Become Unstoppable By Rewiring Your Brain for Success with Dr. Roddy Carter

And it's urgent, Brad, because we need a critical mass of human beings who have mastery of their own brains. If there's just a few smart people who have mastery and the computers take over species done. So my work is urgent and I honestly, some days I work 18 hour days back to back because it's protecting the species. That sounds kind of heroic, but truly at the bottom of my heart, I believe that.

Welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo. And every week we bring you inspiring stories and practical strategies for building a successful business and a life living on your own terms. Now, today we have a very special guest joining us. His name is Roddy Carter. Now, Roddy is a physician, a performance scientist, a master coach, a corporate leader, and an author of a book called Body and Health A Journey to abundance. With over 40 years of experience in a range of medical disciplines and corporate sectors, Roddy's developed a really unique approach to personal mastery that is based on what he calls compassionate neuroscience and really understanding how to master your brain's operating system. He's worked with Olympic athletes, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and everyday people to help unlock their brain's life transforming power and experience profound joy, confidence, prosperity and thriving relationships. Really excited to have him on the show today and have him share his insights on how we can overcome our own limiting beliefs, our own emotions and rewire our brains for success. So, Roddy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hey, Brad, it's great pleasure to be here. I'm honored to be with you. I'm excited to have a chat and. Yeah, good to be here.

Well, honestly, the honor is mine. So I can tell you, as a career entrepreneur, the ups and downs are a roller coaster of emotions and confidence. You know, the successes are, but the failures, they seem to wreak a little bit more havoc on the confidence that I had when I was a little bit greener in the business. So I'm always looking for people who can help me, you know, get and keep the edge that I need while helping to smooth out the edges that keep on getting snagged on the door and keeping me stuck. So. And I keep on hearing just how effective and revolutionary your approach to this is. So I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

Beautiful. Yeah, no, that's great, Brad. I'm going to hop in right away there. And you're describing two things and you'll see the lens that I look through. You're describing the evolution of a business guy. Right? And you use that word green. And as a Neuroscientist who's sitting watching you there. I'm saying, I hope you're not being derogatory about that, because you're designed just perfect. And what you think was green yesterday was working perfectly for you yesterday. But as you evolve and develop and grow, the real trick is getting that brain to grow with you. And I think we're going to talk about that a little later on. But you designed perfect. So don't look back over your shoulder and be sad for that guy. He was doing a beautiful job.

No, absolutely. And it. Well, it is one of those things that I remember I was talking with some friends the other day, and we were just talking about new businesses and new ideas. And I remember saying something like, man, if you know, there's something about the. The curse of knowledge, right? Like once you know, when you. When. When you're. When you're too dumb to know different, right, you don't know what you don't know. So you kind of go in blindly with confidence and think, oh, I can take on the world and I can do this. And then you get in and you just discover that, you know, hey, a lot of things are harder than. Than it looked like if you haven't done it before. And now, having built multiple businesses and done this stuff, I'm very cognizant of all of the. The obstacles that are in the way. So that makes me a little bit more on my heels these days on new business ventures and taking new risks. And I just remember thinking, man, I wish I still had that. That kind of, you know, devil may care. Let's just, you know, put the head down and go. That confidence level that I did back when I was just kind of starting, does that make sense?

It makes so much sense. But here's the truth. You do have both. Okay, I said the whole magic is in my statement. You have both. Now, it's not either or. You have wisdom and you have risk tolerance, but you decide which to play and how much to play at any one time. And that's the trick. You know, I think this beautiful brain, which is designed so perfectly, leads us for the early part of our life. And that's deliberate. Because if you think about when we're born, especially human beings, we're born as the most useless organism on this earth. We are totally incompetent, and we have to be driven to competence. And so I picture Mother Nature arriving at each of our crib and say, hey, young man. Hey, young woman. I've given you this beautiful brain. You've got to listen to it, enslave yourself to it. And so we do that. And we're smart because it drives our survival. That's the primary reason, drives our survival. But nobody tells us the secret that it doesn't help us thrive. We have to change gear. We have to understand this brain better to get us thriving. So you're describing this high risk tolerance. This go out and get it. That's the appropriate response in that phase of your life. And now you're getting to a different stage. And your question now is, how do I use this brain to work best for, for me? And you do have both. You still have that risk tolerance, but you're deciding how to play that against the cautiousness of wisdom and knowledge. You're the master now. Before, before, you were the slave.

I love that. You know, and it's, you know, I was talking to one of the, your, your previous clients, and he was t. Because I was asking him about your work, and he goes, you know, it's really interesting. He goes, I think of when I think of Roddy, he goes, roddy, it's like the, a race car driver and, and the race car. And he was saying, you know, if you, if you put Michael Schumacher, the greatest, you know, F1 race car driver, in a broken down Honda, he's not going to be able to do much with that thing. But if you, if you put him in a Formula one car, like, you take somebody who really understands where they want to go and how they want to go, and they're skilled at operating this machine, you can, you know, win championships. And he's like, so what Roddy does is he really helps build that relationship between, like, the car, the expert driver, and the, and the Formula one car. And it seems like this, where the, the brain meets the self, the driver. And I loved that. I loved that metaphor. Would you agree with that metaphor? Is that one of the ways that you operate?

I love it. You know, and, and I love that, that the client who's been through the work recognizes that himself. I'm actually going to upgrade that metaphor because I think what would surprise everybody is that we are intrinsically, each of us a Michael Schumacher.

I like that.

Yes, we have to grab the competence to drive this massive vehicle, but we all have that intrinsic ability because we're born perfect. And you talk about the self. It's absolutely this relationship between the self, the me, the intrinsic Michael Schumacher and the vehicle, which is my brain. And I am not the same thing as the brain. I am the lucky guy who Gets given this gift that drives me to safety. It has authority over me first. It drives me to survival, and then I get the opportunity to say, hey, I want to get my hands on the wheel. I now become the driver. I decide to use this brain as a gift in service of me, my life, my desires, my ambitions. So, yeah, welcome, Michael Schumacher.

I love that, you know. So you describe your approach to personal mastery as compassionate neuroscience, or I've seen you call it neurocentric coaching. Can you kind of explain that in more detail and how it differs from, you know, to be quite frank, like there's a lot of personal development coaches and authors and gurus from, you know, Tony Robbins to a self help author, and everybody's got their kind of own approaches. But I really got curious when you were talking about this neurocentric approach, and I would just love for you to dive in and give me more details on what that means to you.

Yeah, there's so much loaded in that question, Brad. And with your permission, I'm going to just cut it in two and first address what you described as the compassionate neuroscience. And actually, ironically, this vehicle, this Formula one with Michael Schumacher the driver, is the perfect segue to that. So I'm an engineer, actually, I'm a scientist, but what I do with my clients is engineering. And that's very cold, very, very precise, very factual, very honest. It's like you've pulled this Formula one vehicle into the, what's it called? The Pit Stop.

The Pit Stop, yeah.

And the mechanics, the engineers arrive there, there's no gushy, mushy stuff. Either the brakes are working or they're not working. Either the tire is blown or it's not blown. And I'm not a mechanic, so I can't give you the intricacies of that. I can give you the intricacies of the human brain. And so the neuroscience is at precision engineering, but hey, it's operated by a very warm blooded human being. And if I arrived to you with a spanner and a toolkit, and I didn't come with this compassion of understanding and insight and appreciation of your journey, you described the struggle of the entrepreneur. I understand that deeply, warmly, humanly. And so for me, one of the uniquenesses about my approach is I'm merging those two, the cold engineering, the cold science, with a very warm human appreciation. So that phrase resonates very strongly with me there. And I can say a lot about how this compares with a lot of different approaches out in the marketplace. But did that make sense, that merging of the deep humanity and the precise engineering and science, you know, it makes.

A lot of sense especially to somebody like myself because you know, I'm a self professed personal development junkie. Right. In a. I say that in a good way because I'm always, I realize how important that those six inches in between my ears are to my happiness and success and everything else. So as I've approached different methods I found some of them are very just ethereal. Some people will call it woo woo and it's pure law of attraction and just think about the things you want, et cetera. And then there's other sides of it which I guess to the maybe the far extent I'm not that familiar with psychotherapy but like the real, you know, therapeutic world and there's like it where everything is pure science. And from what I've read and heard and talked about you, it feels as though there's a little bit of a merge there between the two. And it's not pure hard cold science, but it's not just esoteric woo woo either.

Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, I'm one of those scientists who's not afraid by what we don't know. A lot of scientists are afraid of what we don't know because their self esteem is around what we know and they professors, they profess what we know and their identity is locked in what we know. I'm honestly more intrigued by what we don't know. And through my own journey of self discovery, self awareness, self work which started in science, pure deep science understanding my brain, I can tell you it leads into very different wonderful areas that are out there, you know, and I don't want to throw words around but people talk about intention, manifestation and they have this kind of woo woo. We can just kind of gaze and look and we can attract things into our lives. I can show the neuroscience of that and the neuroscience of the way we operate. This beautiful brain is such that we, we do truly have a much bigger role in our future than we could ever imagine. So frightening actually. And I say to my clients, and this is a sobering moment, you think you had nothing to do with where you are today, you had everything to do where you are today. And so why not for tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So we have a dramatic impact on our future if we choose. And that little phrase is a phrase I use over and over again. If we choose, we can truly affect our futures through our brain I think.

And I think that is the key too because yeah, you can either choose to affect it or you can choose to be affected by the rest of the world around you. You know, it's it. That's kind of how I've always lived you. Roddy, I want to get in a moment, I want to get to some of the really specific insights, techniques, foundational principles of what you do. But you mentioned something a minute ago about, you know, when you, something about when you started off and you started engineering and science etc, what led you to the work that you're doing right now.

Wow, this could be a long story, but let me try and give you the Cliff Notes version. So I started my life as a physician and I always tell this story and it's a fun story because when I went to interview to get into medical school, I was a successful, smart, well achieving kid. So they were going to look at me seriously. Um, but I knew when they asked me the decisive question, I was going to give them precisely the answer they wanted. And I felt a little guilty about that. I almost felt they're going to say, hey, this smart kid has studied is, you know, and I decided, I even thought about faking my answer, but I decided no, this is the real deal and they're just going to get my answer. And they said, why do you want to be a doctor? I said, because I love people and I hate suffering. And I say that now because honestly, even well beyond my clinical life, that has underpinned everything I do. But that's how I started. I started as a physician and I went in and I learned about this human body and I started caring for people who I loved because they were suffering. And then I took a decisive step and it was honestly almost by accident. We can talk about that later if you want. But I specialize in exercise science and sports medicine. And here I was now going from working with sick people, some of whom wanted to be better, but not all of them, to working with the most hungry, determined Olympic athletes who were throwing their entire life at their goals. And so it was a spectacular opportunity to working with them. And there was a story that I will tell now with one specific rower. And I don't want to say too much because then I give away real names and my clients relationships are highly confidential. But this was a two time gold medal winner at the Olympics. My laboratory at that stage was in South Africa. So we had opposite seasons to the Northern hemisphere. So this was a Northern hemisphere elite Olympic gold medalist who came down their winter to our summer. We were at altitude, this beautiful laboratory and my job was to put her onto a rowing ergometer to get her to fail. And of course, we're doing all the measurements of her body, her lactate, her breathing, her oxygen, her heart, whatever, as she was getting there. And we are monitoring her response to training. So I have to get to fail. We're monitoring all the chemistry, the physiology, as she gets to failure. And I don't know if you've ever seen a rowing ergometer, but she's pumping, she's churning out wattage like I've never seen. Finally, I break her. And she drops the oar and it charges on a spring recoil into the machine. Big thud. She rips off the mask of her face and she collapses on the floor. And I thought, finally, but I thought I'd done it so well, she may not ever get up again. And then she stood up and she roared. She literally roared. And I said, roddy, you've been studying her biology, her chemistry, her physiology. That's not what makes her a gold medal champion. And it took me into a brain, and I realized that that's where I was going to spend much of the rest of my life understanding the champion's brain, never mind the physiology of the body that built it. So, coming back to your question, your question is, why merge these two here? I was a student of science, and I realized up there, where our science still today is relatively poor was the magic. And if I wasn't open to what we didn't know and understand yet, I wouldn't have been able to bring those two together. Does that make sense? A lot of other reasons I pursued this pathway, but that was a founding moment.

No, I. It makes perfect sense because especially with athletes at that level, the. I imagine the physiological differences between them is microscopic, right? Like they're, you know, the bodies are finely tuned athletic machines. Some have a little bit more advantage than others, but it's what it takes to push it and to go through when you think you're done and to train, maybe it's not in, you know, it's just in training, but to train a little bit harder, to train a little bit longer, to visualize a little bit better and to have those deeper reasons of why you're doing it. So that when you do think you're. You're done and you think you're about to stop, you don't stop and you just keep going.

Brad, you've nailed it. And I came up with a phrase that I used often. By optimizing your body, I could get you to the opening ceremony of the Games. You could walk under the country's flag, but in order to get you to a final or a medal, we had to go up north. And it's interesting, you talk about athletes, it's no different anywhere else. You talk about entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs that line up at the beginning of the race of life are very similarly talented. But the ones who get down to the end with a successful company, a successful exit, whatever they've built, that we absolutely have to understand and optimize the human brain. Otherwise we don't, we don't pick winners.

This is a perfect segue because I would love to know some of the nuances of the, of the neuroscience behind this kind of performance. Both, you know, as it applies to, you know, the Olympians and the, the highest achievers. But I'd also like to know how it applies to a few of us more what I'll call normal folks. I'm not called normal by most people I know these days, but people who aren't at the most elite levels of, of physical training, but, you know, they're, they're trying to achieve more success in, in their life, in their business. I know that, you know, one of my personal drivers is the, I guess I'll call this a fear, which I think is fairly common, which is that fear of never living up to your potential. Right. Like always knowing that, okay, this, this is an F1 car. It should be going 200 miles an hour. And why, why does it sometimes feel like I'm stuck at 100 and you know, 100 might be fast for some people, but when you know what the car is capable of, it can be really frustrating not to be able to feel like you can step on the gas. So I'd love to hear some of the insights that you've had about really the neuroscientific principles that either limits us, but also removes those limits.

Yeah, and you've called it out, out of the gate. It's fear. Fear is a profound, well designed blocker. It's the handbrake of life. It's what keeps us alive. And nature, in her great wisdom, implanted in the very first brains. Even pre apes, pre mammals, pre humans, we go back to the early reptiles. They implanted this. Fear was the first central nervous faculty we had. Fear was the first modality we had. Why? Because at that stage, nature was saying, my biggest challenge is survival. And so she implanted this fear, the capacity for fear that kept us alive. Fast forward now we get to the modern human being who doesn't live with a lot of What I call natural fear. I mean, yeah, we are loaded with fear. Every day you and I will talk about that and we recognize that. And any one of your listeners will know about being loaded with fear. But honestly, the survival fears are few and far between, particularly in an evolved, developed western country like this. And yet we have evolved so fast as a species, biologically, sociologically, technologically, that we've outstripped the evolution of our brain. We have evolved faster than biology ever could. So deep seated in every one of us is this organ of fear that is still doing its work. It's committed, determined work and it thinks it's doing a wonderful job. But no, it's the handbrake. It's blocking us over and over and over again. So my kind of early part of work with people is identifying fears.

I know that fears are. I catch myself all the time, like why, why am I so fearful of this? Like why am I having a physiological response to something that is not putting me in any danger? Why am I. And there is that. I think that's that other piece that when I realized there is a huge difference between danger and fear.

Right?

Danger is like real, physically, like there is something. There's a train coming at you, you better step off the tracks. Fear is like, I never even want to cross a train track because on the off chance that a train might hit me.

So answer your own question, Brad. Why? Why am I still waking up with these fears? Are you broken?

I don't think so.

I don't think so either. So it means there's something in a well functioning system which is designed for you to wake up full of fear. And that honestly is one of the first stages of work is recognizing that you have a magnificent brain doing a wonderful job. It's just not the job you wanted to do.

Right. So is the goal then to just get rid of the fear and be fearless?

Well, so I use the phrase conquer fear.

Okay?

I thought about it very strongly when I came up with that verb because conquer is a big word. It sounds like complete obliteration. Now I can't excise a fear. If I could go into your brain and surgically remove it, that might seem like the best prize. But we still need our fear. If you're standing the top of a 27 story building, if you're about to cross a seven lane highway, I, I want that voice of fear shouting really loud. Otherwise no more Brad. And that's a bad day.

That's true.

But it's around the authority over that reptilian Brain of fear. Because we had to enslave ourselves to our brains to survive. We gave up authority to this beautiful organ. Now as we become aware of the underlying biology, we're invited to take that authority back. So I use the phrase conquer because absolutely we should have that dominance over it. But it's more about the authority that I assume in making the conquest than it is in an annihilation. Does that make sense?

Okay, yeah, it does. But can you elaborate on that? The authority over the fear. Like what, where does this, how do you, how do you summon this authority in order to address your fears?

You don't have to summon it. It's there, okay? You just have to recognize it. When people learn about the underlying biology and they realize on the inside a self that gets to choose, now we're 90% of the way there, we get to choose. So inside every one of our heads are two voices. And I'm simplifying, it's, it's more complex than this. There's a positive voice of belief and there's a negative voice of fear, the survival voice of fear. And we literally get to choose. The positive voice of belief comes from the cognitive brain, the most advanced part of our brain, right at the top of our brain. That's the place of thought and reason, and belief is a thought and we respond to the loudest voice in our head. So if we are enslaved to the brain of fear, the reptilian brain, we are entrapped by the voice of fear. But when we co opt and use our brain, beautiful, powerful cognitive brain, the greatest gift that we have as a species now we can literally think our way beyond fear to success.

I love that. Let me, let me ask a challenging question from my own perspective. So what would you say about what, I guess I would call them irrational fears. Where, you know, a lot of times, you know, we know what we need. This isn't even fear based, but like we, we, everybody knows that if you want to have a fit, healthy body, you only have to do two things. Eat really healthy and go work out. And yet, even though we know this, it's oftentimes hard to motivate ourselves and go do it. When it comes to what I'll call irrational fears, I'll use fear of public speaking as one because it's, I think it's a common and probably the most common fear out there. We may be able to rationally tell ourselves, okay, we're not in danger, there's no, there is no threat to my physical body, etc. But I may have this fear of getting up on stage. And no matter what I tell myself, my body may seem to react completely differently and completely paralyzed, even though I'm telling it so. And I think that's obviously a very common thing, is like, we know it, but we don't do it. How do you approach that kind of paradox?

Yeah, I mean, again, Brad, you've nailed it. And that story, everybody's story, the human story, empathizes, so resonates so deeply with me, and I'm going to tell you why. So I was kind of at the top of my career. I was, ironically, at the time, running the biggest cardiovascular research program in the world. But I was crapping out physically. Exactly the story that you're talking about, this guy. And I knew better than anybody else. I had trained elite Olympic athlete bodies. I knew how to prepare an elite body. Here I was, doing this massive research in cardiovascular wellness. I knew how to have this body. I was grossly out of shape. I was 80 pounds overweight. I was in horrendous condition. And I was the guy headed for my quadruple bypass. And. And I knew how to do better. You're describing the exact situation. And so I said, I'm going to fix this. And I went home to heal my body. And I was doing all the right things. We know what they were. The exercise, the right diet, the right sleep, stress management. I was doing everything. And I was struggling along. Struggling, struggling, struggling, struggling. And I'm going to tell you a story now. So in our beautiful home, we had this. Outside the bathroom, we had this big mirror. I call it a vanity mirror. The kind of mirror you see head to tail, and you spruce yourself up every day. And there was a problem, though. I had to pass this mirror twice a day, every day, in all my naked glory to get into the shower. And I hated the guy that I saw. I literally hated him. He was despicable. Despite all his knowledge, his intellect, his understanding about how to run this body. This body was just decaying, degenerating, falling apart in front of him. And I hated him. And every day, twice a day, I'd walk past this guy, and I hated him more every time. Now, to be honest, that hatred was one of the things driving me to change him. But it wasn't enough. I was crawling, crawling, crawling. And I was probably going to abandon my program any day. And then one day, something miraculously weird happened. No psychedelics, no weird intention, no anything. I stepped out of the shower and I looked at the guy in the mirror, and he looked back at me and again, he was a young athlete. For whatever reason, I saw the guy looking back and I saw inside there was this young athlete. And on that day, everything changed. Suddenly my turnaround, my physical healing was miraculous. And so here I am, this western scientist with his white coat and this peer review and fancy, fancy around me, and something happened. Holy crap. In my own life, like a toggle switch went. The day before, I was this disgusting guy going into the crapper, excuse my language. The day after, I was rebooting in dramatic fashion and reclaimed my life. What happened there? And I said, I'm going to spend my time understanding what happened up here to make that shift. You know what happened, Brad?

That was my next question. What happened?

The power game, it shifted from the power of the reptilian brain of fear to the power of self belief. I believed again that I was a young athlete. Now, if I could take that shift, that flip from south to north and bottle it and sell it, you and I wouldn't even be talking. You couldn't get close to the island that I was living on to interview me, right?

You're absolutely right.

Now I wish it was that easy, but there is a way.

Yeah, that's. That was my question. Like, did you ever identify? Because that feels like that was almost an immediate epiphany thing that just happened. It wasn't necessarily a technique that you consciously did. So is that what you. Were you able to kind of reverse engineer what happened and then do that at will?

That's a good question. You're wrong. I earned it. I earned that spectacular tipping moment. And that's what I do with my clients today. It's a simple insight, a simple methodology, a simple understanding and approach. But we have to do the work. And I can't tell anyone clients when they're going to tip, but I can teach them today how to suppress that voice of fear, build the voice of belief. And then suddenly, in a moment, I had a conversation earlier today when a client looked at me and she said, from last week to this week, she said, roddy, I've got it, Roddy, I'm there. And you know, she was shining confidence and light and brilliance and genius in a way I'd never seen from her before. And she done the same thing. I call it the psychic push ups. You do the work.

Tell me more about that.

You do the work, you do the drills, you go through the exercises and magically we tip that balance. And suddenly self belief and self confidence takes over from self doubt and fear.

I Love that. Can you give any examples or context on like the exercises? Like what kind of exercises help do this for you?

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of them. And we operate both at the level of fear and we work at the level of the oper of the cognitive brain. I call it the operating system, by the way. The brain operating system. When we understand the brain operating system, we can have the brain operating you and I and most regular human beings. And we're all regular, by the way. Even Hussein Boltz, he's kind of not regular the way he can run, but we're all regular. Most regular folk understand the operations of the cell phone better than we understand the operations of our own brains. The supercomputer that still today is more powerful than the biggest Silicon Valley supercomputer. We don't know how to operate that, but it's simple. There's this brain operating system. So we use techniques to minimize fear and to maximize belief. Minimizing fear is getting close to it, understanding it, interrogating it, truly appreciating that it has some deep intrinsic value. And we have exercises that we take people through that to understand that belief. We can reinforce belief in a lot of different ways. You want to. You want to know my favorite way? There's a story involved, by the way. If you open for a story, it's a story. But a beautiful research project, that's what we're here for. You want it? All right, so Amy Cuddy is a wonderful researcher, social science researcher, and at the time she did her research, we knew that this beautiful brain communicated with the body. Just think of yourself. Think of, you can see somebody sitting in a park, depressed, miserable, sad, and you know that they're depressed. And the brain has communicated with the body and so the body is slumped over. You think of the days when you're feeling dejected and you walk around and you don't care what you look like and you're just slumping around. So we knew as scientists that the brain was communicating down to the body. What we didn't know was it communicating the other way around. So what Amy did, she said, and she was working with a student population, getting to the end of their college undergraduate years. She knew they were all going for interviews and she said, ah, let's break a big group in two. We're going to train all of them, both groups in interview technique, how to research how to understand the person you're working with, the questions you should be asking and answering. We're going to give them state of the art interview training. And then one of the groups, we're going to take off one side and she said, I'm going to give you a very simple exercise before you go into your interview. You're going to go into the bathroom and you're going to stand in front of the mirror with a big hands up V for victory sign. And you're going to hold it for two minutes. I don't care who walks in and out of the bathroom, how stupid you look. You're going to stand in this power pose for two minutes. She then randomized them and she went in for the interviews. And nobody knew who evaluated the outcome, who was in which group, and the way I'm telling the story, when she looked at who won the jobs, you know, which group won more than the other one. So this technique that looked silly of getting our bodies into power poses, influencing the confidence of our brain, it worked in real life and they got more interviews. So we teach people how to build body poses, hold body poses, I call it a swagger. And there are all sorts of fun, cool exercises like that where we train this brain. We activate, we optimize the belief, the cognition from the top of the brain, which then suppresses and overrides the fear.

I love that. You know, it reminds me of, I heard this a long, long time ago and I've tried, I still do it once in a while. I'll try it where they've, I don't know if you've ever heard of this exercise. Like take, if you're feeling sad, they say take a pencil and bite it. Because when you bite the pencil, like it forces you into a smile. And if you just do that for long enough, your, your, your face feels the smile even if you don't feel happy. And it starts to almost work. Like you're saying, like your physiology is talking to your neurology and it's almost fooling it. Right? Like it's whatever works. It's also like one of my favorite. Somebody told me, somebody also told me one time it's impossible to be angry and say the word bubbles at the same time. Kind of true.

Yeah. It's not real. It's real. It's real. I picture the brain sitting, looking down there and it's getting signals back up from the body. By the way. It's one of the main problems with stress. So the stress cycle is you and I go into a situation which is alarming and we get anxiety, this emotion in the brain which says, trouble coming, the voice of fear. Listens and starts yelling, danger, Danger, danger. And importantly, sends messages down to the body. Appropriately, you know, on the plains of Africa, where we were first evolved as a species, when danger was coming, this body had to be activated. So the brain sends messages down to the body by the way the body reacts. Because the master is the brain and the servant, the body says, yes, I will do that. And so it activates for danger. And then this dumb old brain looking at the top looks down and says, oh, no. The body says, it's dangerous. There's bad things happening. It must be true. And so we have this virtual cycle where the brain starts the alarm bell and then gets the echo and says, oh, no, this is real. And so we get locked in stress cycles. And that's the power and the simplicity and the stupidity of this beautiful brain. But when you understand that now you can break that cycle.

I like that. You know, it really, it just brings me back. I'm starting to really understand the metaphor that my friend who's a client was talking about the car and the driver. And really, you know, you've got to take that. You got it. Sometimes you got to take that car in. Sometimes the driver's tired. Right? I'm just, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna drive off with this metaphor a little bit. But, you know, sometimes the driver is tired and he's in his eyes and he's not driving the car very well. There's nothing wrong with the car, but sometimes there's something wrong with the car. Sometimes the engine needs tuning. Sometimes it's, you know, the wheels are a little flat. And you have to realize that, you know, even if you have the desire to do something you might be operating against, you know, there might be something, some sub programming that you're operating against and it's keeping you from getting where you want to go. And, you know, you need to get that tuned up. But in order to get that tuned up, you actually have to understand that, yeah, there could be a problem with the way I'm thinking, not just what I'm thinking. So I love, I love your approach to this because it really does. I know for people like me, I like to think of, like, I like this practical magic, right, where it's. I like those. I like the neuroscience, I like the science behind it that backs up the everything else I'm going to do. And it really seems as though you've blended the two very well. Almost like blending science and spirit almost seamlessly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and, and I use a phrase, and it's a bit corny and a bit stupid, but this is real, real life.

By the way, I've got a show called Bacon Wrapped Business. Corny and stupid is okay on this show.

Oh, very nice. Oh, I love that. I love that.

Yeah, you're in good company, but.

I know I'm in very good company. But you know, being a scientist, when I started taking this methodology out to individual plants, I was the guy wearing a white coat looking over my shoulder, watching how it worked, studying what was working, what was not working. And the guy in the white coat looking over my shoulder would say from time to time, when I. Not from time to time, to be honest, very often most of the time looking over my shoulder. When we had done our work, I was mind blown. The transformation in the clients who understood this put in the psychic push ups was absolutely mind blowing. Now it's corny because it's a pun, right? Obviously we're working with the mind, but the results were absolutely spectacular. And I, I'm proud of the work I've done. I consider myself a translator of this knowledge. I translate it for human beings in a way they can understand and apply it in their lives. But that's my role. The rest, the knowledge, the genius, the system, the way it's put together, that's not me. I'm just an observer. And so when we understand this magnificent science and we live our lives by it, bang. The results truly are mind blowing, unexpected beyond our wildest dreams.

You know, one of the parts of your, one of the parts of your program, you talk a lot about being unstoppable in that feeling. I have a really good feeling of. I have a really good idea of what that means to me. But what does that mean to you? Why do you, you know, why that word, why unstoppable?

Well, so as I was. That's such a cool question. As I was thinking about this program, I've got a course. So I started the work one on one with individuals. I said, can I take this from one on one individuals with the same mind blowing impact to a bigger group. And I started hosting workshops with this methodology and material. And I thought, well, what am I going to call the workshop? I didn't need a name for it when I was working with individuals, but now I needed a name for it for a workshop. I thought, what is the best name I can come up with? And I thought this word unstoppable popped into my mind and it comes from my own background and I can share that as well. But I said, roddy, really? Really. Do you know how big that word is? Unstoppable. You're going to go and tell somebody that we're unstoppable? And I hesitated for a while and I said, okay, choose ones a bit more modest, a bit more respectful, a bit more honest. Brad, I can't, I can't find a better one. Because we are built unstoppable. Mother Nature has iterated just like engineers in Silicon Valley for 400 million years. Their design is perfectly genius and they've built us to be unstoppable. Look at the fact that from the earliest forms of life to today, we're still here 400 million years later. That's pretty darn unstoppable. And human beings are the apex of the triangle. With this brain, she has made us truly unstoppable. And we're only stoppable when we don't understand the baked in genius. When we don't take advantage of the natural algorithms which are in us around success. And we don't switch from a survival based organism to an organism that desires and deserves thriving. That's the moment where most of us as adults are stopped.

And think about perfect sense.

Yeah, yeah. Think about the moments in your life when you felt stopped. And yet maybe for whatever reason, six months later, two years later, five years later, the same human being, Sunny, was at the top of their game. That's the same motor vehicle, that's the same Formula One car, kind of dawdles around the track on one day and guns it down the track another day. It's the same vehicle. It's the operator now who understands the vehicle and is running that vehicle better.

You know, that's, that's a really profound statement you just made as well with the, when you think about, I'd never really given that much thought, but when you go back to this unbroken line of survival, right, we're all worried about survival, you know, that's our biggest fear. But we are, like you said, we are at the, the apex of an unbroken line for hundreds of millions of years of actually surviving. But not only surviving, thriving. And just the fact that we're here gives us evidence that so far at least, I guess genetically, you know, we've been unstoppable. I also, you know what I also like about that word is you're not saying, you're not saying you're going to be the most successful this or the most successful that and you know, saying that everybody's going to be the gold medalist because not, not everybody can be the gold Medalist. And not everybody can achieve every single thing they've always wanted in life, because that's reality. But the idea of being unstoppable to me kind of means, well, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to keep going. And no matter what life throws at me, you're not going to stop me. I'm going to keep. I'm going to. I'm going to get where I'm going. And you can try to slow me down, but you're not going to stop me because I'm on. I'm on. There is something really visceral and emotional about that word because it means, yeah, even if I don't. Even if I don't get everything, I didn't stop. And I know, like, back to an entrepreneur, One last piece. Back to an entrepreneur. You know, business failures and the ups and downs, that's part of the. That's part of the game. And you only kind of lose when you stop and you go, well, throw in the towel, I guess I'm not going to do that anymore. And you just kind of shrink. And so, yeah, that's powerful.

You only lose when you're beaten. You only lose when you give up power and accept defeat. And now I'm not saying that every entrepreneur should work on a dead idea or an idea that proves itself to be strategically unsound. I'm not saying everybody should beat themselves to death sometimes. Being unstoppable is a giant pivot into a new direction with new learning and that sort of thing. So it's not that I say you beat yourself to death, but, you know, Brad, in the term of the. Of the name of the workshop, which is now, by the way, the name of an online course as well, the second word is just as important. It's unstoppable you. Unstoppable you. This is the self who pitches up in the seat of the Formula One vehicle. And it's the combination between the self and the vehicle, that Formula one vehicle, which in our analogy is now this beautiful human brain. It's that relationship that's critical. Unstoppable, you. And, you know, we can go deep into. Into philosophy and deep psychoanalysis and psychiatry even.

We are game for. I'm game for that journey.

We identify this version of self. This version of self we see somehow in our mirror and it's baked in with all these limitations. And we buy into that bs. And you know who buys into that bs? This beautiful brain buys into the bs. You know why? Because my brain first met me when I was a little guy and I was imminently stoppable. And you and I have had this experience. I tell a wonderful story where, you know, I have a cousin who was much younger than me and I met up with again with her many years later, and she was telling a story. I said, whoa, you can't be doing this. She was going to travel international. I said, you can't travel international. You're still a little girl. And I realized how this highly intelligent brain had locked her in where my brain first met her. And I suddenly said, whoa, that happens with us too. My brain first met me as this stoppable little thing, and so it still thinks I'm stoppable. Well, now it's my job to re educate that beautiful brain that I've grown up. I'm smart and talented and experienced. I've got emotional depth and breadth now as well that I never had back there. And so I have to re educate my brain, my motor vehicle, and says, whoa, this really is Schumacher. Let's gun it.

Yeah, I like that too. It's like, you know, that the brain has too many memories that, you know, served it. You, you mentioned this in the very beginning. It served us at one point in our lives, and then at another point in our lives, it no longer serves us. We need something else. But that stuff's still back there, right? It's still in the memory. It's still in the memory bank. And oftentimes it still gets pulled up. That's why I know, like, going back, like childhood traumas, whether they be big traumas or smaller traumas, they stay with you and they, they influence your behavior throughout your entire adult life. Because it's still stuck back there.

Yeah. I have this beautiful image in my mind, with your permission, of this massive, magnificent Formula one vehicle being dropped off outside your house. And they've got it all tuned up. And then just before you hop in, the engineers say, no, no, ramp that down, ramp that down. It's just this little guy, Brad, who's hopping in, right? And so you get to go 25 miles an hour in this massive rocket ship on wheels. And that's what your brain is doing. Your brain says in the morning, wakes up and says, oh, there's little Brad again. Let's treat him gently, you know, and, and refines you and, and holds you in there, and I'm using you. But it's, of course, it's me and.

It'S every other human being, hilariously, just to say, like on this story, that reminds me of my wife. So A few years ago, her company did a trip to like a NASCAR track and everybody got to do a couple laps in an actual NASCAR car by themselves. And she got in there and she, you know, this is a car that can go, I don't know, like 180 miles an hour. And you know, she's going around the lap, but she was laughing. And when she was done, she goes, I looked down at the speedometer, I never did it more than 70 because I was so like scared that this thing would take off. Like she goes faster on the highway than she did in this NASCAR track with all of the safety harnesses because, yeah, there was fear there.

Funny. Hey Brad, I want to pick up on something else you said. You know, all these memories, these ancient visions of who we used to be, those are only algorithms. This brain is a supercomputer. So when we understand that it's simply the programming of the supercomputer which is wrong. Nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong with my body, nothing wrong with my brain, nothing wrong with the supercomputer, it's just the programming. Now we set about changing the programming and when we do the simple work as we've got in brain operating system, it's changing the balance between cognitive brain and reptilian brain of fear. I work with individual clients with a far more extravagant model. And we go deep inside understanding what these ancient algorithms are that sometimes we've even acquired from our parents, either through modeling or maybe there is some real transmission. There's fascinating information about possible genetic transmission of some of the this stuff today. But at the end of the day, there are only algorithms. This brain is a supercomputer and we have the ability to override. We can reprogram, we change structure and function of the human brain so that we operate as a formula one if we choose.

That's and I love it's back to the if we choose because it really comes down to the choice you make that you know, you have to have a commitment. Do you want to be, do you want to drive the F1? Do you want to do the laps? Do you want to. And you know, not everybody does, but for those people who choose to, it's good to know that there is a path to make that happen. So Roddy, when you talked about working with individuals, so you do work with, you know, one on one and then you said you have a program that really called unstoppable you that encapsulates, you know, your methodologies, etc, what is, what is that program like? Like what is it like to experience that. How long does it, how, how long does it take? Is it full with all these exercises? Give me a little bit more information on that.

Yeah, I mean, you described it well. So, so the genesis of this was, was I was, I was working with individual clients. My roster is limited, if nothing else, by the amount of number of hours in a day. And I felt so frustrated, I so frustrated because this is knowledge that every one of us should have. Frankly, I should have been taught this in medical school, but I wasn't. There are 8 billion human beings on this earth, 8 billion brains. Everybody who owns a brain should be taught this stuff. But there's only a small number of people who can come into my space and learn this from me. So I said, well, that's why I went to workshops. Can I do it one to many and one too many is not enough? Because this world is a gnarly place. There's a lot of bad stuff going on. And I think if we understood our brains and we operated in a, in a more socially acceptable way, it would be a much nicer place to live. So in my frustration and my desire to help people live their lives beautifully, I said, let's go online. Let's turn this into an online course where people can learn at their own pace and their own time how their brain works. And so it necessarily has to have loaded into it the understanding about the brain, but all the exercises. So we actually have two courses live and we've got another one that's, that's in the pipeline. The first one is what we call the flagship course. It's a 14 lesson course. We advise people to take it once a week. So it takes you over 14 weeks. I like the flagship course because it has the right volume of information. You learn enough about the human brain to be really good with it. And if you do it over 14 weeks, it's the right amount of time to start rewiring, changing the structure and function of the human brain. We have a shorter version which I call an intensive. We focus the information into a seven lesson course. Because a lot of people you can imagine say, Roddy, 14 weeks is a long time. I still say it's the right time, but people say, no, no, no, give it to me quicker. So we've intensified it and we've put a second course in the business context. So it's very specific for business leaders. The examples, the case studies, the exercises are focused on a business leader. So we have those two and we're producing a third one for competitive Athletes going back to my roots with Olympians. And what we're doing is we're taking the science, giving them the science, giving the exercises that. The psychic push ups that changes the functionality of the brain. And yeah, we deliver unstoppable. You.

I love that. That's brilliant. I mean, the work that you're doing is so important, whether it's with individuals or in, you know, self paced, because there are so many people who really just. They could have so much more, they could be so much more if they just realize that there are things they can do. All of us, I'm saying they, we. I need to put lump myself in there that little switches when they flip can work. Miraculous results. It's funny, Roddy, when you talked earlier about looking in the mirror and it was like a switch flipped when you looked at yourself when it comes to fitness and health, that was your catalyst. I had the same thing years ago where I was, you know, overweight and out of shape, and I was talking to a, a friend of mine who is kind of like a fitness guru, etc. And we were just talking. And I just remember after that conversation there was nothing specific he said. We were just talking. And when I went home, something switch, some switch flipped in my brain. I started working out regularly, I started eating very healthy and I saw myself completely different and I felt different. And I just, I remember thinking that exact same thing you said, which is if I could bottle this, this switch flipping, because I don't know how I did it, but somehow the damn thing happened and I got amazing results. And I know I've looked back at my life when I've come to challenging parts to go, what was it that made me feel unstoppable, that made me just do this so effortlessly? So I've been on a quest to recreate that. I love the fact that your intellectual property, your ability to translate this knowledge, as you said, I love how eloquently that was like, this is there. I'm just trying to translate it so people can understand this evolutionary biology that we're all, you know, working with and the spirit that guides it. I look very forward to actually pursuing this and understanding what you're doing and how you're doing it. Because a little, a little change can go a long way.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And you know, Brad, two things. The first thing, your description of that flip. Something happened in your conversation with that guy. Somehow there was a mirroring. And when you looked in the mirror, you believed, if he can do it, maybe I can do it, something beautiful happened in there. And, and, and as the dynamic shifted in your brain, suddenly, you know, we spoke about intention earlier. You know, it's hard not to say that people would say, oh, the universe only delivered him some power. No, inside, inside his brain, something shifted and he was able to seize the power that was rightfully his. And then just a second slightly related observation where you started with there's upside for every single one of us. It takes me back to my primal drive around suffering. The adult human condition seems to have suffering deeply embedded in it. And it's this question of sub optimization and I hate seeing that. I hate seeing suffering. So my passion, my drive, my mission is to help people self optimize. When we self optimize, that pain goes away. And I've done a good thing.

That's absolutely brilliant. Roddy, we come to the top of the hour here, but this has been an absolute honor to talk to you and it's been very informative, you know, for, for my listeners and for anybody else who wants to go deeper down this rabbit hole and really explore compassionate neuroscience and look at what else you've done and how you do it. Where do they go to find out more information?

Brad, probably best is, is, is the website. We've put together my website very thoughtfully. So hopefully people can learn a lot there, access a lot there. The two courses are accessible there for sure. Contact information is there. So that's probably the best place. My website is Roddy Carter, same as my name. R o d d Y-C-A-R-T-E-R.com and if that doesn't work, ping me through that and, and we'll figure.

I got a question for you though, Roddy. Can we put something a little special? Do you have anything for my listeners that we can send them to a special link so if they've, if they've already paid attention for an hour with us, you think we can find something to throw together that they'll be able to walk away with?

Brad, I, I'm pretty sure we, we can. We'll turn this into a Formula one treat. How's that? Well, I'm not promising a Formula one car. They've got to go and build that themselves. But yeah, for sure. Let's, let's figure something out. We'll put something special there. Fantastic. Thank you, Brad. How about with you and your listener, us?

Is there a, like Roddy Carter dot com? How about vip?

You just named it. You just named it, I guarantee.

Hopefully that's not already taken you and.

I will get together after this, and we'll leave something. A special treat for your listeners@roddy carter.com VIP I like that. VIP.

That's good. See, listeners, I'm always. And viewers, I'm always looking out for you. Roddy, thank you so much for being on this show and helping me. I mean, I feel a lot. A lot more clear on what you do and why you do it and why it's so uniquely effective and why I keep on hearing about people saying, you got to check out Roddy Carter's work. Or I've worked with Roddy Carter and my life flipped around. I mean, it's not just one person, it's several people. And I think the work you're doing is. Is some of the most important work out there. You know, I've been. You know, this is. We're recording this in. What is it? April of 2023. And one of the biggest trends out there right now is artificial intelligence. And. And really a new, almost like consciousness is upon this planet that we aren't figuring out. And everybody's trying to figure out artificial intelligence, I find out. But so few people are actually trying to figure out their own authentic intelligence and. And what they have to work with. And I. I just think that this, especially at this time in history, understanding that this is the most complex and powerful probably object, and I'm guessing in the universe, as far as we know, not trying to understand it and not trying to work with it. Especially now when there's a competing intelligence out there. It's almost an existential endeavor. And I think you're doing the work that needs to be done, done to help people understand themselves so that they can operate better. So just thank you for all the work you do.

Yeah. Can I say two minutes in this? Because we could spend another hour on this. AI Is the future. It's beautiful. It's magnificent. We as a species are going next level using AI I'm a huge fan, but. But, but, but. And this is where I'm terrified. Apocalyptic terrified, Brad. Because we're handing over authority, control of intelligence to an external being before we as individuals have authority over our own supercomputer. And that scares me shitless. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use that word.

But truly, you are absolutely allowed, because it does me as well.

It terrifies me. If we as a species hand over control to artificial intelligence before four, we have mastery of our own brains. That's where doomsday comes in. So I don't want to end and terrify your listeners, but I deeply believe that and it keeps me awake at night.

Well, but the hope, the whole part is, I mean, you know, just like in everything this is, the way I look at it is there's going to be winners and losers and the losers are going to be the ones who hand over all of their authority and all of their thinking to the machines. And those of us who survive and thrive and do really well are going to be the ones who use it to amplify our own innate intelligence. But we have to, we have to understand what that is and how it works and how not to get sucked into just outsourcing our thinking to somebody else. So your work enables people to better understand what they're doing, get more out of their own machine and, and, and, and become unstoppable to, to use the.

Pun and it, and it's urgent, Brad, because we need a critical mass of human beings who have mastery of their own brains. If we, if there's just a few smart people who have mastery and the computers take over. Species done. So my work is urgent and I honestly, some days I work 18 hour days back to back because it's protecting the species. That sounds kind of heroic, but truly at the bottom of my heart I.

Believe that not all heroes wear capes. But Roddy, I appreciate that you're doing the work and I look to do it as well for all my listeners. Go check out let's see what Roddy's Got to offer@roddycarter.com forward/vip. Or just check out roddycarter.com and see everything that he's doing. Roddy, thank you so much again for being a guest on the show. It has been absolutely terrific and I cannot wait to hear some of the feedback which by the way, if you're watching, listening and you want to write in with any feedback about this episode or ideas for new ones, you can just send an email to Brad Baconrapp and go Visit roddycarter.com VIP Roddy, I look forward to reconnecting with you here very soon.