The Business Behind our Courses

To me, self-awareness is life. There's no difference. You know, people think about business as something that's separate from life. You know, I do that in business, or it's just business, or— and to me, business is far more of an art form, and how you use it is far more important.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. If you've been listening for a while, you've heard Joe and I refer to the workshops and online courses that this podcast comes from. What's the deal with all of this? Why do we want you to join our mailing list? What's our intention? Are we trying to suck you into something? And what's this going to cost you? Today, I'd like to bring some transparency into what exactly is going on with all this Vue business. Joe, how did you get into the coaching business in the first place?

Uh, by accident. I found myself when Tara and I had a, um, decided to have a kid and a kid was on the way, I realized that I had to stop sitting in a room meditating all the time and make a little money. And I went into venture capital. And one of the realizations I had early on was that if I if I didn't bring my self-awareness practice, if business wasn't a way for me to continue to develop and understand myself, that I would never succeed at business. And then as I started to invest, I realized the mentality of the people that I invested in were the biggest— was the biggest leverage for successful investments. And I started sharing some of the knowledge that I had with them. That was successful in many cases. And then they started telling me that other people needed me. I didn't have the time, so I did a course. And then it just kind of happened. People— the line got long. And at some point I decided that this was far more of my calling than investing. And I was better at it, frankly.

With a lot of, you know, self-development like programs, there's this way that self-development turns out to be a tool for somebody to make a bunch of money and like inflate their ego. What makes what you're doing different from that?

Wow, I would love to say that I'm different from that, but I'm sure that that's at play at the same time. Meaning, I mean, there's no way that you can completely annihilate an ego. I think if you think you've completely annihilated it, that is ego in itself. So I'm sure my ego's at play and making money, I enjoy making money. I definitely like it. But neither of them are the priority in my world. And so creating the business is far more about an enjoyment process for me. Maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I would have said, I really want to bring this out to people because it creates happiness, and I want to change the world. And that's really not alive in me anymore. It's far more alive in me. It's just this is something I really enjoy. I get off on. I like watching people have life-changing experiences. I like being a part of that. I like building something beyond me. I like seeing the value through the success of a business. So it's just, it's really a matter of enjoyment for me.

So you described your journey as like you started out being interested in self-awareness and meditation, then you had a baby and realized you needed some money. So you started to get into business, into VC, and you wanted, of course, to bring your self-awareness practice with you and make that part of what you were doing in business. And then it became the business itself. How did you transition from being a venture capitalist and focusing on the quality of awareness of the people that you invested in into making Vue a business on its own?

I was really just following the demand. I was just following people's requests for the most part. I have a vision for sure, but it's incredibly informed by what people have asked for and what they want. I feel like it's the same when you're coaching somebody, you start with where they are. You don't tell them what you think their agenda should be. You follow their agenda. I think business is the same way. You don't ask people to be different. You don't give them an agenda. You find out what their agenda is. And if you can serve that, if you can be of service to that, and it is aligned internally, then by all means, go ahead. And that's what happened here. It was just the best way I could be of service that was inspiring and enjoyable for me.

Can you tell me more about what you're working on now, like inside and outside of the Vue courses? And what does that look like for you? Yeah.

Too much. I think I'm working on too much. We have the podcast going. We have the Vue course going. We have the AOA course going. I have a group of 12 executives I work with every year as a coach. And then we have an occasional in-person workshop, particularly for those executives, but sometimes for others. And then there's the creation of content, which is what we're doing now. Just generally spreading the word so that people, if it's right for people, they can find it. That's the work.

Yeah, when we first met, Vue was only available through these small in-person workshops that you just mentioned. And what's so important to you about in-person work and what made you start exploring an online format?

Yeah, I was ignorant. I think the in-person work was, I had a conception, a limiting thought that it could only be done in person. And then coronavirus hit. And people came to me and said, hey, we need this and this and this, and we need it online. And I thought, no, no, no, no. And luckily, I didn't need the money. And eventually, I was sitting in my hot tub one day. And I have this hot tub that goes way too hot. And I got some engineer to mess with it. And so I'm boiling my brain. And I had this epiphany that the way that I learned a lot of this stuff is very different than the way I teach it. And so I thought, oh wow, this is— I could potentially teach it online the way that I learned it. And then that started the exploration, and only to find out that there are ways that when it's done online, it's more powerful, it's stronger, and there's some ways in which it's weaker. It's stronger because it's like more persistent, you have more time with it, you don't get the workshop high. It becomes an integrated part of life. There's some experiences that can happen in person that are bigger than the experiences that happen online overall on average. There's some exercises you can only do online. So, and some that you can only do in person. And so in that discovery and just trying to make it better and iterate, iterate, iterate, which is how I do it. I never try for perfection. I just keep on. Improving. And it just turned out that people really dug them. We got great NPS scores, and people really liked it. And then I got really motivated because I realized it made me less involved, which is really a critical component for me in doing any of the work, is that I want to become— if someone's teaching you math, you don't want them to have to be there every time you're doing math. That would be a pretty shitty teacher. And so I saw that the online version needed less of me, and that became really exciting for me. And so then I got more and more inspired by the online work.

What are you trying to accomplish by growing Vue as a business?

It is really just a matter of following my enjoyment. I mean, I think there's some freedom that I have in the fact that I'm not really trying to accomplish anything. It sounds kind of counterintuitive, like you have to have business goals, and I do. You know, you have to have a vision, and I do. But at the end of the day, I'm really good with things not working because I'm not attached to, tied to, my value isn't created from the business outcomes. And, you know, the vision is, wouldn't it be cool for a whole bunch of people to be able to communicate this way and to have breakthroughs and to have happier lives and to enjoy themselves more, enjoy each other more, businesses to be more successful. Particularly businesses where people are open to self-exploration, like, wouldn't that be awesome? And it would be. It's a super cool thing, but that's more of like the symptom. The core is my own enjoyment. The core is what turns me on. It sounds like that's a little bit hedonistic almost, but it's not quite that way in the fact that what I've learned over time is that when I'm following the deeper call, there's more enjoyment in my life. It's almost, it's not almost, it is an act of surrender. So it's like I'm surrendering to the call, just like a baby surrenders to a cry. Like there's a movement that's happening. My enjoyment is a way for me to directly get in touch with that call, that thing that's pulling me, the gravity of my internal exploration, the gravity of divinity or Oneness, whatever you want to call that thing, God. And my enjoyment is the way that I get to gauge how deeply I'm surrendering.

I love that the way you described the vision was a series of run-on questions.

Shit, I didn't even notice. That totally makes sense.

Yeah. So yeah, you mentioned that, you know, you're doing this for your enjoyment. And you do have business goals and a vision. What are some of the business goals? Like, what's the revenue model? How does this work?

The first question that helps me answer the second question is, what do I want the money for? What is the money about? And so for me, money is just another tool in self-exploration. That's its highest purpose. And money is also, as a secondary purpose, a means of supporting people's energy. And there's a definite need for like a flow of money, that money stagnant is a destructive force in my conception of the world. So the goals around money in particular are all about making sure that the people who I work with are well paid, that they have good opportunities, that we get to do the stuff that we enjoy. And then the money towards the customer, the main purpose is does it make the spirit— does it support the spiritual journey or does it not? And one of the things that I think is really important is that you create a slate of products that are accessible for anybody's journey. So there's free content for people who aren't able to afford and then other content for people who can afford. And the reason that that's important is because that exchange of energy is really important. Meaning, like, I was in Nicaragua, and there was this group of people who were there to deliver food and clothing to these folks in Nicaragua. And I was sitting talking to them, and I was like, "You know, I feel like it's a bit destructive what you're doing." They were, of course, taken aback. And I said, "You know, to me, if you just give them stuff, it teaches them," that they can't take care of themselves on some level. And I far more believe in an exchange. And they're like, "Well, these guys have nothing to give." And I said, "Sure they do." For instance, there was a sea turtle shortage going on because they'd all been killed. I'm like, "The community could do a sea turtle rescue or they could help with the restoration projects for the sea tortoises, sea turtles." in exchange for it. There's lots of ways, and I think it's really important. It's a quote that was in a book called "The Soul of Money" that sticks with me, and it was an indigenous tribe, and they said, "If you're here to help me, no thank you. If you're here to work together for our mutual freedom, let's get to work." And I think that the monetary exchange towards the customer needs to be that, and it needs to be something that's felt. If you're dealing with somebody who's a billionaire to say, "Okay, I'll do all this work for you for $200," isn't an exchange of energy in the same way that it would be with someone who is working at $10 an hour. So it's really important that there's some way that that energy exchange can happen.

I mean, it's been a common kind of challenge, I guess, that like really good coaching has been disproportionately available to executives or high-paid tech workers or something. Meanwhile, a lot of people who are really struggling and could use a lot of this work the most simply can't afford to pay for workshops. But now that you're creating online self-paced courses that don't require your time to administer, what makes you run those as a business when you could give them out for free?

Yeah, that's a question that I've asked myself a lot. You know, when we were looking at the business model, do we want to do this for free? And the answer was that we didn't think that we would get as much completion and buy-in if it was free. And that said, I do give it away for free often if the circumstances are right, if the approach is right. But just generally, the thought process is, what's the way that the work does the best work inside of you? And that's how I think about everything. I think about it like when we market something, for instance, I think about not how do we get someone to buy a course, I think about how does the marketing become the beginning of the course? How does it become the beginning of self-exploration? So everything that I'm doing is serving the self-exploration. Everything from the way that I bill to how we build the courses to the teamwork that goes into building the courses to how we price it. It's our best guess, and I'm sure we're wrong, but it's our best guess at how we can best serve the people, how to get them through the course, how to make it meaningful enough for them to value it so that they give it the right love and attention.

Yeah, that seems like a really difficult problem because you have some people for whom $300 is like a throwaway and then other people for whom $300 is like the majority of a rent payment or their entire rent payment. And, you know, it could be argued that both need it equally or could use it could use this work equally but just have completely different context for money.

Yeah, it is. It's a really difficult thing and hopefully we'll provide stuff. The other part of the model is that the higher-end stuff pays for the lower-end stuff, right? So the work that I do in companies where there's a higher dollar per hour can pay for lower-priced courses. So our own sustainability is definitely a part of this. And like I said, it's to make sure that everybody in the organization or anybody I contract with has the ability to thrive. In their own life. Because if we're creating something from a poverty mentality, then we're going to be projecting that poverty mentality into our teachings. And so I think that's not going to work. But the idea for sure, and a lot of the goals that I have, are about making it more and more available at different price points and different levels of commitment. And I don't have a perfect solution by any stretch. And if anybody has one, please let us know. My experience of doing stuff completely for free has not been as successful as far as serving the population that I want to serve, the people who are interested. It just doesn't seem to work as well. And yet we still pull that lever sometimes, giving away— recently gave away the course to an organization that doesn't have the money but is doing great work in the world. And I assume we'll continue to do that.

You were talking about like sustainability. And there are a lot of examples of organizations that are, you know, like businesses built around some kind of work like this that turns self-inquiry into a business at scale only to have things go south or blow up for a number of reasons related to their like requirements for sustainability, you know, like training facilitators and then, you know, kind of gatekeeping those facilitators and trying to keep a cut and then, creating paths that become somewhat manipulative and create dependence. People end up becoming financially dependent on a community or in a particular organization and feeling trapped. So like, how can you maximize the positive impact of this work and scale it without it becoming corrupted by the needs of a scaling business?

Yeah, so I did an experiment on this before. I failed miserably on it. This one seems to be far more successful. And I think to some degree I was making that mistake And I think it's the gift of the online component that's really showed me to some degree the mentality mess up. So my perspective, I thought I was far more necessary than I was. The less necessary that I view myself to be in the work or that I view the organization to be, or that, you know, that our existence alone isn't necessary for the development of humanity, that we're just here to serve it, this kind of development of humanity, the less we have a risk of becoming one of those organizations. So I think that the need to be special or the need to be needed or the need to save, any of those kind of needs are what create those organizations. The inner work is really the most important thing, and that clarifies the way that the art of this business is expressed. And so everything that I do is all about pointing people back to themselves. And the less involved I can be, the less involved the organization can be, the better, so that we don't create an organization where people need us.

What's your approach to intellectual property? You could say that the, the way of being that Vu points to is not new and you didn't invent it and people have been discovering it through many different traditions. How do you consider view to be, in some sense, like your baby and something that you are stewarding and responsible for? And to what sense is it just kind of out there for people to discover?

This is one of the hardest questions that I wrestle with. I'm glad you brought it up because it's a place where I could still use some clarity. Yeah, so on one level, There's a part of me that wants everything that I do to be completely open source and anybody could use it for anything. On another level, I've seen that be really dangerous and destructive. You know, these tools modified slightly can be used for nefarious purposes or at least unconscious purposes. And so there's this fear that that will happen and I've seen it happen and not even through people having bad intentions. It's just, it's oftentimes someone's like, "Oh, I can use this tool to help a whole bunch of people." And they haven't looked at their own shadow. And so their shadow just kind of, you know, just completely takes over the work. And I've seen that happen quite a few times. And so the way that I, the iteration that I'm on now is that you ask permission to use any of the tools that are specific to us. If you're going to go use them. And then we make sure that it feels right to us and that you have the right support to use those tools. I don't know if that's going to be scalable, but that's what we do in our contracts with people who are taking the courses, is basically you can't go and use this. And I remember, like, one of the first talks I gave, I was giving people all these tools that I had developed and that were a synergy of other tools. You know, there's certain things— about 80% of what we do I don't know anybody else who does them. And then 20% of what we do are taken from traditions, from neuroscience or something that's like 2,000, 3,000 years old, from esoteric texts that I read and everything in between. But the stuff that's novel, it came from my consciousness. And so to some degree, there is a, I feel safe in the using of those tools. And what I've noticed is when, people use those tools, but their consciousness didn't create it, that, that it can become more dangerous because they don't fully have an understanding of the tool. And more importantly, I created these tools from my consciousness, and I want other people to create tools from theirs. Like, and so again, I want to be less involved. And so as people create their own stuff from their consciousness, those are right tools for where they are and where the people near them are. So it's just incredibly useful to have more of those tools out there, and rather than making them dependent on my tools. And so that's another reason that we basically have come up with the conclusion that you ask for permission to use the tools.

One thing that I've heard, um, some people have sort of objections when they first encounter this work, usually through somebody else, is that it seems selfish. And there's like some shades of that in this conversation where you're talking about, you know, I'm doing this for my enjoyment and, you know, it needs to be an energetic exchange. And you hear a lot of people talk about, you know, energetic exchange and like kind of using that word to disown that they're actually charging for something and that they want money.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want your money. No doubt about it. I like making money. There's no doubt about that. But then again, that's selfish too. So what's the answer that I could give that isn't selfish, right? Even the person who is— like, I've done a tremendous amount of nonprofit work, and I can find the selfishness in that too. And there's an incredible personal reward in being of service. I don't even know if the word selfish— I don't know if I even believe in it particularly. I feel like that's just a word that some adult created to control their children. The levels of selfishness seem to be a good way to gauge where you are in your own personal development. When selfishness of like, "I want this now and I don't want you to have it," that level of selfishness just means that you're in a tremendous amount of misery compared to somebody whose level of selfishness is to be of service to people. And I'm sure the mentality of being of service to people is a form of misery compared to another level of selfishness. So I don't buy into selfishness, but I think what you're pointing to outside of that, which is kind of a justification of narcissism through spirituality, is what I would call that. This idea that I'm going to make myself special or big or, I'm gonna get all of my id needs met through the activities I'm doing in the world, whether it be business or art or whatever. And I'm gonna justify it with a whole bunch of spiritual talk and things like, I'm gonna listen to my truth, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's a real risk. It's not to pretend it's not there. It's not even like the risk is that I need to, see if it's there, the risk is that I need to find the more and more subtle versions of that in play in myself. And the lucky part is that it's misery. So I can find those parts pretty easily if I'm just paying attention to where I'm not aligned, where I'm in friction with myself. And so that's the work. That's the work. But from an outside point of view, there's really nothing I can say that somebody who's not being assertive with their own needs is going to hear that's going to make me sound anything but selfish.

How much concern do you have that, you know, these, these tools getting out there en masse, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people using, like, taking these courses in a decentralized way and bringing this into their lives with all of their shadows, what concern do you have that this could become weaponized en masse in ways that you don't expect, in unintended ways?

Oh, I hate this feeling. And now I'm going to love this feeling. It's inevitable. I'm going to say something that's a little risky here, but there's an atrocity that occurs, and it is through that atrocity that 10 other atrocities are prevented. And it's through the prevention of those atrocities that the next atrocity occurs. I don't see a way around good being corrupted into bad and bad creating the next good. It seems to be just the way of things. So, it breaks my heart and that I know to some degree that this stuff has already been weaponized. I know that on a small scale, someone's gonna bring the view And they're going to say something like, you're not asking how, what questions to somebody, to their wife. And their wife's going to be like, fuck the view. And then like the view is going to be seen—

You're not in wonder enough.

Right, yeah, you're not in wonder enough. Yeah, that exactly. And then it's just going to become a new morality. And then somebody is going to feel oppressed by the morality. And then they're going to be like, screw view. That thing is just blah, blah, blah. And then they're going to— Yeah, it's just, I don't know any way for that to be prevented. And it breaks my heart. And it's been happening for, I mean, look what people have done with the words of Christ or the words of Buddha. And they oppress themselves and others with them all the time. It's going to happen here. It happens with the internet. Anything, anything of significance gets used to oppress people eventually. Even love gets used to oppress people.

Or the idea of love.

Yeah, exactly.

So wrapping this episode up, what is your vision of a future, like 5 years from now, where view conversations are a thing that people just have all the time and it's become, like, let's say it's successful and it becomes just part of the social lexicon. What does that world look like to you?

It's all happening and I'm somewhat blissfully unaware, I think is my, version of like the best-case scenario. The best-case scenario is one in which— and in a weird way this is already happening— where the repercussions of the work are far beyond my capacity to see them, and they have extended into other people's work. And now there's new and better tools out there that have built on these tools. And on a personal note, it would be nice to be continuing to be excited about the business and continuing to be trying new projects and funneling whatever resources we create into bigger explorations of self-discovery in the world. And I've done it all inside of a balance where my children still feel loved and cared for and that they know deeply that they're the priority over the work. That would be my vision.

Well, thank you very much, Joe.

A pleasure. You got me crying, man.

Thanks. Mission accomplished. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.