The #1 Habit All Successful People RUN DAILY! (You Need To DO THIS Everyday) | Vishen Lakhiani

Vishen Lakhiani, welcome back to the show. Tom, so good to be back here. Brother, I'm super excited. And what is the number one habit that you think all successful people have that everybody watching this should adopt immediately? Now, I know you think I'm going to say meditation, right? I know you think that. Everybody thinks that, but that's not it, okay? The number one habit is actually not a habit at all. It is a belief that leads to a habit. And And that belief is that the number one thing in your life is your rate of growth. So, I call it your rose. believe that your rate of growth is high? You should know. You should believe that the most important thing in your life is not your family, it's not your business, it's not your money, it's how fast are you evolving and growing. The word to remember is rose, rate of self-evolution. So, let me tell you where this comes from, okay? This actually comes from a very prominent MBA professor by the name of Srikumar Rao. So, Srikumar Rao, um he was speaking at one of my events, and after the event, he came and he told me, "Vishen, you know what is the problem with MBA programs in America?" And I go, "What?" And he says, "They don't teach consciousness." So, I said, "But they do." And he goes, "No, no, no, no, no. You're confusing consciousness with ethics. Since Enron, everybody teaches ethics. Consciousness is what we need to teach people." So, I'm like, "What exactly do you mean?" And he goes, "Let me explain it to you. Consciousness means this, that you are a soul having a human experience, and what your soul craves is growth more than anything else. You think your business matters. You think your marriage matters. You think your children matter. But let's just talk about business. Your business doesn't matter. If your business makes a million billion dollars, who cares? If your business fails, who cares? What matters is did you grow? Your business is nothing more than one of the most powerful vehicles for your personal growth. And the funny thing is, so are your relationships. Funny thing is, so are your children. Your quest in life is to grow and grow and grow. Now, if this becomes your belief, all your habits align with this belief. Are you making time in your day to improve yourself? Are you making time in your day to read, to study, to watch Impact Theory, to do a Mindvalley Quest? Are you making time to meditate cuz that helps you grow, to exercise cuz that helps you grow? And this is what people forget. We get stuck on this [ __ ] hamster wheel chasing the dollars trying to grow in our career when we forget that none of that [ __ ] matters. It's all about us as a multi-dimensional human being and are we growing? I actually agree with you violently. Why though does it matter? Because if you grow, everything else in your life grows, right? And we see this so often with with great entrepreneurs. does that matter? Like, do you So, I have I'll I'll walk you down the garden path and tell me if if you agree with this. So, I'm totally on board. Whenever somebody asked me what's the meaning of life, I would say there's no meaning that's ascribed to it. It's meaning that you give it. But, if you want to reach fulfillment, do the following. Work your ass off to gain a set of skills to your point about progressing and growing that allow you to serve not only yourself but other people. Now, the reason that I think that that should be the number one thing that people pay attention to is because it will give you the neurochemical state that is most um satisfying maybe the right word cuz it isn't like joy, eating a bowl of ice cream, having sex. All of those things are awesome peak experiences, but they rapidly attenuate. Whereas fulfillment, you can be fulfilled even in the midst of grief. Mhm. And so for me, it's a evolutionary neuro psychological answer. so I think I think here's here's why it applies. Fulfillment, right? Fulfillment. Fulfillment is what we want out of life. Tony Robbins said there are there are several uh human needs, but the two most important human needs he he talks about six, but the two most important he says is the need for growth and the need for contribution. Mhm. Okay, now trying to contribute without growth is is is like walking backwards. It doesn't make sense. If you're growing and you're becoming the best possible human being you can be, that is often the path to contribution. If you're growing the skills that you're growing within, whether growing as an entrepreneur, growing in terms of your health and wellness, growing your cognition ability, that is going to give you the tools to go out there and contribute. So, if growth and contribution are the pathway to fulfillment, growth is that accelerator. Mhm. That's why I think it's important. Yeah, it's really interesting that so, I think about it from an evolutionary perspective. It's I One of the things I find most fascinating about you is you can go from evolution to astral projection. And I am very firmly in the the one camp, but so, I think about it firmly in the science camp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Uh-uh-uh, so so am I. I'm a computer scientist, I'm a computer engineer. It's just that I think that there are things that have been proven by science, but not agreed upon by all scientists, and that's a big difference. Tell me more. What do you mean by that? Okay, so one could talk about intuition, right? Yep. Um intuition is a big part of my life. I write my books through tapping into my intuition. Intuition is very similar to that process that you talk about. I remember interviewing you once and you spoke about thinkitation. Mhm. You know, how you meditate in the morning and these ideas flow to you? Right? What we don't know is where these ideas coming from. Are they coming because our brains are suddenly hyper optimized, or are they coming from outside our brain? Yeah, what do you think? I think they're coming from outside our brain. From where outside of our brain? So, so now let's talk about the science. Okay? Don't take me into the science yet. We'll circle back to that. where? Outside our brain? Yeah, I think we're going to find the answer when we go into quantum biology. Okay. So, uh I'll give people a thumbnail sketch of what I think quantum biology is. I'm not at all educated in this. So, here's my understanding of quantum biology. Everything that we see, interact with, all of it is quantum. That I think is unarguable. There is no theory of everything. So, we all know there's something that we don't know yet that we can't describe mathematically, at least. But, if we know that all of reality is quantum, then therefore, by its very nature, biology must be quantum. So, I have heard people talk about things like in your brain, if you we can describe and think about the parts that we can see in a microscope and all that, but when you get down to the quanta, you can't. And so, there obviously is some function of your brain that is almost certainly existing and not almost certainly, it must be coming forth from the quantum realm since we all know that on a small enough scale everything becomes So, So, let me try to explain it in a simple way, which also can be rooted in science, okay? They are They are these things that we observe about animals that we just don't understand. For example, monkeys in a certain island in Japan start learning a particular way to open shellfish using a particular rock. As soon as there are enough monkeys on that particular island learn that method, the same breed of monkey on another island, too far away from the monkeys to swim in between, start developing that same method. What is going on there? How are these monkey brains connected? Another example of commonly looked at in quantum biology is Well, so, tie that to So, is this an information exchange between members of the same species? Are we connected? members of the same species connected beyond what we can see with our physical eyes? And another example that they're looking at is the certain migration of of certain birds that fly thousands of miles during a particular season. And these birds know exactly how to fly, exactly what direction. So, scientists measures measured the brain of these birds to see is it because there's something about their brain that's aligning with the Earth's magnetic field. And what they found is yes, at a cellular level there is something that aligns with the Earth's magnetic field, but it's about 1 billionth. It's too small for these birds to actually make any logical deduction. And so again, one of the things that the only explanation they can look at is that there's something happening at the quantum level. Now, I'm not a quantum physicist. I can't explain that. That is way, way, way complex. All we know is there are certain areas of reality that we are yet to discover. I mean, our knowledge of physics is doubling every 7 years. And so, just because we can't explain how something works right now, doesn't mean we can't leverage or use it. And I believe intuition is one of those things. This is really fascinating to me and I promise you I'm exploring this with an open mind. Here's how I look at it. So, if you had said humans, this would be a lot easier. You said monkeys and so that gets tougher for me. But first, let me I'll get to monkeys in a second because it's far harder and I don't know I have not heard that before. So, we'll set that aside. But I just read a book, absolutely phenomenal book by Matt Ridley called The Evolution of Everything. Mhm. And it's basically this debate, which is if you have a creationist view, Mhm. you start looking at things as okay, there's a top-down sense. It's coming from somewhere else. It's coming into your mind. The um evolutionary lens to look at it is no, no, no, this is coming from the bottom up. And so he uses innovation as an example. And so he's like, "What are the odds that two people invent something on the same day unless it's something coming out of the ether?" And there's a really cool story. I've actually told this before, so my audience will have to forgive me. But there's this really cool story. Michael Jackson calls Quincy Jones in the middle of the night. Right. He's like, "Quincy, you got to wake up. You got to wake up." And he's like, "Jesus, Mike, what's up?" And he's like, "I just had an idea for a song. We've got to record it right now." And he's like, "Do we really have to record it right now?" And he's like, "Yes, because if we don't, Prince is going to." Right. And he's like, "What are you talking about? How could Prince know?" And he's like, "It's just It's out there. It's It's in the ether." Yeah. Now, Matt Ridley would say that what they're responding to is something is happening in culture where but it's coming from the bottom up. So it's evolving up and now once people become aware of it, yes, it does feel like it just came from the top down because it it all happens at once. But we're all in the same soup, which is why we're detecting temperature, just to use the analogy, at the same time. So we're in this medium, culture, that's making it feel like something is coming from the outside, but it's actually not. It's the thing that we're in. So he gives the example of light bulbs. And he's like, "In the West, we all think it was Thomas Edison, but there's something like seven or eight different people in different cultures that have been credited with No, they invented the light bulb." He's like, "But nobody invented the light bulb 10,000 years ago because you didn't have electricity. And you didn't have electricity because you didn't have XYZ." Right. So what you're saying it's it's luck and timing. Right? Ooh, when I say luck, I wouldn't use that word. I can't speak for Matt Ridley. But I would say that the reason that aviation Mhm. hit a certain point and then stopped is because for a long time your hardest metal was steel, but steel's too heavy. You can't create enough propulsion, so flight doesn't happen. But then you get aluminum. And now because you can smelt aluminum or however it's made, it's light enough and strong enough that you can have aviation. But until there's another materials breakthrough, aviation is just sort of stalled out. It's been the same for like 60 years. So while computers have gotten faster and cheaper, aviation hasn't changed. We sent people to the moon and then that was it. We haven't created any new propulsion and all that. Michael Saylor, I don't know if you know him, fascinating guy, background in aeronautics. He said the reason that he's turned himself into a multi-billionaire in software, even though he has a background in aeronautics, he said, "Aeronautics has just stalled out. It's a materials problem. It's a propulsion's problem." I thought, "Okay, that's really interesting." So you have all these other things going on in this soup of culture that make things seem like everybody's coming up with the same idea or failing to come up with the same idea because of something from the outside, but it's really a whole totally disagree. Okay, so first So I want to share two things. So I would totally So I want to share Now, are you a dualist? I don't know what you mean by that. Okay, so but But let me tell you. So firstly, when we're going into an argument like this, and it's not an argument, I'm really enjoying this. conversation, right? I don't know that I'm right. I want to be very clear. Yeah, so so I think that there is something that you're missing looking at. And I think there's certain scientific studies which are worth looking at because they show that the world is a lot more mysterious than we think. But also, there's a psychological phenomenon um which is it is an interesting thing. Ken Wilber calls it the pre/trans fallacy. So Ken Wilber, of course, Pre/trans fallacy? P pre trans p r e {dash} trans t r a n s. Okay, you can put it on you can put it on Google. You'll find a Wikipedia article on it. So a lot of people who follow you, a lot of people in the Western world today are rationalists. So if you look at Wall Street, you look at Silicon Valley, these are rationalists. And rational thinking is important to push the world forward. Now, rationalists is a next evolution of human culture after we came from religion, from mythology. The problem with rationalists is that rationalists look at spirituality and they see spirituality as something from the past. This is called pre-rational spirituality. And so they look at the talking bush. They look at you're born a sinner. They look at magical ideas in the Bible like like demons and so on and they go God that is like rubbish magical thinking that doesn't exist. But they fail to understand that there's a form of spirituality called trans-rational spirituality. Meditation falls in that domain. Forgiveness practices fall fall in that domain. Trans-rational spirituality is spirituality that's emerging in alignment with science. Because with fMRI scans there's so much that we can see in the human brain. Now people who are in the rational zone, they look at they are unable to see that there are two distinct forms of understanding spiritual nature. So they look at the person who's talking about how a crystal on your chest and the phase of the moon can affect your sleep and your moods and they're like oh God this is such nonsense. But then they put that in the same bucket as trans-rational spirituality which is actually being supported by some really interesting scientific evidence. You must understand that there are two. When I wrote my book The Six Phase Meditation I'm talking about trans-rational spirituality. I back everything I talk about with scientific evidence. And in some cases I say look there's no science for this but millions of people do this practice because they notice something change in themselves. So the first thing is you don't want to fall in the pre-trans fallacy. We're not talking about burning bushes here. We're not talking about magic and mythology. We're talking about trans-rational spirituality. And there are some really fascinating scientific evidences. for me? I actually don't know what that means. So Is it a cross Does it mean a cross-rationality? Multiple forms of rationality? spirituality that's emerging past the age of rationality. Okay. Right? You look at the yoga movement. You know, I was talking to the founder of Gaiam. He was talking about how he wanted to get yoga mats that he was selling in some major department stores. This was 2003. And they said, "Nope, we can't sell yoga mats because we don't do religion." Today, you can buy yoga mats everywhere. The world is changing really fast. You look at meditation and forgiveness studies. There's an exponential rise, exponential, in the number of studies on the benefits of meditation on human health. I mean, one of the things we know right now, proven by science, meditation improves telomere length, which is a biomarker of aging. So, you want to live longer, you got to freaking meditate. So, this is what we mean by the domain of transrational spirituality. Now, what I argue is that there are two aspects of transrational spirituality that are about to explode in the public domain. And these two aspects are this, the idea that our minds are connected, that there is some information flow between me and you, between you and other people. And I'll share with you some stunning evidence to support this. And the second, that our mind can influence our bodies. That when you think about your wife, Lisa, in a positive, loving way, there actual physiological changes that happen in her body. And again, there's evidence for this. These two things show that we are more deeply connected than we think. And these two ideas are also a basis of of my new book. Okay, so I want to make sure that we're careful to separate some things. Your book is amazing, by the way. I've read it cover to cover. I I am such a freakish adherent of meditation. Um what you cover in the book, I think if people do, they will benefit tremendously. So, I don't want people to think that I'm I'm um Yeah. that I'm pushing back on the book. But I want to go back to this idea of dualism for a second. So, dualism, as I understand it, and and this is probably something I could learn a lot more, but my my overly basic understanding is that dualism is that there is a separation between your body, the physical body, and your soul. Uh so, people that believe that those two things are separate, you can live after death, and all of that. I am not a dualist, so for me, I can't I have a fundamental base assumption about the way the world works, quantum or no quantum. Look, I under at a really basic level, I understand quantum entanglement, I understand information theory, everything that we're doing in Project Kaizen is actually a it's a story based on my layman's understanding of information theory. So, like, I get it, fascinated by it, super interesting, and I think despite that, even reaching into the future and saying, "Hey, all of that's true, that quantum computers will use quantum entanglement and superposition and all of that stuff." Um I still don't think that there is a separation between the body and the soul. And you could be right. We're not even talking about that. That is I don't know what that answer is. So, I hope I don't offend anyone here, but I believe that we should raise children We should raise children to as to to gain their own beliefs. So, when I was educating my my son when he was 7 years old, we watched Neil deGrasse Tyson's documentary Cosmos. And I asked my son told So, my son is the product of multiple religions. His mom is Lutheran and Russian Orthodox. I grew up in a Hindu and I asked I explained to him the ideas of life and death in all of these religions from Christianity to Russian Orthodox to Hinduism, and then I explained Neil deGrasse Tyson's theory that after we die, we simply become united with the Earth, and we are made of stardust, and we return back. Someday, the sun's going to explode, it's going to engulf the Earth, we will return back to stardust. And I asked my son at 8, which belief most resonates with you? And he said, I like Neil. I like the stardust theory. So, that's how my children are raised. They are not raised as dualist. But, this is what fascinates me. There was a study done at the University of Edinburgh, and it's a very famous study. It's called the Ganzfeld test study. So, they separated people into two groups. In one group, people were in a room and they were called senders, and they were shown one of four images. So, these images could be a tank rolling through a battlefield. It could be a horse running through water. It could be Mount Fuji. And then the second group, they were put in a sensory deprivation chamber, right? So, basically like a salt tank. They were floating in a salt tank. There was super relaxed, mellow, meditative music. Now, the researchers would ask the senders to of the four pictures, the senders were shown one and they had to imagine that they could tell the receiver mentally what they were seeing, relay that information to the receiver. Now, they wake up the receiver and they ask they show the receiver the four pictures and they said, choose. Choose what your sender is seeing. Now, of course, these people are not in any form of physical contact with each other. Probability-wise, what would they choose? Correct, 25%, right? One out of four. But, what the University of Edinburgh found is that the actual correct answer was 33%. It was one out of three. Now, they can't explain it. They're not saying that oh, these senders are psychic or whatever. All they're saying is there is some information transfer that's happening and it's influencing and it's affecting the odds of probability of these receivers perceiving the right information. I'm going to stab in the dark here. I don't know about it. I don't know the study. I could be wrong. Caveat, caveat, caveat. But, I could see where one, you're already limiting the universe down to four things. You know it could be one of the four. And then, if people have an aversion to tanks, oh, I I want them to be sending me the tank. I would prefer they be sending me the puppy dog face or whatever. Um so I could see something like that skewing it to where you get an answer like that. Well, remember that the pictures are that the senders don't get to choose what they want to send, right? I mean, this study was corrected for all of these things. And there are multiple studies that show similar results that there's an information flow between people. Now, this is not scientific. In fact, it's quite But for instance, do you think that it would remain 33% if there were 100 images? Um so there were there are studies like this, and what they show is that there's the odds of guessing correctly typically tend to be higher. There was another study. So let's talk about that. There was another study done by Professor John Mihalasky at the Newark College of Engineering. It was a study on CEOs and intuition. So this was a very simple study. CEOs had to guess a a specific card type. Again, five cards, your odds of guessing correctly are 20%. Certain CEOs could guess 23, 24, 25% correct. Now, this is done over hundreds of trials. Now, here's what was interesting about Mihalasky study. He found that the CEOs that seemed to guess correctly more often, it also correlated with profitability increase in their companies. So again, we there is multiple studies that show that certain people guess correctly more often outside the laws of probability. I believe and and also these studies also show that this guessing tends to happen when we are in a relaxed state of mind. So what do you think is happening there? I believe in I believe that there is something called intuition. There's something called intuition, and that in some way all human beings are connected. But does that mean that the the universe, quote unquote, is broadcasting the right answer, and you just have to be in tune with it? know, and it's dangerous to make assumptions like that. But what we know is this. Why is it dangerous? It's dangerous to make assumptions like that because it it may take you down the wrong path. But let's go back to what you do. You meditate in the morning and you say incredible ideas come to you. You call it thinkitation. Mhm. What these studies are showing and what you're doing when you're meditating is you're going in a relaxed state. All these studies are showing is that when you go in a relaxed state information is clearer to the point where sometimes information that you shouldn't know, you seem to know at higher than odds of probability. We can't explain how it works. Can you give me an example of shouldn't know? Something I shouldn't know. So so these CEOs who are guessing these cards correctly, they shouldn't theoretically be able to guess out of five cards beyond a 20% probability. The Ganzfeld test experiments at the University of Edinburgh. There is something that's causing this fluidity of mind where you're getting information at an easier rate. That could explain why thinkitation works for you. It's interesting. I would definitely I'm super curious to look at these studies. Anything that gives me an edge, I'm all for. Yeah, well well a good book on it a good book on it is Best Evidence by Michael Schmicker. All called Best Best Evidence by Michael Schmicker. He was a journalist who was asked to debunk all of this and he became a believer. Another book is um The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin, PhD. These books um beautiful meta-analysis of all of these studies. So I love that we're going down this path. Yeah, so let's um let's go back. I wanted to ask you a question. So if you were designing the way the world worked, would you design this thing in where hey, the more you relax, the more that you can pick up on this frequency? Yes. Yes, absolutely. make it more wouldn't but I but I but if you're teaching this in schools, you're not talking about intuition. What what we know for sure is that when you're in a relaxed state, creative ideas flow. Yeah, I agree with that. But so here's how I So we actually my um my wife is the lead on a project that we're doing called The Wish Academy. And the main girl's original superpower was going to be intuition. And I was like, over my dead body. And Lisa was like, why can't we make intuition a superpower? And I said, because intuition has to be trained. I think people have intuition, but you're not going to have intuition about something that you it's completely abstract. Like let's say, um intuition about uh alien biology, right? Something where a something completely a 9-year-old that's never encountered human biology suddenly has intuition about something that literally could not be more even that it would have to be non-DNA based because even that, like if you grew up in a DNA-based society, it's possible there's something there. But to have intuition about something to which you truly know nothing, I think is basically a 0% chance of that. But if you've grown up studying something, thinking about something, and this is why I think meditation works for me, is I'm now able to quiet my mind such that areas of my brain that don't normally talk to each other begin talking. And so, it can one side of my mind, let's say a more creative side, can offer up to my logical side, well what about this really random thing that you never would have put together through association? Something like that. Exactly. And I've had these conversations with with people like Steven Kotler, right? Steven Kotler teaches on Mindvalley and and we had a we we had a conversation on this. And I asked Steven, what do you believe? And he says, look, when you rest your mind, Steven is a rationalist. He doesn't believe in intuition, but he believes there's some there's some optimization of your brain state so answers come to you faster. And that's all we're talking about. You don't have to believe in intuition to do the Six Phase. In fact, that word, that topic isn't even discussed in this book. But what we do say is that creativity is magnified when you're able to access these states. And this, multiple times it's been proven. The most recent experiment, they wanted to see if Edison was famous for taking his afternoon nap. So, they wanted to see is there something to Edison's napping practice, right? Was there something to his napping practice that made him come up with all of these inventions? the metal ball over the plate. There was this story that Edison holds a metal ball in his hand and when he drifts off to sleep, his hand drops, the ball hits a plate creating a loud clang. It wakes him up and it helps him solve problems. So, scientists did this with a group of people and uh they were given a math problem to solve. One group was told to solve it the traditional way, just you know, busting your mind on it. The other group was encouraged to take naps. They found that the group that napped was 80% better at solving the problem. So, again, evidence that getting in this restful state creates a a clarity of mind that helps us get more creative, whether it's problem solving or creativity. to figure out the interpretation that this is coming from the outside, that there is something that you would you don't have to believe that. We're not even talking about that. it it's interesting. So, I I am fascinated because I don't share that and it seems so it's contrary to all the base assumptions that I've built up over rationalist and you may be falling for the pre-trans fallacy and you're stubborn about it. And you're stubborn about it. Now, also the the reason is because there are lots of hokey people who call themselves psychics who manipulate others and they give a bad name to the idea of intuition. But what I want to know is why if you were creating the universe, why would you build that in? What am I missing? Why would that make it better? So, think about the that it's called a I think it's called a hundred monkey theory, right? This observation that species suddenly pick up skills. It helps survival. Explain the hundred monkey So, I told you the monkeys a particular group of monkeys in an island of Japan learn to use certain tools. From each other? The separated thing is One one monkey figures it out, figures out for example how to use a rock to break open shellfish. All the other monkeys on that island learn. Now, that you can say is true imitation. But, what happens is when a when a large number of monkeys on that island learn that, the same species of monkey on an island far away start picking up, start doing the same thing. And so, you don't think that that's just a natural evolutionary process, which is why it happens at roughly the same time? hard to believe that we don't know everything about the world that we live in? We don't know everything about the world. Exactly. So, our knowledge of physics doubles every 7 years. And so, and so, all I'm saying is we we are observing these things. We're observing these things, and we know that there's something there. We can't explain it. Nassim Haramein, I don't know if you've had him on the show, but he says spirituality is nothing more than physics we have yet to find an equation for. What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here, and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10? If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you. And let me tell you right now, discipline, by its very nature, means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing. Achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging, stressful things, and to stick with them even when it gets boring, and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you it pays off. In fact, I will tell you, you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called How to Build Ironclad Discipline, that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. Right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. Interesting. Uh sure. What I'm trying to get to is one, I'm always checking to see if the things that I believe are more likely to accurately predict the outcome of my behaviors, which will allow me to go to my goals faster. Um so if there is something here, that's why I was asking like is this a better way to create the universe? So when I look at the way that we're solving problems in the world now, is it my base assumption is that we're making catastrophic errors of judgment right now at this moment in history from a cultural perspective. We're taking a top-down approach. I think it's dangerous and I think it's going to lead people to some really horrific outcomes. So as I think through this and thank you and thank you to everybody at home that's letting me think through this in real time because I don't have a strong stance on this. I'm really exploring um something at the edges. So a few years ago, culture started to make its way under my radar. I'd never thought about it before. I was just trying to build businesses so I could tell stories and that was it. And then as I stepped in front of the camera, it started to occur to me that there were definitely a lot of things happening in the world that I had previously been unaware of because I had my head down and I was just building building building. And then the more I looked around, the more I saw how algorithms were pulling us sort of down these shoots and I wanted to seek disconfirming evidence. Then I started to really think about, okay, why do I believe what I believe? What is truth first of all? So I have a definition for truth, which is it's that which allows you to predict the outcome of your behaviors or anyone's behaviors. The cause and effect that you are way better at understanding cause and effect, predicting cause and effect. That seems like the closest thing to what is objectively true. So having Donald Hoffman on the show, uh I don't know if you know him, but his whole thing is everything you think about the world is an illusion. Like just from top to bottom. You don't see anything real, it's all fake. But his whole thing is that evolution drives you to that conclusion because it's taking you to a place where your actions lead to the right outcomes. And while he didn't say the words that I'm saying, so I don't want to misrepresent his beliefs, that, when I think about in my own life, I've always told people do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. Then the natural question is, well, would you believe something that's untrue? My thing is that doesn't sit right with me, so no is my knee-jerk reaction to that. I was like, well, why wouldn't I believe something that's untrue if it makes my life better? And I was like, well, how would something untrue make my life better? And the answer is it wouldn't. So, the things that make my life better, assuming that I'm well adjusted and I'm not schizophrenic, it's the things that are going to allow me to have my relationship be thriving, have my business be thriving, to meditate and know that it's going to help me, to do things and be able to understand, whoa, this is an improvement. Now, we could take the time to define what I think every human is unintentionally optimizing for, but I'll set that aside for a second. So, I'm trying to get to truth, meaning that which allows me to function more effectively in the world. Let me ask you an interesting question. Yep. Your wife, Lisa, is is sick right now. Yep. Do you believe that if you were to close your eyes, go into a restful state, and think about Lisa, and feel love for her, and send her that love, and imagine as if you were sending love and goodness and good vibes to her, that it would help her body heal? No. You don't believe that? Okay. So, that that's fine. So, let's talk about that. being wrong. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that, right? Wouldn't be Wouldn't it be amazing if that was true? The The poet Rumi said, and he's he spoke to lovers when he said this, "I can close my eyes and talk to you in a thousand silent ways." And poetically it sounds cool, but is there practicality to it? So, one of the other studies that really interests me is this. It was a study done by Dr. William Broad at the San Antonio Mind Science Institute. And I'm giving these names because people who are doubting this, I want you to be able to Google this and look into it, right? So, what in this study, what they did is they took several hundred people and they put them in two rooms. One was senders, one were receivers. Now, the receivers were hooked up to 19 different machines that measured their biology. So, skin resistance, which is a biomarker of of how rested you are, your heart rate, your brainwave activity, your breathing, and so on. And at a particular time, the senders were told, "Okay, imagine you're sending good vibes to the receiver." That's all. Good vibes could be well wishes, prayers, whatever. You're just thinking positively about someone. At that specific time, 1:53 p.m., the receivers, the doctors would monitor, things change about their biology. Their skin resistance might go up, which means that they are sweating less, which means that they are getting in a more restful restful state. Their EEG activity might go from beta to alpha, which again shows that they are they're relaxed, they're feeling good. And we can't explain this. We can't explain how someone thinking positive thoughts about someone else actually influences their biology. Did the person being thought of know they were being thought of? No, not at that particular time. Let's say you don't believe that. You still deny the study. You don't care about William Broad's research. It doesn't prevent you from doing the six-phase meditation. So, when we start the six-phase meditation, we actually start using a exercise to increase love and compassion. Why? Because compassion has been studied. If you can increase your compassion and your kindness, it improves your productivity at work, it makes you a better leader, it makes you a better boss, makes you better in your relationship, but it also makes you live longer. It reduces headache, it makes you sleep better, it reduces feelings of depression and anxiety. Now, how do we activate the six-phase? We start by seeing the picture of the person on the planet you love most. For me, it's my children, Hayden and Eve. Seeing their face, feeling that love, feeling that love for them in your heart area. And then imagine you can send that love to wider and wider and wider circles of humanity. So, I feel the love for my daughter and my son. I feel it in my heart area, and I imagine I can beam it out to wider areas of humanity. Now, it doesn't matter if you think the William Broad studies are bunk and that this is not going to affect humanity. What the HeartMath Institute in Los Gatos found is that by just thinking about the person you love, your heart resonance, which is another biomarker of wellness, shifts in favorable ways. Within a minute of doing this, within a minute of closing your eyes and seeing Lisa, for me, within a minute of seeing my daughter Eve in my mind's eye, my heart my heart resonance changes. And heart resonance is basically a um a subtle measurement of what's going on between your heartbeats, and it correlates with wellness. Um it changes. And so, we don't you don't have to believe that we can connect across time and space. It's been studied, and your biology directly changes from these exercises. So, the six phase, phase one, two, and three are all psychospiritual transcendent techniques, and I can explain what that means, that instantly shift your biology and your cognition, so you're showing up better in the day. If you want to believe that you can influence in a subtle way the biology of your loved one, sure. You want to believe that you can improve your intuition, sure. I believe that. You don't have to believe it. And I've given you the studies so you understand why I, as a computer scientist, believe it. But even if you don't believe it, studies show that it does cause favorable changes in your body. Over 15,000 studies. Yeah, the it impacting you, that experientially, I was going to say that's undeniable. I won't say that, but I will say experientially n of 1 that's undeniable. It meditation has been transformative in my life. The six phase meditation that you walk people through is really awesome. So, the thing that we've been exploring is the word that suits how I feel is whether this is coming from the outside and whether that would be better. The inside part I've just felt I know it's super effective and I get that I get how the mind is going to wildly impact your own physiology. I can even get that it I'll I'll say it this way. If I were diagnosed with terminal cancer tomorrow, a thousand percent I would imagine my cells attacking it and it melting away and I would get myself to believe it and I'll be like a thousand this is going to work a hundred percent guaranteed. I would also do all of the dietary things and exercise and all of that stuff. Because there's evidence for that, right? Uh at that point I wouldn't even really care about evidence. I would do anything I thought could possibly maybe have a positive effect. The exact So, that's phase four. Phase four is visualization and you can use that to manifest your goals or even heal yourself. So, the exact phase four protocol here is from the Silva method which is now run by Mindvalley. Dr. O. Carl Simonton, the cancer research pioneer, tested this. This is crazy on a group of 159 cancer patients. Um again, Simonton Cancer Research Center. And what he found was this. The average lifespan These were patients who were terminal. They were given 12 months to live. The average lifespan increased to 24.4 months. Um I believe 17 patients went into They saw their cancer reduce. 14 saw their cancer completely disappear. Now, again, these are 14 and 17 out of 159, right? So, the odds are still only 20 to 30%. But yeah, those odds exist and Simonton said about the Silva method is the single most powerful tool I have to offer patients. That is in this book. The Silva method constitutes, which is inherited by Mindvalley now, constitutes space ball. So, there is evidence for this. Doesn't work It didn't work for the majority of people. But, it worked for enough that it's worth looking at. No doubt. I mean, when it comes to that, anything is worth looking at. My So, my fundamental question, the thing that I am the thing that I have a thesis around, I could not be more open to being wrong, but the thing I have a thesis around is this idea of something coming from the outside. To me, all the things you can do on yourself and your own body, all of that makes sense. I don't understand, even from just a pure evolution, so one, again, to your earlier question, I do not know how the world how the world works? Do you understand the intricacies of how your mobile phone works? No, that's what I was going to say. still use it, right? Yep. So, you don't have to understand how it works. There's enough evidence that we are connected beyond time and space. There is enough evidence for that that suggests that that may be true. fast, if somebody were to tell me, "Hey, you don't understand the way your mobile phone works, right?" Yeah, correct. "But, you still use it." Correct. But, if somebody's telling me, "Hey, all you have to do is think, I hope my wife calls me, and then she'll call me." That's where I'm like, uh, I think it's better for me to send her a text and say, "Call me." saying that. What we are saying So, but no, I never said that. So, you're putting words in my mouth. What I said is, and I encourage you to try it, if you think beautiful, loving thoughts about your wife, Lisa, there is a subtle shift, a subtle shift in her biology and in her emotional states because you are connected. That's all I'm saying. And I'm saying and whe- and whether that is true or not, it's a beautiful idea because why shouldn't you think beautiful thoughts about the people you love? Agreed. It's a fascinating idea, but remember, I go back to what is going to allow me to better predict the outcome of my behavior. So, that will certainly help me. I don't know that it will help her, but I remain curious. So, going back, do you have a hypothesis around why the universe would be constructed in a way where there is this I don't know what word you would use, truth, right answer, whatever that's being broadcast. Why would that be better than say just being born with that information already inside of you? Well, I think if we were born with all the information we need inside of us, what would be the point of discovery? What would be the point of innovation? We're not going to have all of this information in front of us. So, I have a hypothesis about how things work. I call it a hypothesis for a reason because I don't know. I've no idea if this will end up panning out, but in my quest to be able to predict the outcome of my behaviors, I need a working idea. Right. So, my working idea right now is that things are completely, blindly constructed from the ground up from an evolutionary perspective, meaning the idea, Richard Dawkins' idea of the blind watchmaker. Mhm. So, you get a watch, it seems so incredibly complex. How could this ever have been created if it wasn't created specifically to tell time? Or the example that's often used, how could an eye have ever been created if it wasn't designed to see? Right. And so, my thing is that the idea of a truth being broadcast and we have to learn to relax so that we can receive something from the outside. That breaks my entire model of the world. So, now I'm trying to to build a new model. Mhm. I need to understand how all the pieces connect. So, that's what I'm trying to get to. You have to understand how the pieces connect, but you also have to understand what your world views are. Because if you have a world view that is resistant to this model, you're not going to be able to see it. Ken Wilber talks about this in terms of world views. People across the world fall into different buckets of world views. You have the militaristic world view, like people of North Korea. You have the religious worldview, like people of evangelical states or a country like Iran. You have the spiritual worldview that you see in Burning Man. You have the rational worldview of of Wall Street. The problem is all of these worldviews think they are 100% correct and they look at the other worldviews in Ken Wilber's words as goofy. And thus immediately you shut down. There is some truth in all of these worldviews. What you want is an integrated or integral worldview where you can understand where all of these views come from, their historical narratives, and what is truth and what is untruth. That's the most important thing. So really we're talking about moving to, in terms of worldviews, the purple or the integral level of the consciousness spectrum. Why purple? That's just the color. So Ken Wilber uses a color code to define it. You don't want to say level one, level two, level three because that implies that one is higher than the other. Right? When you go with colors, colors do not dominate each other. You don't have a domina- a dominating hierarchy. It's very interesting. Okay. So you got to you can study all of the science, but if your worldview is locked in one area and you haven't moved on to integral me. So What happens is that it becomes harder. So I I am so obsessed with what is useful. I'm certainly not dogmatic in my thinking. Right. But I only bring things into my worldview if I can see how the pieces connect and try them out and use them. Right? So for instance the example I've used very often is when we were first introduced to Newtonian physics, it was like, "Oh my god, this lets you predict how planets moved it 100% it's accurate." Then we get Einstein's relativity, then general relativity or sorry, general relativity then special, I can't remember which one came first, but both layering on. And so we realized, "Oh my god, Newtonian physics wasn't actually as right." And by getting the further information around relativity, now we're able to do things like GPS and all of the incredible things, nuclear power and all of that. So, the more right you can be, it it really is world-changing. So, I'm looking for that next breakthrough. I would love for this to be the next breakthrough. I'm just trying to figure out I don't think it's an unwillingness or a stubbornness for me to figure this out. I just need to understand how these pieces connect. Setting that aside, I'm not sure we're going to get much further with that and I don't want to end up in like a whole debate about truth and then it just spirals into madness, but that's utterly fascinating. But I'm But I'm But I'm loving this discussion because it's so different from any other interviews I've had on this book. Well, to be clear, we we haven't even gotten to the book yet. Like we will get I don't want people to think that anything that we've talked about so far, what I've been trying to explore is this idea that something's coming from the outside. Okay. Setting that aside, how did you come down to the six things in the six-phase protocol? Why not seven? Why not four? So, it's not about this way. I was a former Silicon Valley exact. I discovered meditation and it completely changed the course of my career. I was in Silicon Valley during a really horrible time, 2001. The dot-com bubble burst and then September 11th hit. I lost my job. I lost all my money. I lost the money I'd borrowed from my father to start my company. I was sleeping on a friend's couch and I remember I was so broke I couldn't even fix the brakes on my car and I crashed into a minivan um carrying two kids, right? Unfortunately, nothing happened, but I was it was a horrible time. I had to pay for all of that and as a result, I couldn't even afford rent. So, it was during this time that I stumbled upon meditation. I was Googling online for answers. I was trying to figure out why my life sucks so bad. And that practice of meditation that I learned completely shifted me. I had a job at that point, really low level. In 4 months, I went from low level entry level to vice president of sales because I was just so good at my job as I started bringing in these protocols that I was learning from meditation. Protocols such as being able to be really peaceful and zen. It's called equanimity during stress so you can focus better. Being able to increase your levels of creativity so you have better ideation. Being able to visualize your goals and then move towards them. And so I stayed with the company for 18 more months and then I was thinking, man, this stuff all the stuff I learned at my electrical engineering and computer science degree from the University of Michigan, which I paid maybe a quarter million dollars for in that time's money, was nowhere as useful as this weekend meditation class. So I decided to quit and become a meditation instructor. So I did that for 5 years. During that time I built Mindvalley. Mindvalley became a massive company with about 100 million in revenue, valuation of a billion uh with no VC funding, no investors, no bank loans. And I attribute it to this practice of meditation, being able to go within. Building up Mindvalley, there were at least three times I almost lost it all. But being able to go within, being able to to train your brain to even go through that level of chaos helped me as an entrepreneur. And so 10 years ago at this point I'd interviewed, you know, hundreds of people. Today I've interviewed thousands of people across all Mindvalley programs, all Mindvalley podcasts and platforms. And I wanted to build a personal growth practice for myself that I would have the discipline to do every morning. And I wanted something that I could do in 15 minutes cuz I'm busy, we're busy, we're all busy, that would give me the maximum benefit in the tiniest, teeniest amount of time. And that was the six phase. There was six practices that I found. Now, these are not traditional meditation. So, if you're a hardcore meditation purist, this book will probably piss you off, right? But these are six practices. They are called psycho-spiritual transcendent techniques. Psycho because many of them are rooted in psychology, spirituality because many of them do have a spiritual ideology to it as well. Not religious spirituality, again, big difference. Define the difference for me. We'll come to that. And then transcendent because you're going within. You're disconnecting from the outside world. You're going within and everything is running in your head. Okay, now these six practices have been proven by science to create a massive positive impact in your life. Um the first one has to do with compassion. The second one have to it has to do with happiness. The third has to do with forgiveness. Now, these three constitute your emotions in the present. But in today's world, it's not just enough to be blissful in the present. We got to go out there. We We want to build companies. We want to change the world. We want to create revolutions. So, the next four phases, four, five, and six are about that. They're about creating. They're about action. Phase four is about seeing a goal of yours that's 3 years out. And and getting yourself energized for that goal. Phase five is about organizing and commanding the perfect, most productive day for yourself, all in your mind. And phase six is where you connect this with with whatever is your spiritual or religious belief or your personal belief, you ask for a blessing. And that's it. That's the six phase. Now, it got picked up by um by elite athletes. Uh Tony Gonzalez, who's one of the top NFL um uh players, um was tre- I trained them on this. He spoke about this in multiple publications. Reggie Jackson of the LA Clippers has spoken about this. Great One of the craziest stories, Bianca Andreescu, she attended a class on the six phase and at 19 she started at 16 she started visualizing herself beating Serena Williams at the US Open at 19, September 2019, Bianca was 19 years old, she beat Serena Williams, won the US Open. When they asked her, "How did you do it?" She said, "Where's my phone? Where's my phone?" And then she pulled out my book, my first book which talked about the six phase. She was a graduate of one of my classes and she tweeted about it. So um she credited it in part partially with helping her win the US Open. And then rockstars and celebrities started talking about it. Gerard Butler, the actor, said, "If everybody did this, the world would be a more peaceful, compassionate place." Miguel, the R&B star, who who did the song Remember the Forget, one of my favorite songs, he gave an article in Billboard magazine and he spoke about doing the six phase with his entourage before his concerts, before going on stage. Now these people do it because when you're when you're filming a movie, when you're getting on stage, when you're in a court, you instantly feel that difference. But it also works for entrepreneurs. So many entrepreneurs who have built massive companies do this and credit this with giving them the fortitude, the drive, the power, the mental well-being to do what they do because entrepreneurs are basically athletes building a product. Yeah, I love that. It's one thing I've talked about with business is it's the sport that you can play forever. So you don't have to worry about your body giving out, which is wonderful. Uh like I said at the beginning the the six phase meditation method I think is really fantastic. It really would make the world a far better place. It will certainly impact people. Um there are aspects of this that I think are worth really diving into. So one, the idea of gratitude. Why why is that the place to start? Why is it so impactful? Why so many people talk about this? I can vouch for it in my own life, but what what's the juice behind gratitude? So so firstly, we start with compassion. Gratitude is phase two. Okay? Now let's talk about let's jump into phase two and talk about gratitude. So, gratitude, according to science, is the human characteristic most widely associated with well-being. That means if there's one quality that you can adopt that is proven scientifically to produce overall well-being, it's this. It's gratitude. Do we know why? There are different theories, but but here's what we know. We know that when you can elevate your levels of happiness, you perform better at work. Your health improves. Your peace of mind improve. You sleep better. Just just the work benefits are really startling. Shawn Achor of Harvard University wrote a book called The Happiness Advantage, and this book is is is really good. He speaks about how studies on on gratitude and happiness show that when we're happy, we do so much better at everything. Doctors are 19% better at diagnosis. Salespeople are 55% better at closing sales. And then there's the whole study of emotions. The study specifically they measure your emotional states using a concept called PQ, or positivity quotient. So, PQ is your ratio of good thoughts to overall thoughts, right? The more positive you are, the higher your PQ. Now, here's the crazy thing. Shirzad Chamine, who wrote the book PQ, he cites a study that shows that the the only thing that predicts the behavior of teams, that correlates with high productivity on teams, is not the leader. It's not the strategy. It's not the amount of of bagels you serve during a team meeting. It is PQ, the overall feeling of the people on that team. And so, we are seeing that happiness doesn't just make us feel good. It's rocket fuel for productivity. It's rocket fuel for people like you and me that want to go out and do big things in the world. No doubt. I when I think about one of the the mindset that an entrepreneur has to have is both optimistic and accurate basically. So, you need a vision of the world that is true and optimistic. I would say that you need to be optimistic because if you're not, then you're just not going to take action. Do you think that there's something else going on or is it just that that it allows you the belief that like, "Hey, this might actually work." and therefore you move forward? So, I think that if we think about ourselves purely from a biological perspective, right? Our brains perform better when the right chemicals are being released. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. The practice of gratitude releases the right chemicals. You're building your business based on the quality of your brain. If your brain is in a healthy state, you're better able to get access into states of focus, states of flow, states of creativity, states of um wait states of cognition where your processing speed is is better. And gratitude is one of those ways to optimize your thinking, optimize your brain. Ultimately, you're building your business with your brain and I think that's why it works. That's why so many studies show that we do our work best when we are happiest. Talk to me about visualization. You go into a lot of detail in the book. I particularly liked your story about your Taekwondo competition. Uh be careful what you visualize. Um why is visualization important and how do we do it well? I think I think why it's important. So, visualization is important if you do it at a particular brain wave state. So, if you're visualizing at the waking state, which is beta. Now, this is measured through a device called an EEG. It means an electroencephalograph. It means your brain is beating at around uh 14 to 21 cycles per second. I don't know if it's effective. The studies that show it's effective show that it works when you're doing it at a state. And that's why you do it when you meditate. Right? So, visualization does two things. One, it actually effects your biology. And two, it actually effects your performance. So again, let's talk about studies. There have been numerous studies that show that visualizing yourself getting better, healing, can actually help increase your your rate of healing. And then, there's performance. There were studies on basketball players. Alan Richardson, I believe he's a psychologist in in in Australia. He found that visualizing yourself shooting hoops and seeing it land in the basket is almost as effective as actually practicing in the course. Crazy. Uh practicing in the court produced a 25% uh increase in performance. Visualization alone, 24% increase in performance. Do you have to visualize like cuz I know Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about the same thing with lifting and he's like, you've got to imagine your growing in the mountains and the the contraction. If you're practicing the basketball one, do they have to like feel it, feel the emotion, feel the ball release? this is what optimizes it. You feel the emotion, you feel the elation every time you hit that hoop. So the feelings are important. to feel the physicality or just the elation? The more you can feel, the better. So in fact, I believe it's all about feeling. Right? Because it's not about what you see. Someone who was born blind can still practice this. It's about what you feel. So let's say you want you want to build your business. Your business is at 1 million in revenue. You want to get it up to 10 million in revenue. You visualize that. You visualize how would you dress? How would you feel? What would your office look like? How would you treat people? What would your day go like? And if and I'm not saying you're creating magic that's making this happen. I'm saying you're conditioning your brain to believe I can do this. And you're conditioning yourself to take on the right feelings, the right behaviors that then show up in your life. The more you take on these behaviors, the more you start believing something is possible, that's going to give you the impetus to actually get there. I took my business to 100 million revenue, about a billion in valuation. You've done the same thing. I bet you you never stop dreaming of the next level and the next level and the next level. And I did the same. And so to me, visualization was always part of my daily practice. No matter where I was in business, I always visualized the next level. It's interesting. You're giving me a lot of credit. Thank you. It's very kind. I don't think I was as systematic as I would advise other people to be. I think that the way that you walk people through it is far better than what I actually did. Um I was really just focused on what do I need to learn? What do I have to get better at? But I visualization feels like an underutilized thing for me. Because every time I do it, so I in Impact Theory University, I'm always telling people, you should be surprised by failure. Don't rehearse it. Now that's me giving me the advice that I needed because I would sit there and unintentionally visualize things going wrong so that I could be prepared to like, how do I extricate myself from this, especially because uh for a long time I suffered from just debilitating anxiety. My anxiety was largely diet related, so once I cleaned that up, it went away, but I didn't know that at the time. So as I would to your point about what you're feeling when you're visualizing, it matters a lot, what I would be feeling when I was visualizing a meeting or whatever is anxiety because I was feeling it at the time. I had generalized anxiety. So no matter what I was visualizing, I felt anxious while I was doing it. And so I would get this feeling of dread coming into like whatever this thing was going to be. And when I tried to use visualization, I couldn't conjure the right images, I couldn't get the right feeling. So I was like, ah God, I don't I don't know that I want to use this. Now what I did find worked better, although now I I if I were to use your method of really trying to embody the feeling it would work a lot better. But I would describe it either in written words or I would do like an internal actual monologue where instead of trying to conjure the images, I would say the words. I would say things in my mind, "You walk into the room. Everybody's stoked that you're there. You sit down powerfully." So even though I wasn't feeling it as much as I wanted to be, I was painting a psychotically clear image. Because it's not about the visualization, right? Remember the the the example of the blind person, the person born blind. Does that mean that visualization doesn't work for them? No, it's about the feeling. Whether you use words or you use visuals, it's about the feeling that it's generating. Yes, it's interesting when I think about the brain and how it is a caloric hog. Then you have an impulse from an evolutionary perspective to be lazy effectively. And then so you your brain myelinates, right? So okay, we're going to think this a lot, we're going to feel this a lot, then I'm going to myelinate these neurons together. So neurons that fire together wire together, what they're talking about is that myelination process so that it's easier to think and feel that thing, whatever you do repeatedly. And I feel like that's a big part of why visualization is going to work. One, you can interrupt your negative feelings as you are dreading this thing by forcing yourself to imagine it going well, to think about all the things you would need to do for it to go right. And then also, if you do that enough, your brain is going to be like, "Oh, I guess this feeling of feeling good, feeling accomplished, like it's going to work, I'm going to be doing this a lot, so I better make this easier to do." And so now you're in the right zone. Walk people through though what happened to you at the Taekwondo tournament cuz it's right, right, right, right. Um I was talking about how when I was 17 years old, well, before before So my first ever trip to the United States, I came here as a martial artist to compete at the US Open uh Taekwondo championships. Just like Bianca Andreescu saw herself winning the US Open, when I was 17 years old, I visualized myself being an international martial arts fighter. And um the story in that book the story in that book there are two parts to the story. So, first I got to tell the preface. Before I even had the balls to visualize myself being an international martial arts fighter competing at the US Open in Colorado Springs in 1993, I had to see some evidence that visualization worked. Now, when I was growing up as a teenager, I had really really really bad skin disease. So, my face was covered in acne and it really affected my self-confidence. Um I remember growing up I didn't have friends. I considered myself ugly. I never went out on a date with a girl, even though I had many crushes, until I was maybe 22. Wow. I had very little self-confidence in terms of who I was as a person because of my skin. Now, when I was 17, I read in a book on visualization that the skin is the organ that science shows is most susceptible to the human mind. And so, armed with this, I started practicing creative visualization. Now, the model I used came from Jose Silva. Um Jose Silva who founded the Silva method, which as I said, uh to be fully transparent, I later acquired the rights to that and that's now on Mindvalley, okay? But what he said was you're visualizing your skin getting better in this a particular modality and you're doing it at a relaxed level of mind, the alpha brainwave frequency, three times a day. Each visualization session takes 3 minutes. So, I had 5 years of bad skin. It started at 13. Now, I was 17 years old, 5 years of bad skin, and I did this Silva methodology. Uh this is the same imagery therapy I spoke about earlier that Dr. O'Connell Simonton tested. In 5 weeks, my skin healed. So, again, the protocol was 3 minutes a day, three times a day, so 9 minutes total. In 5 weeks my skin healed. My pimples disappeared. Armed with that, I was like, "Wow, this stuff is awesome. What else can I do?" So, the next thing was improving sporting performance. My father had enrolled me in Taekwondo classes to build up my confidence cuz I honestly didn't really have that much. And I decided I want to take this to the next level. I want to get a second-degree black belt, which I did, and then I want to compete at the US Open. But unlike many other athletes, I was obsessed with seeing with just being at the US Open and seeing America. I didn't actually see myself winning a medal, which was stupid, stupid, stupid. So, I show up at the US Open in Colorado Springs. I got that far. I show up for the championships and I'm wearing these thick glasses. I was that much of a nerd. You know those giant glasses from the late '90s, like the lenses go all the way down, you can clean your lenses by licking them. So, I show up with these giant glasses. My power is -700 short-sighted, so the glasses are this thick, and these are sports glasses. In Malaysia you can fight with these glasses. In the USA, apparently not. I get in the ring and the referee blows a whistle and he's like, "Yo, kid, you can't wear those glasses here." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" And he goes, "I don't care if you can do this in your country. This is in America. Your glasses break, a piece of glass enters your eye, you sue us all for 10 million dollars. Take those glasses off." So, I'm like, "But I can't see without these glasses." Remember, this was 1993, contact lens technology wasn't really developed yet, right? He's like, "I don't care. Take those glasses off." So, I take off my glasses and I'm freaking blind. And I'm facing Glenn Ryback, the Dutch national champion. And if you know anything about Dutch people, they are crazy tall, and Taekwondo is a kicking sport. So, the taller and skinnier you are, the more an advantage you have. Yeah. Within within 10 seconds I feel a hit to my head and I'm on the ground. I get back up. I'm like, "Where the is this guy?" I I was ready ready to go for him if I could actually see him. 36 seconds into it, the second kick, I'm on the floor again. And at this point my referee knows that I'm going to be killed if he doesn't get me out. He tosses in the towel. I am out. I was officially the fastest knockout at the 1993 US Open Taekwondo Championships in Colorado Springs. I ended up in hospital. Jesus. Yeah. So, I I wish I'd seen myself actually walk out of the ring with a medal. I saw myself walk in the ring, which I did, walk in the ring proud, feeling all badass. Um I wish I'd seen myself actually walk out of the ring rather than walk out of the Colorado Springs Medical Center. Yeah, that's hilarious. Visualization is such a big deal, especially for kids, being able to see yourself getting good at something. As a kid, I was really uh not even just as a kid, into my 20s, maybe even the beginning of my 30s, I really despised competition. And I would have told Oh man, people that are competitive, what [ __ ] But the reality was I was just afraid that I couldn't win. And so, the idea being competitive, and it wasn't conscious, I really did think it. I really did think that oh, competitiveness is just it's [ __ ] But then as I started to realize, oh wait, I can actually get better at things that I suck at, all of the sudden and then I was like, whoa, I kind of want to compete. Like I want to put myself out there. I got really sad that I didn't take sports seriously because I never had that camaraderie that the um team sports vibe that you get out. Every sport I did, I did solo because I thought, well, if I fail, at least I only take myself down. And once I realized, oh, you can actually get better at things, then I was like, oh man, that would have been a lot of fun to really contribute to a team, to be part of something, to push myself. It's part of why I like video games now, to be competitive, cuz I only play I play one game, but it's you get to be a team. So, my wife, my sister, and I play as a fire team. And I love the idea that you can push yourself, you can get better, improve, and then like really put it out there and compete. But alas, I did not have visualization or meditation or any of this stuff. Which speaking of which, this is a big push for you guys at Mindvalley. What is missing in education today? What should kids be taught that had I or anybody else been taught at that age would make our lives better? So, you want the easy answer or the difficult answer? I actually want the difficult one. Give me like the full mamajama. So, so, so, we actually look at life from uh the Mindvalley model is to look at life from 12 different dimensions. Um and we just uh acquired a company called Lifebook. We acquired uh um a significant stake in the company. By the way, brother, what you've done with the business is incredible, man. Congratulations. It's amazing. we're pretty excited. So, what we're trying to do with the education model is this. You know, so many of us were trained based on official government-sanctioned curriculums. And that isn't enough in the world today. So, we start with getting you through the Lifebook approach really clear on your goals, really clear on your vision. When you take Lifebook by Mindvalley, you end up with a 100-page book. Imagine a 100-page book with absolute clarity in the life you want to create in all 12 of the different dimensions of your life that we look at. For each of these dimension, you understand your beliefs. What do I believe about love? What do I believe about my body? You understand your why. Why do you want to get healthy? Why do you want to be a father? You understand your vision. What does a family look like to you? What does a business look like to you in intricate detail? And And you develop your strategy. How do you get there? Now once you have this as a base, our AI analyzes this. And as our AI analyzes this, we start creating a custom education for you. We have 61 of the world's greatest teachers in everything from building a business to leadership to meditation to um to developing a monk-like brain to speed reading, that's Jim Kwik. So many of these teachers you've had on the show to parenting, Dr. Shefali, to self-esteem, Marisa Peer. And all of this education is customized for you. We're building an education that's customized to your vision of who you want to be, not some official curriculum. But we're going to go further. The next thing we're going to do is we're building a private social network so we can now connect you to the right people wherever in the world you're traveling to. You show up in Berlin, we'll be able to say, "Okay, Tom, these are five people you need to meet in Berlin because these people can help you with your vision. They've already figured out some aspects of this vision." Or these are people that you can help. And the third thing that we're going to do is supplementation cuz the food we take today isn't healthy enough. So we're developing we're working with some incredible scientists to develop supplement lines that can put you in the right state to move towards your vision, whether it is health and wellness, brain optimization, or maybe focus, maybe creativity, maybe put you in a more loving state so your your dates and your relationships are are juicier. So these three things are really important and this is what we're working on. Now we are we are fairly complete with the first part, which is the education. The social network, the supplements, all of that is coming in the next 2 years. What are the 12 areas that you have broken this down into? So so we won't have time to go into all of the area, but I'll give you a couple. School tells you pretty much prepares you for your career. It's designed to get you a job. I believe in the 1920s, there's a there's a legend. We don't know if it's true that Calvin Coolidge said that said this, "The purpose of education is to create cogs in the wheels of of industry." And that's a pretty lousy way to define education, right? So, we look at this. We look at areas such as your physical body, your intellectual capacity, how fast are you learning, how fast are you growing, your emotional states. What are your persistent emotions that you experience from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. We also look at areas that relate to your relationship with other people, your social life. Who are your friends? What do you do with your friends? We don't set goals for our social life, but it's important. Goals for your Well, how often are you connected to other inspiring individuals that can elevate you? How do you serve your friends? Who are the people that you are closest to? All of these matter. I'm sure you've heard that Jim Rohn Well, we are the sum of the people we are closest to. Then we look at goals for your relationship life. You look at goals for your parenting life. And then you look at goals for what you're trying to create. So, some of the other categories are money, your career, uh we look at your life vision, which is your legacy, what you want to leave to the planet when you die. So, there are 12 categories and in each of these categories, you are going really really really deep within the four questions. It's really interesting, man. That's It is fascinating to watch education change before our very eyes. I've heard you say that look, if you can get an education for free, go for it. Amazing. Um but if not, you're probably better off with something like Mindvalley. Where do you think believe I firmly believe that the quality of your life will be better, significantly better, if you are a Mindvalley member than if you have a university degree from 98% of the universities in the world. It's a bold statement, but makes sense. One would think you'd build that which you really want to see in the world. Do you guys ever plan to get into hard skills like engineering or things like that or not your specialty? Think it's being done well elsewhere? No, the reason for that is because they are they are great companies that do that. If you want to learn programming, you know, you go to Pluralsight. They are great digital academies if you want to learn to be a marketer. But the fact is that is not what makes us. I've been a programmer, I've been a writer, I've been a marketer. These were all just phases of my life. I'd go deep into one of these when I want to. What Mindvalley is focused on are life skills that are important for the entirety of your life. No matter what age you are, being able to understand parenting, conscious parenting, right? Now, teacher for that is Shefali Sabari, is going to be important. Even if you're a grandparent, you want to be good to your grandkids. You're going to have an you might have nephews or nieces. Being able to understand your body is important no matter what phase of your life you're in. So, we look at the skills which are truly important. I believe that my life would have been significantly richer if I'd spent time understanding my body to the degree which I would have I I'd I'd spent even a semester at university learning computer engineering. No doubt. If you'd met me when I was 25, what would you have told me about parenting? Should I do it? I would say it's up to you. Right? I think in today's world, I don't think everybody needs to have kids. I think overpopulation is is is a crisis. Um but I know from my perspective as a father, parenting is probably the most rewarding thing you can experience. Parent parenting and love to be and both of them are very widely connected. Being madly in love with someone and having that beautiful life together and having kids. I think these are two things that provide us so much fulfillment. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm I'm sort of the same Well, I'm not sort of the same. I am the same. I am very grateful that people have kids. I think somebody has to do it. Uh but for me Right. Every time The only real way to say it is I really want to have kids, but I really want to not have kids more just a little bit more Right. than I want to have kids. So, it's tough. It is uh I think it's ready-made fulfillment. So, if somebody were to ask me, I would say like you should really think long and hard before you don't have kids. I think most people the default answer is probably the right answer, which is to have kids. Do it well. Do it consciously. Like be aware of what you're doing, but that feels like for the most people it's going to give them that the deepest sense of fulfillment is I think the the right word. Nature's sort of in-baked thing. But going back to um overpopulation, what do you What do you think about uh people like Elon Musk who are more worried about the flip side? Mhm. So, I I love Elon. Uh Elon's mom, May Musk, is one of our teachers on Mindvalley. Yeah, she teaches a program on for for women over 40 on going out there and conquering the world. So, I'm a big big big fan of the Musk family. Absolutely huge fans of the Musk family. Um but I don't know if I agree with Elon that our biggest crisis right now is is that humanity might be wiped out by an asteroid. I believe our biggest crisis could well be climate change. And I appreciate Elon for what he's doing with Tesla because he's tackling two two very different things. Right? I don't know if overpopulation is our biggest problem right now. So, I don't know if underpopulation is our biggest problem right now. Got you. Yeah, that to me I think is um I haven't looked into it closely enough to have a really strong opinion, but it is very disconcerting like when you look at what's going on in Japan and you see like we are getting in certain countries for sure were not at replacement levels. We've been well under Japan's been well under for more than a decade. I think the US now has been in non-replacement levels. So it'll be interesting to see how people respond to that. It's pretty fascinating, man. The world is so complex and getting into things like um reading, I'm sure you've read Noah Yuval Harari's book. There have been a few books that I've read recently about how like how things have come to be and the level of complexity and the way that things bump into each other and evolve into the next thing. Have you read Ray Dalio's Principles for Dealing with a Changing World Order? Oh, dude, you're going to love it. It's I mean it's terrifying. It's very unnerving. I had to stop reading it at night cuz it was like freaking me out a bit, but it's actually influenced my decision-making. And it's really got me thinking about uh this idea. So his core thesis is basically this. There are only so many personality types and because of that human nature is what it is and so we bump into each other in the same ways over and over and over and that's why history rhymes. And because there are only so many different personality types and there are only so many different situations like you can actually chart them out. And so he plots out the six phases that any empire goes through. And basically that he's looked at I forget he spent some ungodly amount of like over a hundred million dollars if I'm not mistaken researching the last I think he went in like the last two thousand years but with a high focus on the last five hundred years and chronicled every empire as it rose and fell and then charting where the US is the current leader of the the the current world leader that there the sixth phase is basically total societal collapse and he puts America somewhere in phase five which is like the decline. And so I'm like a guy that makes all of his money off of understanding macro trends on a global level who spent over a hundred million dollars researching all of these different cycles is like OPS maybe we should really stop and be thoughtful about where things are going. Yeah, it's interesting because I never like I was just wanted to talk mindset like that was just actually ironically all I ever planned to talk about was business but to explain to people how to actually start a business I had to talk about mindset. And now it's like yeah, I might have to start looking more broadly and really thinking about in fact you talked about this I don't know if it was in the book I've read basically everything you've ever written or one of your interviews where you talk you quoted somebody I think if we all contribute our grain of sand. Like you don't have to want to tackle the whole world. Give me that quote. I wish I could remember it. Basically something like don't don't try to don't try to save the world just contribute your own positive grain of sand. You don't I think the quote was you don't have to save the world just don't [ __ ] it up for the next generation. Also a very powerful way to say it. So as you build out this incredible machine designed to help people not [ __ ] up the next generation. Um what are like some of the the things that have been most life-changing for you? So for me most life-changing practices probably have been there have been so many cuz I study everything. In fact starting tomorrow I go on two different retreats just to learn about being human right? So I'm constantly discovering things. But some of the things that have been incredible for me number one has been um this is in no particular order meditation for sure. The Silva method the six phase, both of those fall under meditation. Number two, high intensity interval training, strength training. Uh we have a program in Mindvalley called 10X and that has completely changed my body. Um I've been able to to just shift the way I look, shift my energy levels, shift my cognition just through strength training. amount of time, right? Part of that's optimized. What are you guys doing to optimize? How are you able to get results in a short amount of time? Well, let me let me finish the five first and then we can dive deeper. And then WildFit, so WildFit is a nutrition program. I realized how badly I was eating and uh I transformed my eating and that also transformed my health. WildFit is not owned by Mindvalley, but we have an exclusive license to publish it. Lifebook, Lifebook is that program I told you about. We just took uh um a significant stake in the company. Lifebook is where you create such clarity on your life that you have a 100-page book on your entire life. And then the the fifth one is the um the concept of the Mindvalley Quest, uh which is dedicating 20 minutes a day to learning something. And so on Mindvalley you pick a topic, so you want to pick Conscious Parenting by Dr. Shefali, you want to pick Improving Your Memory by Jim Kwik, or you want to pick maybe, you know, Leadership with Keith Ferrazzi. 20 minutes a day for 30 days, you go deep into that topic and we layer on behaviors, habits, routines so that you evolve into that person. So these five things have probably have a massive outsized impact on my life. Talk to me about the diet and exercise stuff. Yeah. So let's start with the the earlier question. How do you guys What do you do in the program that optimizes for results in a short amount of time? So uh with 10X, um basically they are six exercises you do. And these six exercises give you the maximum maximum reach over your body. They cover about 85 to 90% of all the major muscle groups in your body. Okay, so that's called 10X alpha. Now, what we are measuring there in terms of health is something called um power to weight ratio. Power to weight ratio. So, based on your weight in a in a in a particular slice of time, how much power can you output? Okay, so if you optimize for power to weight ratio, you find that an elite uh athlete so so for the everything is in the metric system. Um so, it's kilograms. So, it's kilograms over minutes in the gym. If Sorry, it's it's total kilograms lifted and the number of times you've lifted these kilograms over minutes in the gym over your body weight. So, an elite athlete would have a power to weight ratio in in in around the 10s. Um the average person would be maybe two to three to four. So, um if you are my age, if you're over 40, if you're above eight, that's really really really So, you're optimizing for that. How much power can your body generate in a slice of time? So, the 10X alpha routine uh so, it going to depends on how much time you have. If you can only go to the gym once a week, the alpha routine takes precisely 12 minutes. So, you literally get to the gym and then there are six exercises that you do. Two are for the leg, two are push exercises, two are pull exercises. So, the leg exercises might be calves and they might be a leg press. The push exercise might be chest press and the shoulder press. The pull exercise might be a lat pull down and then a row. Okay, these cover 85 to 90% of the muscles in your body. But, you're doing it in a specific way and that specific way is about So, let's say you're doing a chest press. It's 2 seconds push and then it's 3 seconds. It's it's 3 seconds on the reverse. Why? Because studies show that on the on the reverse, it's about a 30% uh greater muscle growth. So you're optimizing for muscle growth. It's done with a really high weight. So about 90% of what you can do as your one rep maximum. And it's done in 60 seconds. You open up the Mindvalley app, you listen to a particular metronome sound. tick tick tick tick tick. That's one rep. So it's about 5 seconds. So you do 12 reps in about 60 seconds without resting. You go to the next machine. Without resting, you go to the next machine. And so, assuming it takes you about a minute to set up the machine and sit down, the entire thing takes 12 minutes. But you're going maximum weight. It is freaking painful. But we teach a philosophy called chase the pain. Understanding that that pain that pain means you're doing it. That pain So especially in the last reps, if you can feel that pain, that's when you're creating the greatest muscle stimulation. And so, um It's it's a phenomenal routine. So I try to go to the gym two to three times a week. But still it's about 12 minutes each time. Not bad. It's fast. Yeah. What have you changed in your diet? So in the diet, I followed the protocol called WildFit. So WildFit is a really really really interesting diet routine. So I did it and I went from This was 2016 when I did it. And I used to be chubby. I used to have about be 22% body fat. If you look at me and older episodes of Impact Theory, I kind of look different. I went from 22% body fat to about 13 to 14% body fat, which is what I am right now. Okay, that's considered pretty good for a man over 40. Um and um WildFit is 90 days. And you trick your body into giving up all the bad conditioned behavior. You understand where hunger comes from. You understand emotional eating. You understand how your love for your mother may be making you eat certain things that you shouldn't be eating. And you stop the cravings. So, for example, before WildFit, I would have two Starbucks lattes a day. Oh. A day. Two Starbucks lattes. And um I didn't even really think that was bad for me. Cuz uh I think it's about 250 calories per latte. Now, I only drink black coffee. If I even take a latte, it just doesn't feel right. Mhm. Now, it doesn't mean you never eat ice cream or you never eat pizza. What? Latte latte would have milk, yeah. It just means that you don't crave it. If If there's an office party and they're serving pizza, you don't feel like you need to eat it. You understand all of the social conditioning that's taking place causing you to to feel like you need to grab that slice. From the social pressure to the conditioning that you get from watching a Pizza Hut ad on television. And as a result, people go through a transformation. Now, Eric Edmeades, the creator of WildFit, also created a concept called BCD, behavioral change dynamics. And he's actually changing your behavior. He's a former Tony Robbins So, he's applying a little bit of NLP there. But in 90 days, people see a print phenomenal transformation. So, after I did it, I put a hundred of my employees on it. And the record weight loss was 91 lbs. And then we had two employees who lost 51 lbs and all of this in 3 months. What are if you had to boil it down? So, carnivore diet, eat only meat. Paleo, uh eat only things found in nature. WildFit It's WildFit is not really a diet. And that's the thing, diets don't really work. They they the the failure rate on diets is astonishing. It's over 90% because diets are often based on willpower. Mhm. And willpower is tough. It's tough to do things just based on willpower. WildFit is like a reset of your brain. You just show up differently. You start eating differently. And Eric is such a genius as a trainer. Like this this dude is incredible. When I put him on stage at Mindvalley, he just spoke at Mindvalley University. We had maybe 200 trainers. He got a score of 4.99. Highest rated speaker. Like and this is out of a thousand people attending. Wow. 4.99, right? This guy is masterful. I think that's why Tony Robbins used to put him on a stage. And so Eric knows how to flip the switches in your brain, completely mesmerize you to the point where you think about your body and your food in a different way. But it's not just for losing weight. People see hair grow back. People see skin improve. My skin improved so much on Wildfit. I was having hair loss, that stopped. My energy levels changed. I need to eat a Mars bar at the office at 5:00 p.m. as an afternoon snack to keep my energy up. I did not realize that I was just, you know, I was giving myself a sugar spike and I was so so hooked on sugar. I needed sugar to fuel my productivity. Now when you do Wildfit, he pulls your internal engine away from sugar, boom, all the way to the fat. And your body is now trained to burn fat rather than sugar. Yeah, I was going to ask like what that core constituency is. So he's getting you off of fat. Sounds like he's pulling you away from expert. I've I've been through it. Mindvalley is the exclusive publisher of it. I'm not the expert. You should have Eric on this show. But Wildfit is formidable. Very very intriguing, dude. What you built is incredible. The book is amazing. Where can people follow you? So you can follow me on Instagram @vision. @v i s h e n. I love it, brother. Thanks for coming. Everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. Awesome. If we're not a deep narcissist, we have that thermostat where things start hurting us a little bit and we bring ourselves back up through the self-esteem mechanism so we don't get too depressed and too down. There's an element of unreality to that, but it's very valuable and I would never ever ever want to burst that.