing the patient to summon specific emotions (gratitude, courage) at will. One of his early patients was Azaria, who had been voicing characters on The Simpsons when he developed a crippling fear of auditions. In his first meeting with Stutz, Azaria reported that he was afraid of “looking like an idiot, failing at being an actor, and not being able to pursue my dream.” Stutz disagreed. “You’re afraid of how your own mind is going to attack you, of how you’re going to beat yourself up over perceiving that you didn’t do too well,” Azaria recalled him saying. Stutz taught him about his Shadow and urged him to welcome it into the audition process, explaining that the “horrible truth for actors is that the Shadow is actually where all the creativity and inspiration comes from.” Before he went into the audition room, Azaria would say, “God bless you, Shadow, you’re the king. You do everything, I do nothing.” Immediately after the audition, Azaria would run through a routine Stutz called “Afterburn”: He would appreciate the things he’d done right, then contemplate the moments when he felt he’d slipped up, then meditate on whatever he happened to be looking at (the play of light on the wall, a potted palm), and finally buy himself an ice-cream cone or a slice of pizza. Within six weeks, Azaria said, his problem was solved.
Over the course of many sessions, Stutz grew so close with some of his patients that they became like family. He spends Thanksgiving with Bill Lawrence, the co-creator of Shrinking, and his wife, Christa Miller, a patient for 23 years who also stars on the show. Mark Kriegel, a writer, sometimes cooks pasta dinners for Stutz and drives them over to his apartment. “There are any number of times I made an appointment just because I wanted to bullshit with him,” Kriegel said. In recent sessions, John Stamos told me, he has started asking Stutz more about his own life. “We’ll spend 50 minutes talking about him,” he said.
Stamos recalled grilling Stutz about Brad Grey, the late CEO of Paramount. “What would you tell Brad?” he asked him. “How was he so fucking powerful? How was he so scary?” Stutz’s assertiveness with his patients sometimes seemed to rub off on them. Patients told me their work with him helped them walk into meetings with more confidence or channel their aggression into useful pursuits. They appreciated his focus on practical matters. He didn’t demand that they dredge up their pasts — work that can be painful, anxiety producing, and burdensome. His philosophy, optimistic and oriented toward success, was focused on moving into the future. “He was very direct,” Alan Iezman, a talent manager who saw Stutz in the ’80s, told me. “Like, ‘Let’s not screw around figuring out your past trauma or who treated you badly when you were a baby. Let’s just get you on a road that’s more positive and productive.’ ”
As the years passed and the names on Stutz’s list of patients grew more famous, securing a spot on his calendar came to feel like entry into a “secret club,” said Miller. Despite his growing prestige, Stutz continued to live like a monk. For most of his practice, until about 15 years ago when he moved to Century City, he saw patients in a run-down apartment on West Texas Avenue. Cusack, a client for three decades, suspected he stayed in “the Hovel,” as some patients called it, “just to put people’s egos in check.” In a town where everyone is obsessed with appearances, he seemed to be living proof that none of that mattered, that “the materialistic way of thinking,” as Cusack put it, “is not adequate.” For his part, though, Stutz told me he was not immune to the Hollywood bullshit he helped his patients overcome. As his fame spread, he became more selective about whom he accepted as a patient. “It becomes a thing of Who’s A-list, and do we have room for them? If you think I’m not going to think like that, everybody thinks like that,” he declared.
Stutz said that the most convincing thing about his idol, Steiner, was that he never accepted any money. “He came into this world destitute. He left the world destitute. He didn’t like power.” Stutz, by contrast, charges $700 an hour. He described himself to me, in a self-deprecating way, as a mercenary. I was surprised to hear him say this. Throughout his books, both he and Michels critique the crass belief that money will lead to lasting happiness and warn about the problem of the ego, the way it can keep a person shallow, directionless, and small. Perhaps this is why, despite his material success, Stutz said he long felt unfulfilled. “The things that were really important to me I failed at, basically,” he told me. He never married or had children. In Hill’s documentary, Stutz describes his mother as an emotionally closed-off woman who spent every dinner conversation on a tirade about how much she hated men. As a result, he says, “there was no pathway inside me that could step up to a woman and feel safe.” He’d never managed to overcome that psychic block. “I was a good shrink, I had a good practice, but the stuff that had depth to it, that coin never turned over to the right side,” he told me.
After the movie came out, he felt like his luck was finally changing. “I was in water, and it felt like it was rising,” he said. Strangers approached him on the street and told him he had saved their lives. The monastic lifestyle, the failure to have a family of his own, were not just losses but necessary sacrifices made in pursuit of a sacred calling. He felt an incredible surge of confidence in his crusade to bring his therapy to the world. “I’m the best,” he recalled thinking. “I’m the most driven. It’s mine to accept responsibility for. I’ve never had that feeling before.”
The release of the film did more for Stutz’s reputation than it did for his patient’s. A year after it came out, Hill’s ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady posted screenshots of text messages she claimed she and Hill had exchanged in 2021; in them, someone named Jonah tells Brady, a professional surfer, that if she wants to post photos of herself in a bathing suit and have “boundaryless” friendships with men as well as with women “who are in unstable places,” then he is not the right partner for her. If she fails to change this behavior, he says, it will be a violation of his boundaries. The leak of these messages prompted dozens of news stories, op-eds, and personal essays. One headline read bluntly: “Not all therapy is a force for good. I give you exhibit A: the actor Jonah Hill.” The onlookers pondered whether he had really “done the work” or whether, as one writer put it, he was engaging in a “manipulative weaponisation of therapeutic language.”
Stutz was not particularly concerned by any of it. When I asked him about the backlash, at first he didn’t seem to know what I was referring to. Eventually, he made the connection: “What, when the woman was attacking him?” He said he didn’t pay attention to the press. “If he had shot somebody, I wouldn’t be too upset,” he said. In other words, even if the patient did something bad, he would try to be as supportive as possible; his concern was their well-being. “I don’t want to judge myself by these outer results,” he added.
A day before the retreat, at his apartment, Stutz led me into his office, which was softly lit and filled with eclectic objets d’art. He sank into the couch and gestured to the chair opposite him. In our interviews, Stutz had could be evasive. He struggled to recall details, changed the subject, lost the thread of conversation, and contradicted himself. He spoke in aphorisms and parables, returning to the same allusions and anecdotes again and again, the meanings sometimes difficult to parse. But at some point in each meeting, a shift would occur. He would start by asking me a question and then, before I was fully aware of what was happening, the interview would turn into a therapy session. In the role of therapist, he was direct, funny, and perceptive, bearing little resemblance to Stutz the interview subject. “When you get me in this setting, I turn into a different person,” he agreed. He said he becomes “ruthless” in his effort to create a connection with his patient.
During one of our conversations, he asked me about my Shadow. As it happened, I’d recently had a dream about a demented 4-year-old version of myself, a creature of bottomless need who chased me down the street, scurrying behind me on all fours. As I began to describe the context, he interrupted. “I just want to say something first,” he said. He studied my face. “This is the most incredible session I’ve ever had.” I laughed. “Not the content,” he continued, shrugging. He’d heard all that before, he said — every variation of depravity and dysfunction. He closed his eyes and paused, considering his words. “It’s the courage and the power that comes out of your mouth.” Later, he told me he prided himself on knowing what would help “strengthen the person’s sense of self and what would diminish it.”
He suggested I close my eyes and picture the demented 4-year-old in my dream, then ask her what was driving her. I had a pretty good idea about this already. I had been seeing a psychoanalyst, a contemporary Freudian, four days a week for the past two years, sharing every thought that crossed my mind while my analyst sat behind my head and occasionally offered an interpretation. Often, this meant dissecting the past. Stutz told me I was wasting my time: “You can be working on something, understand its roots, understand how it’s damaged you, understand how helpless you feel, all that stuff — it adds up to nothing. There’s a gap between that and actually changing.”
Stutz has claimed his own approach differs from the old therapies in one crucial respect: “It works.” He warned me that if I continued on as I was, the consequences would be dire — personal destruction and professional failure. But if I dedicated myself to the Tools, I would be astonished by what I could accomplish. My career would flourish. My relationships would blossom. My will would strengthen. My life would change. Of course, I wanted these things. This is why someone goes to analysis four days a week. But my analyst had never told me what to do to achieve them. He offered no exercises. He shared no vision for what my life should look like. At times, it felt like wandering in the wilderness. I could understand why Stutz’s patients were drawn to him. Still, there is a reason people go through a process like analysis. As the unconscious is unearthed and worked through over the course of many sessions, as the ghosts of one’s past are summoned up, mourned, and laid to rest, a precious freedom can emerge. I worried that if I listened to Stutz and did exactly as he told me, I might sacrifice that freedom in favor of his reassuring certainty. He disagreed that this was a concern. “Any human endeavor needs leadership,” he told me.
On the afternoon of our third day in Ojai, Stutz took a seat on a folding chair among the other attendees and began speaking quietly. Up until that point, the sessions had been tightly structured. For five and a half hours each day, the group listened to lectures about Shadow work and participated in meditation exercises, group therapy, and role-play. Today, Stutz went off script. He said he’d been thinking lately about how “everything is falling apart.” He alluded to the disconnectedness that so many of us feel, the “fracturing” of the world, and suggested that together we could fix the problem. As he’d done in his conversations with me, he paused to offer us some words of encouragement. “This is a very unusual group,” he said. “Everybody is very kind and solicitous of everybody else here.” He looked around the room. “I don’t know if any of you can feel it. The group moves as a whole, and because it does, it can generate more firepower.” What we needed to do, he said, was “harness that energy.”
The next few minutes did not provide an answer as to how. “I had this vision,” he continued. “I didn’t know what most of you looked like, but you were in the vision and the vision created an oval. It was an oval that kept circulating over and over and over, and if you begin to look at that as the force driving the entire universe, it’s a force of wholeness. Then this stuff starts to make more sense.”
“In other words,” he went on, “do you guys have any interest in trying to formulate yourself as a group and focus the energy that you are creating? You don’t have to answer it now. But if we can’t get you guys to do it, we can’t get anybody to do it.”
Picking up on what Stutz seemed to be saying, Michels suggested that we reflect on “the best way for us to serve the whole — meaning the connected collective consciousness of which each one of us is a part.” I looked around the room at the other attendees, their eyes closed in concentration. Someone let out a whimper. It was Stutz. “I need help,” he said in a small voice. He remained seated. It wasn’t clear what was wrong. People pushed back their chairs and rushed over to him from around the room. They rubbed his back, brought him water. They whispered into his ears and crouched at his feet.
When Stutz spoke again, his voice was weak and high-pitched, all the vitality drained out of it. His ailment appeared to be spiritual, not physical. “I’m just trying to bring myself to some kind of peace,” he said. “On a normal scale of hierarchical accomplishment, I’ve already won. There’s nothing more to win.” He began talking about the ancient world. Something important had been lost, some glue that had connected all of us to one another and to God. He let out a sob. “I feel like I’m flying in the wrong direction,” he said.
Michels, sitting up at the podium, looked at his mentor and asked, “Could you say more about what’s coming up?”
After a silence, Stutz started to talk about the “four laws” necessary for any creative act: humility, ignorance, poverty, anonymity. He lingered on the word humility: “It says no matter what I’m doing, no matter what I’m working on, it’s not as great or as important as I think it is.” As he spoke, his voice grew stronger. “You can talk about each one of these points for 100 years.” People around the room began to nod. Michels suggested another meditation. He wanted everyone to sit with Stutz’s words for a moment longer — to try to understand the vision he had for the group. “Don’t resist any messages you receive, whatever they are,” Michels said.
A man toward the back, a documentary filmmaker, raised his hand. “And the purpose?”
“That’s what I’m waiting for too,” Michels said.
