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 I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts.
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I think there is great value, however, to introducing.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 Welcome to this special masterclass.
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We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today.
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It's going to be powerful.
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So let's go ahead and dive in.
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 Say I feel cold and ice, right?
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I'm in ice, it's 30 degrees.
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Can I control my mind to say, you know what, this is actually a hot tub and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now?
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Or is it too much physiological?
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 barriers to break through that?
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To some extent you can.
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So I think the question that you're asking is a very important one.
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It's actually the question, which is, to what extent does our subjective narrative, the story we tell ourselves, actually mean something for the body?
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And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative?
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 So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now.
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And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work.
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But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile.
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Well, if that worked,
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 We would have a lot less depression than we see out there.
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Now that does not mean... Most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well.
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When you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?
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The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that
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 the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue.
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So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed, we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when we're feeling good, we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures, all true.
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But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm gonna completely shift the mind.
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That's a first step.
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Think about like two interlocking gears.
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It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going.
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So how do you get it to dance together?
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Exactly, so subjective,
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 There is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body.
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To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold?
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So a couple things that are important.
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First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are.
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Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time.
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They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection.
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 But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced.
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For instance, right now I can say, okay, have a thought that, just decide to write your name and you can do that.
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I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it.
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So that's a deliberate thought, which says that you can introduce thoughts.
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So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them.
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 Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time.
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But we can introduce a positive thought.
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Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?
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Probably not.
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So you can only have one thought at a time.
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Right, but they come very fast.
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But it comes and goes.
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So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think.
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Otherwise, a spontaneous thought will pop back in based on your experience, based on sensory, based on...
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 how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just gonna keep popping in.
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So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?
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So I'm a big fan of wellness, and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes, and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science.
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And what I love about your question is you're asking for, really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions.
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 One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have.
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What a terrible thing to put on people.
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What a challenging thing.
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I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts.
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I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes.
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Now the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis
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 for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort.
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And that relates to the dopamine pathway.
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 So the molecule dopamine is a reward.
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It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of your life, you complete something.
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But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals.
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It's actually released when we are en route to our goals, when we're in pursuit of our goals.
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 and we think we're on the right path.
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This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater.
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I felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it.
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That's right.
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High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.
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To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right?
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 And it can be to some wins along the way, but growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things.
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One is I'm not where I want to be now, but I'm capable of getting there eventually.
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The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.
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 In fact, don't reward the result, reward the effort.
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That's right.
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And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process.
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And actually Carol's, one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right.
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 So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they loved doing it, and incidentally or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer, because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process.
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Now the cool thing about dopamine,
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 is that it's very subjectively controlled.
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We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.
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Our interpretation.
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Our interpretation.
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But it has to be
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 attached to reality.
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So one should never confuse... What is real?
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Right.
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So if you're thinking about the effort you're expending.
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So let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business, for instance, and it's hard.
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 If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path, or if they're not in movement along that path, they're at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.
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They're taking a step forward.
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If they can reward that process internally, two things happen.
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 First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process.
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And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine.
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And what I mean by that is
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 There was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press Journal, a couple years ago, showing that with repeated bouts of effort, we use and we release more and more epinephrine.
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It's kind of adrenaline, but in the brain.
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Every time, every time you put in effort, so every time you make, for this, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you write that email, every time you, let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftswoman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort,
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 you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account.
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You're spending epinephrine.
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At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting.
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It feels exhausting.
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 And this was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments, and they have the subjects exert effort, and they can control the visual environment, so sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward in kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress, and other times it was an exercise in futility, where they would just keep the visual world stationary, and they would expend effort, and they didn't think they were going anywhere.
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 Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing, and eventually they quit.
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Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you, anyone, the feeling that you could continue, and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue.
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And you've seen this actually, football's a good example, two teams play, say the Super Bowl, both teams are max effort the entire time.
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Max effort.
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 The team that wins, suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days.
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They can talk, I mean, they have the energy.
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They're exhausted right before that.
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That's right.
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Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, except it was neural energy.
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And what happened was, effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline.
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Eventually, people quit.
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They just quit.
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 Dopamine is able to suppress that and so then you're expending effort But you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it So we need dopamine to keep the effort going is that I'm hearing you say that's right dopamine is not just about reward It's when the biggest misconceptions dopamine is about motivation and drive.
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It's like a jet that propels you along a path and
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 How do we get more dopamine?
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You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.
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Like how?
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Okay, so that's a great question.
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First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements.
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I want to be really clear.
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There is a drug, there are two drugs actually, that will cause massive release of dopamine.
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They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.
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 That's what gets us addicted, because it feels so good.
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The problem is, exactly, the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source.
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It becomes the goal and the path.
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It becomes the path and the destination.
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And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes.
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 down very, very fast.
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Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good.
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That's right.
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And that's the greatest feeling you'll have, so why do anything else when you can have that feeling?
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That's right.
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And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies.
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 they were designed to do anything.
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They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances we could adapt.
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So in an animal context, an animal that let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young,
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 it's gonna feel agitation, that's stress, that's cortisol, it's like hunger, my babies might not eat, I might not eat, maybe it's looking for a mate, it's gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching, foraging, it's called in the animal behavior world, it's foraging.
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At some point it might catch a smell of something,
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 a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty.
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At that moment, dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path.
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Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and it turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again.
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 So you don't give up.
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You just don't repeat it again.
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So it reminds you that's not the path to go down.
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Interesting.
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And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience.
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Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously.
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 you're gonna repeat those.
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Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.
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So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.
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That's right.
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So you asked, how do you do this?
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So to really make it concrete.
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And is there too much, is there too much thing?
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Is there such thing as too much dopamine?
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Well, if you're not on drugs.
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 So, cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life.
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They make people very focused on things outside of themselves.
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That's the other thing that dopamine does.
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It can be positive or negative.
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But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment.
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You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that.
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 I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes.
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So it's like, get after it.
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What do sharks do on Monday?
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Or I can't remember the specific things.
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Or then they're the, sometimes it's just time to chill.
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Well, that's a different molecule.
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That's serotonin, right?
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And then dopamine is the get after it molecule.
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And epinephrine is effort.
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So if we were gonna break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort.
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 Just effort, with no subjective label on them, good or bad.
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Effort.
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Whether or not it's stress, or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's just, it's exerting effort.
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Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.
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 So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?
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Brilliant question.
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It's a skill that we learn.
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So that's really nice to know.
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It's never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better.
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So I have four adult children.
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They grew up with this stuff.
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And as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats.
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So they've been trained literally at my husband.
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And they all work for me, by the way.
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 They're either all amazing kids or messed up kids.
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Totally, yeah.
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Yeah, we'll have to ask that question.
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Well, Dominique's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there.
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But yeah, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia, and then going to the more sort of
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 things like that we can accept grief, anger, etc.
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These are not illnesses.
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This is the biggest message that I probably have.
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The second biggest.
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The first is that mind is the source and if you don't get mind right, everything else.
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You can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and
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 self-help, but unless your mind is right, you won't ever use that stuff.
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It's just data.
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And so there's another step missing, and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept
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 Part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away.
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So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses.
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In fact, they're very helpful.
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They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses.
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They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told.
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 they are actually responses, and because they are responses of our mind in the world, we use our brain and body to express them, because the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts, and then we use that to speak.
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We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak.
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So obviously, if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess.
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But because our brain's neuroplastic, and if we manage our mind,
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 change your brain, we can change our DNA.
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Literally, that's what I've shown in my research, you can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally.
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If you change your mind?
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If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers.
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So for example, if you're in acute trauma, for example, and you go through just, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way.
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I've been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring device.
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 and for some research purposes.
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And I happened to, while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you track your levels, and I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neuropsycho that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact.
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And I happened to be going through experience of very acute trauma in our family over December.
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And in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240.
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Now, that's heart attack level.
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 and I immediately managed my mind through the neurocycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system, anyone can learn it, and I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level.
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And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it.
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And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA's dropped, your homocysteine's up.
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All that means is that your immune system is going crazy.
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It's under attack, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Exactly, you've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID, and in fact,
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 your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever.
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That, it will recognize that as an invader like a virus, like COVID.
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So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind.
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Think, feel, choose, you build thoughts.
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Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories.
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So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches.
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 this is toxic, it will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID or if I had a flu virus or if I had measles or something or any kind of damage in my body, the immune system sees that as threatening survival because we are wired for survival.
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 So this is not survival.
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So your immune system says, hey, that's a threat.
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Let's send out the army.
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T-lymphocytes, B-lymphocytes, macrophages.
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Let's go fix this thing.
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And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing.
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So initially, inflammation is to isolate and fix.
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To protect.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Exactly.
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Isolate and protect.
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And then you're supposed to fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause.
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And then this goes away.
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And then the anti-inflammatory factors come in, and the inflammation goes away.
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But if we don't deal with the stuff,
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 and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are enacting, the constant arguments or the assertions.
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You know, we all have these toxic patterns.
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No one's immune.
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And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety.
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And those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern.
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It's either a trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed.
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 But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected.
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And I showed you my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X. And where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres.
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And telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind.
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Very interesting.
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 Aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well?
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Exactly.
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Totally correct.
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So if those are under attack and dying, you're probably physically going to die as well.
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Exactly.
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That's exactly what I showed.
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So we had subjects at the beginning of my clinical trial that I put in this book.
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 We had subjects, and I've actually got a picture of this person's, one of the subjects' brains.
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This is inside, looking inside their brain, and the blue represents someone who's totally depressed, flatline, brain flatline, literally.
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And this person's, all their biomarkers were up there, cortisol, inflammation, etc.
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But this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat.
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Blue means
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 a very, very depressed, and this person was.
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Their narrative was tremendous trauma in their life.
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They were offline, they were battling with work, relationships, a lot of stuff.
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Everything was off.
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Everything was off, sleep, you name it.
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They were at like, ready to check out.
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What page is this on?
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This is on page, I should tell you, I should know the page off my heart, 161.
0
SPEAKER_00
Okay, cool, yeah.
0
SPEAKER_00
I think you probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there.
0
SPEAKER_00
 So this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA and we looked at their telomeres, they will tell you how, the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease.
0
SPEAKER_00
So they were sitting, so that will show in terms of your biological age.
0
SPEAKER_00
So their telomeres were short and unhealthy.
0
SPEAKER_00
Their ages were, in this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well that's similar, their chronological, their actual age was in their mid-30s.
0
SPEAKER_00
 but their biological age.
0
SPEAKER_02
They're like 70 or something.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yes, a sickly 70 year old.
0
SPEAKER_02
That's crazy.
0
SPEAKER_00
Crazy.
0
SPEAKER_00
Within nine weeks of mind management, note, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs.
0
SPEAKER_00
I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial, it was pure mind management, just the neuropsycho, just get your mind under control.
0
SPEAKER_00
And that gray means that their brain stabilized, that the brain waves that they were actually managing.
0
SPEAKER_00
So here they were saying, I am depression, I am hopeless.
0
SPEAKER_00
 All the biomarkers, DNA, here they're saying, I now know why I feel depression.
0
SPEAKER_00
I'm not depression.
0
SPEAKER_00
I now know why.
0
SPEAKER_00
And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's not who I am.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's not an it.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's not an illness.
0
SPEAKER_00
By 63 days, and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing behavior change in their life.
0
SPEAKER_00
They were saying, OK, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do.
0
SPEAKER_00
 and there was changes in their behavior, they were back at work, they were back sleeping, 25% improvement in sleep, and I mean all kinds of like, their relationships were not suicidal anymore, and I mean that's, I could go on and on and on.
0
SPEAKER_00
This subject over here was in the control group, so they got no mind management, and what you'll see is a lot of red, and a lot of chaos, and that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible, this person's DNA, telomeres were very short,
0
SPEAKER_00
 And so with mind management, in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health.
0
SPEAKER_00
And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are very significant.
0
SPEAKER_02
Right, right, it's all about leafy greens and plant-based.
0
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, which is significant.
0
SPEAKER_00
And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, I think this is the first study that's been done on
0
SPEAKER_00
 actually doing deliberate, intentional mind work to change.
0
SPEAKER_00
And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers.
0
SPEAKER_00
But the biggest thing was their narrative, the person's story.
0
SPEAKER_00
So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again.
0
SPEAKER_00
 And they had also had this acceptance, and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when we started, was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose-tinted glasses.
0
SPEAKER_00
That's crazy.
0
SPEAKER_00
It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful.
0
SPEAKER_00
We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about 40 years in the West now, where we look at depression and anxiety
0
SPEAKER_00
 and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress.
0
SPEAKER_00
So it's been lumped, or misery of life has been medicalized, to quote a brilliant psychiatrist.
0
SPEAKER_00
 and Joanna Moncrief.
0
SPEAKER_00
So we've got to really watch out for that.
0
SPEAKER_00
But actually, the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses.
0
SPEAKER_00
They are just survival instincts.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's telling you, hey, pay attention.
0
SPEAKER_00
There's something going on.
0
SPEAKER_00
You need to go and have it.
0
SPEAKER_02
Something's not working.
0
SPEAKER_02
Something's not working.
0
SPEAKER_00
Something's not working.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed.
0
SPEAKER_00
And that'll block the greatness.
0
SPEAKER_02
So are you saying, am I hearing, did I hear you say that there are
0
SPEAKER_02
 there isn't a mental health disease, it's more of just a pattern or something that we should be mindful of, but it's not an actual disease?
0
SPEAKER_00
No, it's not a disease.
0
SPEAKER_00
And I know this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science.
0
SPEAKER_00
In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field, and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a, they've been looking for the neurobiological correlates.
0
SPEAKER_00
They've been looking for where in the brain is depression.
0
SPEAKER_00
 And for years, we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression.
0
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that's not even, it was a theory never proven, great for marketing, for telling drugs, and also the simplistic way of telling someone, hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemical imbalance, let me give you a drug to fix it.
0
SPEAKER_00
We want this quick fix mentality.
0
SPEAKER_00
So as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix.
0
SPEAKER_00
But life's not like that, mind is not like that.
0
SPEAKER_00
Mind is separate from brain and body.
0
SPEAKER_00
 You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body.
0
SPEAKER_00
But when it comes to mind, there's this gravitational field, this force, this think-feel-choose thing.
0
SPEAKER_00
A medication's not going to change how you're thinking, feeling, and choosing.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's not going to get rid of this.
0
SPEAKER_00
 It's just going to numb your brain, so maybe you don't feel this while it's working.
0
SPEAKER_00
But at the same time as then when that drug wears off, this is still there.
0
SPEAKER_00
This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem.
0
SPEAKER_00
So this is increasing your vulnerability.
0
SPEAKER_00
The longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease.
0
SPEAKER_02
Oh my gosh.
0
SPEAKER_00
 You know, and this is what gets you stuck.
0
SPEAKER_00
And these are the patterns.
0
SPEAKER_00
So no, it's not an illness.
0
SPEAKER_00
It is a normal human response.
0
SPEAKER_00
Here we, the pandemic, we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health.
0
SPEAKER_00
Mental health has always been an issue.
0
SPEAKER_00
Lewis, from the beginning of time,
0
SPEAKER_00
 mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever.
0
SPEAKER_00
So mental health is not on the rise, but the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease, has created a whole new problem.
0
SPEAKER_00
So here we sit with, before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid-90s, and this is when I was still practicing, early days of my practicing, sort of 10 years into my work.
0
SPEAKER_00
 and I started seeing this trend of, and I was watching the study, where people were, the decades-long trend of people living longer.
0
SPEAKER_00
So we know, we all hear this message.
0
SPEAKER_00
This is what we've heard.
0
SPEAKER_00
People are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology.
0
SPEAKER_00
None of us question that.
0
SPEAKER_00
But something happened in 96 that did start questioning that.
0
SPEAKER_00
By the mid-2000s, it was an established, researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed.
0
SPEAKER_00
 and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair, where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases.
0
SPEAKER_00
And the age group most being affected are between 24 and 65.
0
SPEAKER_00
So people at the beginning of their career and the prime of their career and through that age group are dropping down dead like flies.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it's considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases.
0
SPEAKER_00
So we have to look at the bone.
0
SPEAKER_00
Lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body
0
SPEAKER_00
 That's weaker.
0
SPEAKER_00
Why?
0
SPEAKER_00
Lifestyle, which is mind-driven.
0
SPEAKER_00
How am I eating, drinking, sleeping?
0
SPEAKER_00
But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that?
0
SPEAKER_00
How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments?
0
SPEAKER_00
How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits?
0
SPEAKER_00
What am I doing about that stuff?
0
SPEAKER_00
 And that's when we ignore all of that because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter.
0
SPEAKER_00
What matters is the symptoms.
0
SPEAKER_00
Let's just look for the symptoms.
0
SPEAKER_00
Checklist, diagnose, label.
0
SPEAKER_00
When you label someone, you chop up to 10 years more of their life.
0
SPEAKER_00
You know, it's like it's adding on.
0
SPEAKER_00
They've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have chopped their 20 years
1
SPEAKER_00
 of up to 20 years of their lifespan.
1
SPEAKER_00
People on psychotropic drugs, because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body, chopping up to 25 years of their life.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is serious.
1
SPEAKER_00
So here we have this already existing, then the pandemic hits.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now in other years, they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives.
1
SPEAKER_00
But there's such a contradiction, because they're saying, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical, and not knowing if you're going to live or die, and how long is this isolation going to go on?
1
SPEAKER_00
 economic impact and whatever, the whole lot.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's trauma.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they say that when they say, but this is the way to treat it.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let's label it, let's diagnose it, let's medicate it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So here we've come into COVID with a problem, with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems.
1
SPEAKER_00
And scientifically, this has all been researched and shown.
1
SPEAKER_00
And now we've got the pandemic, and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work.
1
SPEAKER_00
 to this, which is going to make it even worse.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants who are depressed.
1
SPEAKER_00
100% of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic.
1
SPEAKER_00
100% of people in the world at some point in their life
1
SPEAKER_00
 have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair, and one of the others.
1
SPEAKER_00
A large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure of the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates, it's probably 30, 40 percent of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff, where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the minus 9, 10, 8, 9, 10, if you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to minus 10.
1
SPEAKER_00
 and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases.
1
SPEAKER_00
They are simply in that traumatic situation, you having a traumatic response.
1
SPEAKER_00
Think of someone who's a war vet.
1
SPEAKER_00
I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do
1
SPEAKER_00
 You know, they come back and try and, we all know the problem of trying to reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature.
1
SPEAKER_00
And now, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they're diseased.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of, we don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this.
1
SPEAKER_00
 They will inject things like risperidone, which is an antipsychotic, into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they're psychotic for a reason.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's their coping.
1
SPEAKER_00
How do you deal with this?
1
SPEAKER_00
Of course you're going to be angry.
1
SPEAKER_00
You're going to be frustrated.
1
SPEAKER_00
You're not going to be able to love like you did.
1
SPEAKER_00
You have to
1
SPEAKER_00
 be able to embrace process and re-conceptualize.
1
SPEAKER_00
Giving them a drug's not going to help it.
1
SPEAKER_00
In fact, it constrains the brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
It restricts the brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's no chemical cure for that.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's just going to add fuel to the fire, because your mind's got to work through the brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
So now you put chemicals in, and now that's not going to facilitate change.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have to do something.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it's like a narrative.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people?
1
SPEAKER_02
You know, when they say, Oh, I have a depression, it's a disease or bipolar, or I have this mental health disease, or I have a chemical imbalance, I was treated with this, don't try to say I don't because this is who I am.
1
SPEAKER_02
Is that do some people have that?
1
SPEAKER_02
Or is that?
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's a result of the narrative of, I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance, is a narrative that is the only explanation that people are being given.
1
SPEAKER_00
They're not given an alternative reaction, I mean, an alternative narrative.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given.
1
SPEAKER_00
 I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label.
1
SPEAKER_00
You're not diseased.
1
SPEAKER_00
You're not a broken brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
Your brain isn't defective.
1
SPEAKER_00
You are going through something.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you aren't something.
1
SPEAKER_00
You aren't that.
1
SPEAKER_00
You are going through something.
1
SPEAKER_02
You're experiencing something.
1
SPEAKER_00
 You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair.
1
SPEAKER_00
The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to
1
SPEAKER_00
 and not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma.
1
SPEAKER_00
That can drive a person crazy and that's not crazy in the sense of illness.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's crazy in the sense of your mind
1
SPEAKER_00
 is like this erratic tidal wave around you, and it's going through your brain, and you've got these, and your immune system, and everything's screaming out to you and saying, hey, let's fix this.
1
SPEAKER_00
So a disease label invalidates it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And for a moment, it might be nice to know, OK, well, there's a label to how I feel, because it kind of feels like we've got a bit of control.
1
SPEAKER_00
So initially, that gives you comfort.
1
SPEAKER_00
But don't see yourself as that.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's better to say, I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress.
1
SPEAKER_00
 issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD or I have the sickness of PTSD.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's better to say I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings, because of my whole story than saying I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, just research that's coming out the other day showed that we've got to stop saying this.
1
SPEAKER_00
The top psychiatrists that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this, that there's no ways that serotonin imbalance, you can't even measure that.
1
SPEAKER_00
 There's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's what you've experienced that's the cause.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then that moves through your brain and your body.
1
SPEAKER_00
So obviously your brain and your body respond.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we will see changes in the brain and the body.
1
SPEAKER_00
We will see neurochemical chaos, not necessarily serotonin imbalance.
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's just one.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes it's dopamine, and if dopamine's down, serotonin's off, and then anandamide's off, and then, I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms, and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain, and your DNA, and your telomeres, and 1,400 neurophysiological responses are off.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So that's the response, though.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this scary thing that's controlling you.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that invalidates.
1
SPEAKER_00
If someone comes back from war or someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if I say to you, gosh,
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's terrible.
1
SPEAKER_00
Tell me about it.
1
SPEAKER_00
I want to hear your story.
1
SPEAKER_00
I want to support you.
1
SPEAKER_00
Your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's an origin story.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's a source.
1
SPEAKER_00
So can I listen?
1
SPEAKER_00
Can I help?
1
SPEAKER_00
Can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it?
1
SPEAKER_00
 And that takes time.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's not a 15 minute appointment where I can give you a label.
1
SPEAKER_00
That takes time.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they're used in the right place.
1
SPEAKER_00
But to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation, to try and condition them.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can't condition, you have to reconstruct.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it's kind of like an algebraic equation.
1
SPEAKER_00
X is the situation, Y is how you should
1
SPEAKER_00
 you want to function for mental peace.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you've got X plus Y, and so here we are in our X situation, where we as a sort of human experiencing life.
1
SPEAKER_00
We're supposed to be at Y, and you put the two together, and what the current treatment says is that, okay, now we're going to create Z. We're just going to ignore X and Y. We're going to create a new thing, and that new thing is you diseased.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that doesn't work.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's actually X plus Y equals XY.
1
SPEAKER_00
X is what you're going through.
1
SPEAKER_00
Y is where you want to find mental peace.
1
SPEAKER_02
 We talk a lot about practicing meditation and also prayer.
1
SPEAKER_02
And you say something that was interesting that you said about using silence to hear in between the lines.
1
SPEAKER_02
So can you share what that means to hear in between the lines through prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and kind of what this all means?
1
SPEAKER_02
How can we understand this?
1
SPEAKER_02
There's a lot of noise about it, but what does it really mean?
1
SPEAKER_01
 When I hear the word mindfulness, to me what it really means is intentionality.
1
SPEAKER_01
What I mean by that is, are you crafting, designing, and intentionally creating your life?
1
SPEAKER_01
Or are you just coasting in the passenger seat of your life which is just dragging you and driving you wherever it's taking you?
1
SPEAKER_01
 And so it's the difference between being the driver or being in the passenger seat.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so to me, living intentionally is what allows you to live a life of by design.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I'll give you an example of what mindfulness can look like.
1
SPEAKER_01
There's something in the book that I talk about called the three S's, which are sights, sense, and sounds.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now if you think about that, we're exposed to sights, sense, and sounds every single day.
1
SPEAKER_01
Every single day.
1
SPEAKER_01
 But how many of us have crafted those to be sights, scents, and sounds that we want in our life?
1
SPEAKER_01
So this is what I realized.
1
SPEAKER_01
When we were monks, one of the most important things was, what was the first thing you saw, the sight, when you woke up?
1
SPEAKER_01
And right now, most people are probably seeing their screen.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think 80% of people look at their screens first thing in the morning and the last thing at the night.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you're seeing your screen first thing in the morning.
1
SPEAKER_01
But what are you really seeing?
1
SPEAKER_01
You're seeing everyone else's priorities.
1
SPEAKER_01
 You're seeing everyone else's issues and challenges.
1
SPEAKER_01
You're seeing everyone else's messages to you, which means you're already starting your day off reactively.
1
SPEAKER_01
But what if you started your morning looking at a painting that inspired you or a picture of a loved one that brought joy in your heart or your favorite quote by Lewis or by anyone else that
1
SPEAKER_01
 When you read that in the morning, you were like, oh yeah, I feel in charge today to make a difference in the world.
1
SPEAKER_01
So imagine the first thing you saw in the morning was something inspiring.
1
SPEAKER_01
How much would your day change?
1
SPEAKER_01
That's mindfulness.
1
SPEAKER_01
Mindfulness is being intentional and mindful about what you are exposing yourself to.
1
SPEAKER_01
Let's talk about sounds next.
1
SPEAKER_01
So sounds was something that I started to study actually much later from a modern life perspective.
1
SPEAKER_01
 But when we're monks, we would wake up to birds, we would wake up to water, we'd wake up to gongs or cymbals.
1
SPEAKER_01
Chants.
1
SPEAKER_01
Chants, exactly, which are all beautiful sounds.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, the crazy thing is all of us wake up to something called an alarm.
1
SPEAKER_01
 I don't know why anyone would want to wake up to an alarm.
1
SPEAKER_01
Why would you want to wake up alarmed?
1
SPEAKER_01
It means now your system is alarming.
1
SPEAKER_01
Why would you want to do that?
1
SPEAKER_01
Why would you want to wake up in shock?
1
SPEAKER_01
In a state of like a jolt?
1
SPEAKER_01
I don't think that's a positive way to wake up.
1
SPEAKER_01
So changing the sound that you wake up to
1
SPEAKER_01
 Now, I'm not saying that everyone can wake up to nature sounds.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you're one of those people who just hit the snooze button again.
1
SPEAKER_01
But what if you woke up to a sound or a song that brought you joy?
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, when I lived in New York for two years between 2016 and 2018, I started to feel quite exhausted by the end of the day.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I was really looking into like, why is it that I feel tired?
1
SPEAKER_01
 And I started to realize, I came across this term called cognitive load.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what it means is that a lot of the sounds that you hear in New York City are sounds that are insignificant for your mind to process.
1
SPEAKER_01
Drilling, construction work, taxis honking, driving, cars screeching, scratching.
1
SPEAKER_02
People yelling at each other on the streets.
1
SPEAKER_01
People yelling at each other on the streets.
1
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All of that sound is called cognitive load, where your brain is now trying to make sense of meaningless sound.
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 Well, it's also just like, should I be afraid?
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This is a loud sound.
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Is my brain going to fight or flight?
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Like, I need to protect myself.
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So you're always being alarmed.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And you hear sirens.
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The amount of sirens that I remember hearing on the streets.
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Now, when you hear sirens, sirens have an emotional trigger.
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 And they have an emotional response to them.
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So think about your day.
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Think about when you come home from work.
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Well, now you're working from home.
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What sound do you want to hear when you're working?
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What sound do you want to hear at the end of the day?
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When you sound design your life, that's called mindfulness.
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That's being intentional.
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And then finally, scent.
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 Scent is such a powerful sense that we're not even aware.
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How many of you, when you smell your favorite food, can't already wait to eat it?
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You can almost taste it.
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You can taste it already just through scent.
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Why is it that every time you walk into...
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 But yeah, I think pizza has one of the best sets.
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Well, your wife, Roddy, has got some amazing food.
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That was an amazing set.
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When I walked in the kitchen last week, I was like, mmm, this is amazing.
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That was for you.
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That was special.
1
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That was for you.
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That was for you.
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That was a good meal.
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That was a really good meal.
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She really appreciated that you love to eat, too.
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She was happy.
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Her heart was full.
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Exactly.
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Bring a former jock into your house, and you'll clear all the food out.
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 I've never seen someone eat that much.
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I was like, he's a big American dude.
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I was like, this is like, you know, he can eat.
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And so, no, it was great.
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She was so happy that you appreciated it so much.
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She really appreciated that.
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But the scent is important in your life.
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When you walk into a massage spa, it's the scent, the eucalyptus, the lavender, the sandalwood.
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It puts you in a peaceful state.
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 Dude, Zen puts you in Zen without trying.
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And so mindfulness is intentionally creating a life that makes you feel what you want to feel without having to just create the feeling from inside.
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You may say, Jay, you know, I really struggle.
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 Trying to be positive.
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I struggle trying to deal with anxiety.
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I struggle trying to be focused Your sight sense and sounds can help you do that Yeah, and you start creating an environment where you naturally feel that like today when I walked into your studio I saw your books.
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I saw these motivational quotes.
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I saw a boxing glove and it's like all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm in a uplifting environment
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 So you already get triggered.
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Exactly.
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I think a friend of mine mentioned one time on the podcast, Chris Lee, said you want to create an environment like a rainforest where things can thrive and grow as opposed to having an environment like a desert where things go to die.
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 That's beautiful.
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And if you have sights, scents, and sounds that are like a desert for your life, for your heart, then it's going to be hard to grow those things from your heart.
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But if you create an environment of a rainforest where things can grow, water, nature, cool air, things like that, then you can really start to cultivate that growth.
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You mentioned about creating and designing your life.
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 How much of the world do you think we receive by being here?
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And how much of the world do we create ourselves?
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Yeah, that's a beautiful question.
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It's a complete dynamic dance between what the Vedic tradition would call fate and free will.
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So fate is what is already created for you, and a good example would be the place you were born.
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 the type of family you grew up in, the socioeconomic background you had.
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It was already there when you walked into the world.
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But within that, you had choices where your free will came about.
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You had the choice to either do what everyone in your neighborhood did or to do something different.
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You had the choice to have a relationship with a particular person or not.
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So what happens is that we're constantly creating new spaces from which we have another choice.
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 And so you kind of see it as this dynamic dance between, okay, now I'm in this situation and now what is my choice in this situation?
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So I would say, I'm not saying it's equal, I'm saying it's a dynamic balance and a switching process where you're constantly creating a new level and then now in that level you have a next choice.
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Because we didn't have the choice to be created here.
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We were here and that wasn't our choice.
1
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 Now everything after that is our choice, right?
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Yeah, and there are some, obviously there are some traditions, and I'm a big diver into like reincarnation and past lives.
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So according to the beliefs of reincarnation and past lives, you have at some point made a choice to be here.
1
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But taking it more simplistically, the truth is that when you're brought into a situation, the best analogy that I've heard and it's been told for years is of a father is an alcoholic.
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 One of the sons that he has decides to become an alcoholic because his father's an alcoholic The other son decides to never drink alcohol because his father's an alcoholic So they were exposed to the same situation in the same scenario environment same environment
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 But they both made different choices based on their experience.
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And that's the choice element.
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That's the element that we should be trying to empower in our lives.
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Because we can constantly say, I'm limited by my environment or I've been restricted by my environment.
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And hey, it's true.
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There are so many of us that have been limited and restricted.
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But by now you repeating that, you are going to repeat that restriction in your life.
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How much of a positive environment
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 supports us in our growth or holds us back.
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There are some people who have the perfect family situation, resources, beautiful backyards and nature, who are lazy.
1
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And there are others who have, you know, divorced parents, abusive parents, abusive friends, an environment of a desert, and they figure out a way to thrive.
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How much importance does our environment play in our overall success?
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 If you look at the examples that you just shared and you really analyze life, you'd see very little, because you see people craft their own life.
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So a good example for me is that when I came back from living in the ashram, and there were other people who may have been monks who'd also left the path, and I came back to a...
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 not financially successful or supportive family.
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So my family doesn't have abundant wealth and couldn't necessarily have taken care of me or paid for me forever.
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And I had to figure out my own life.
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And that to me was a great sense of impetus and incentive to go and figure it out and learn new skills and network and meet people.
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And I saw other friends whose parents had like a property portfolio with like 10 properties ready to hand them over.
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 they had a BMW the second that they came out, whatever, you know, from their own life.
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Or I even have friends that had all of that and didn't become monks and didn't even find careers.
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So I've also got friends that I went to school with that today don't even have careers, even though their parents were really well established, which has all of these examples have continued me to believe
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 that we truly have influence in more than our environment.
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Our environment affects us for sure.
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It plants seeds and weeds into our life, but there is still a choice.
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And I think even if you feel there isn't a choice,
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 simply by accepting that there is, it means you have a chance to get out of there.
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And I think that's what.......................................................................................................................................................................................................
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 when it's tried the obvious.
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And that's why a lot of creativity and focus studies say that the first 10 ideas that come to your mind are never the most interesting.
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It's when you get into the 11th idea that you start breaking the pattern.
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And so if someone asks you, oh, what's your best business idea?
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Your first 10 ideas are probably not that innovative.
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And so the mind constantly gets stuck on that train.
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And you've got to keep reminding yourself that there is another door.
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There could be another pathway.
1
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 I was thinking about a piece of advice that so one of my closest spiritual mentors who is in London, I knew him since I was probably like 12 and probably since I was 18, he passed away this year from stage four brain cancer.
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 And he'd had brain cancer for about, I think like three, four years now.
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And so I hadn't really had a real interaction with him for the past few years because every time I saw him, he wasn't fully functioning in his short-term memory.
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His long-term memory was there, but his short-term memory wasn't.
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And I remember speaking to him probably about seven, eight years ago and asking him the question.
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I said to him, you know, I've got so many ideas.
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There's so many things I could do.
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Where do I start?
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 And he said this beautiful thing to me.
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He said, you know what?
1
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Your role should be to open up every door possible.
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And he said, let the world close the doors you're not meant to walk through and walk through the ones that remain open.
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And what I realized is most of us are just not opening up enough doors because we think we only have the option of two doors.
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We look at life as binary, zero and one, zero and one, right?
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It's just A or B, this or that.
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 And I mean, I think you'd say this too about you and every guest you ever had on.
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I don't think life is ever this or that.
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It's like this, that, and that, and maybe that, and that, and there's always a gap.
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Of course.
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The challenge that people have that I've sensed a lot is the fear of criticism when you go after something that you weren't supposed to do, or that people don't think you're supposed to do.
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Why do so many people fear criticism from peers, family, friends?
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 the media, why is that such a big fear and how do we overcome criticism from others?
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Psychologically we feel a sense of safety and security when we think people agree with us.
1
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 Right, that is just psychologically true that we would rather avoid conflict and sit in a space where we agree and therefore we have something called confirmation bias and the echo chamber where we keep surrounding ourselves with thoughts and ideas that are similar and reaffirm our beliefs.
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 Now, I think that you can have that and at the same time entertain ideas that you're not sure about yet.
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And so one of my favorite examples was MIT did this study where they asked people which person was more creative and innovative.
1
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And they showed two charts.
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One chart was employee A and the other chart was employee B. The chart for employee A, all of the people they knew
1
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 knew each other and knew them back.
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So it was almost like a closed loop.
1
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And employee B, they knew lots of people who didn't know each other.
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And they found that people who have more people in their network who don't know each other are more likely to be creative and productive.
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Really?
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Why is that?
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Because they expose you to opposing ideas and they may counteract how you think.
1
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So one of my favorite examples of this is a conversation between
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 Mark Zuckerberg and one of his mentors.
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So Mark Zuckerberg told this story at the Facebook headquarters a few years back.
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I wasn't there I've seen it on video and I'm sure it's available and he talks about how when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook in 2009 He approached his mentor and his mentor happened to be Steve Jobs.
1
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Wow, pretty cool.
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Wow, pretty cool.
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I wish really yeah, it's so cool So Mark Zuckerberg goes to Steve Jobs and he says I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook remember that time Facebook was five years old
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 There was no fan pages, I don't think.
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I don't think it was, there was no creators.
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I don't think there were fan pages.
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It was very much used by university students at that stage.
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I think it was mainly Ivy Leagues and college kids.
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And I don't even think it was international in a massive way.
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Very early days, and now we can't even think of that.
1
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But 2009, I mean, you just about had the iPhone and just about had Instagram and YouTube.
1
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So he ran up to Steve Jobs and he said, I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook.
1
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 What do I do?
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Now Steve Jobs at that time obviously was already the founder of one of the biggest brands on the planet and obviously the brand still is.
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He had access to investors, he had access to business coaches, I'm sure he had access to life coaches, he had access to health experts, he had access to anything.
1
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Like I don't think there's anyone, scientists, PhDs, I don't think there's anyone in the world who Steve Jobs couldn't have called up at the time.
1
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 And Steve Jobs said something amazing.
1
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He said, you know what, Mark?
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I think you should go and live in an ashram in India.
1
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He did not.
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He did.
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No way.
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It's a true story.
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He goes, and when you go to live in the ashram in India, that's where, if you spend some time there, that's where you'll find your answer.
1
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Shut up.
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And Mark did it.
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No way.
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Mark went to the ashram.
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It's a true story.
1
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For how long?
1
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 I believe he was there for, I've seen two online, I've seen two versions of the exact time he was there.
1
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I've seen some people say it was a couple of days or a week or some people said it's a month.
1
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So I think it's hazy how much time he actually spent there.
1
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But he went.
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And he says that based on that experience, that's where he found the direction of Facebook, to be connecting people.
1
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 Now, the reason why I love that story is because it's the unobvious, alternative, random connection.
1
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And when Harvard did a study of 3,000 executives, they looked at it and asked them, what's the number one skill for being a good leader?
1
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 And a lot of people would say communication, a lot of people would say vision, strategy, humility.
1
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And the number one answer that they got from 3,000 executives was the one word which is called associating.
1
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And what that means is the ability to spot patterns where everyone else doesn't see them.
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 And that's the connect that real leaders can spot patterns and connections in anomalies.
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So most people would be like, what has an ashram got to do with a tech platform?
1
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But that is where you expand your mind to find answers that you never expected.
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 How important is creating alone time with noises, people, busy work, to allow your mind to expand?
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Is that the only time in that silence?
1
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I think you mentioned it.
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Silence to hear in between the lines.
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Is that where we start to hear what we're supposed to be creating, where we're supposed to be heading, our mission?
1
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Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that back.
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I wanted to get back to that.
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So when we talk about
1
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 There's a beautiful statement by David Lynch, who's a movie producer and a deep meditator, and he says that prayer is how you talk to God, and meditation is how God talks to you.
1
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And whether you believe in God or the universe or spirit or divine, whatever it means, the point is that there is a dialogue and a conversation.
1
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So prayer is like you're speaking, you're saying, here's what I want.
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Here's how I feel.
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Help me.
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Help me, yeah.
1
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And meditation is more receiving.
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Receiving, yeah.
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 And so I love that statement because I think it makes it very clear that we have to have a dialogue with the universe.
1
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We have to have a dialogue with people in our lives.
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We have to have a dialogue and there's both giving and receiving.
1
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So when I talk about hearing in between the lines, the best example I can give you Lewis is, let's take a look at you and your relationship and mine and my wife's relationship.
1
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 One of us is always traveling.
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So you travel, your partner travels, I travel, my wife travels.
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Sometimes we're missing each other.
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Imagine you've got really busy and hectic.
1
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Do you think, and anyone listening or watching, you can ask the same question.
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If you were really busy and hectic and stressed out, do you think your partner feels comfortable to tell you how they feel and get your attention?
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 If I'm busy, stressed out, overwhelmed, will my partner tell me how I feel about themselves or about... Yeah, do you think they would feel confident to be like, Lewis, I need to tell you something really important?
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I don't think they would.
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They wouldn't.
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They really wouldn't because... They don't want to stress you out more.
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They don't want to stress you out more.
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You're not present, all these things.
1
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Exactly.
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So exactly that.
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And so what happens is when you're still, your mind and body actually get to speak to you and give you signals of how they feel.
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And so when you're still, that's when you