Becoming Buddha: How to Be Happy with Jerry Colonna | 1157 | Dave Asprey

I remember years ago I was a guest on a CNN special about depression in Silicon Valley. After my appearance, I got a phone call from the head of HR for a very, very large software company. And she said, jerry, we need your help because, and this is what shocked me. Health care claims for depression and anxiety for the children of the employees had been up 35, 45%. And this is pre pandemic.

Yeah.

So one of the consequences of those with power not doing this kind of work is that children suffer.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is a fun interview because our guest is a high powered executive who ran into some health problems and actually very successful guy. And we're going to talk about what success really looks like. So many of you, when you're listening to this, you have a lens on the world of like, how do I become more successful as a human being? And there's many different definitions of success that I've gone through in my career. And I think you're going to find a lot of wisdom here. And this is unrelated to why he's on the show, but when he was 25, he was editor in chief of Information Week magazine. And this is something I haven't mentioned on the show before, but the first time I was ever mentioned on the front cover of any magazine was Information Week when I was maybe 24. And it was an article about how email was actually freeing up time for people. This was at the time before email became the scourge of the earth. And it was, it was funny. I'm like, look at me, I'm at Information Week. I'd been in Entrepreneur magazine before that, but I wasn't on the COVID It was just my name on the COVID But at the time I was like, look at me, I'm successful in my IT career. So, Jerry Colonna, thank you for that, that mention many, many years ago.

Dave, I had no idea that that connection was there. And thank you for surprising me with that. I would have been sorely disappointed if I heard that story on email. So thank you for sharing that just now.

You've got it. You were also a founder of Flatiron Partners in New York, which was one of the biggest and most successful early stage investors. Your partner at JP Morgan Private Equity, and we'll say a big name VC kind of a guy. Good way to put it.

Yeah, I was a mocker. That's good Yiddish word. I was a guy who, I was a Big wig.

Nice. It, it's, it's become, it's become something interesting for me because when I was 12, I read an article about what venture capitalists do and like, that sounds like the most fun you could ever have, like just helping entrepreneurs. And I was so excited, like, someday I want to be a vc. And years later I had a job on Sandhill Road working for a vc and like, this actually kind of sucks. And then I, I started Bulletproof and I got schooled in what VCs really do, which, which is always aligned with partners or with the CEOs of portfolio companies. And so I've had this, this thing where I look at what you've done and I've talked with VCs from the generation before me and they're all enormously wealthy. But there's a wisdom that comes in from just seeing, you know, success and failure over and over and over. But most of them by and large are not happy people. They're, they're kind of burned out people. I see a lot of broken marriages, by the way. I am also divorced, but we consciously uncoupled. And I would say it's not a broken marriage, it's a successful marriage that ended up, and I also see a lot of alcohol, drug abuse, like it, it's not always a happy place. And you seem like you've gone from what they used to call you the Yoda of Silicon Valley. You seem like you've made some kind of personal transition that's worth sharing with listeners because you're a Buddhist, a coach, you run the reboot podcast and you talk to high, high performance CEOs to help them not do the stuff that you and I have both done. And so that's why you're on the show today and welcome.

Well, thank you for that. And I'm still stuck on a 12 year old reading an article about what VCs do.

It was an entrepreneur magazine. I, I, I wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was like seven. Like I'm start a business someday. It's going to be a thing. And my friend's like, I'm going to be a baseball star. And I'm like, that's dumb. And I, I, I'm just a nerd, right?

I, I was just going to say that was the word I was going to use. I feel kinship with your nerdy self because I was probably reading similar kinds of things. Not quite business, although I did dive deep in some strange business biographies. I was always fascinated by the individual, which, and, and to roll it all the way back, back when I was at Information Week, my first job was as a reporter. And so I really enjoyed knowing the person behind the story. But to your question, yeah, so I'm 60 now, just to give some context. And I walked away from being a VC at 38, so quite a number of years ago, quite a number of lifetimes ago, if you will. And the short story on that is that the reality of the emptiness of success, of material success, hit me like a ton of bricks around 38 years old, where I had gotten to the point where the more outward success I had, the worse I felt inside. And the simplest way to understand it was that the inner me was constantly at odds with the outer me. And that which was proffered as the path just felt shallow and empty. And it was so bad that after Flatiron wound down, which was concomitant with the collapse of the first wave of Internet companies, I joined JP Morgan. And within six or seven months, the depression that had been stalking me for years instead of lifting actually got worse to the point where I was suicidal and really broken. And so I walked away from it all, not sure what I was going to do next. But it's from that point forward that who I am today was born.

Talking about this hollowness. So you probably remember Exodus Communications back in the day. This is a company that created the, the data center industry and I was a co founder of their professional services group. The part of the business that I helped to start grew to 100 million a quarter in revenue. And soon I was doing, I was doing M and A, like the, the technology, M and A, like I would say, should we buy this or not based on the capabilities. So I, I rose very, very high up in the company. And I remember when I had $6 million in stock and I looked at a friend, said I'll be happy when I have 10. And I had the same thing. I don't think I was depressed, I was just angry and probably anxious and wouldn't have recognized either. The anger I knew, but the. Didn't know why. And the, the anxiety that's behind the anger and the fear that's behind that I wouldn't have, I couldn't even conceive of that because there's, why would you be afraid? You have all this money and you have a great job and know you're, you're changing the world by building all this cool tech. But there, there is that what you describe as hollowness where you're just not happy. Why does either economic or career success seem to almost more likely make unhappiness versus happiness.

Well, we could just sort of pause and recognize the wisdom teachings that all of us have been exposed to for millennia. Right? I mean, whether it's the Greek philosophers or particular religious tradition, they have taught us about the ephemeral nature of fame, praise money as a stand in for meaning, and yet it feels that it's something that we have to learn again and again. You know, if I can bring it back to something you said before. You, in, in describing me, you talked about how I work with high performing folks. And I'll confess that I wince a little bit every time someone says that because in, you know, first of all, my ego feels good. When people acknowledge that, that feels great. But I don't like the fact that my ego feels good about that.

I'm still astounded that a venture capitalist knows what ego is. So congratulations on your progress, my friend.

Well, 33 years of psychoanalysis and 22 years of sitting on the meditation cushion, I've got to have learned something.

There you go. And you are not a venture capitalist anymore. To be really clear, I'm just labeling you for fun.

Yeah. No, I'll take it. I have left the dark side and I've joined the force. I'm a Jedi now. No longer a Sith Lord. I'm teasing, but I want to go back to this word, performing. High performing, this phrase, because I think it's part of the answer to the, to the question that you asked, which is that we can get fixated, can't we, on projecting who we want to be, even at 12 years old, onto this idealized version of, quote, a high performing, successful business person only to be blind to their suffering. You know, I, I have a client who is a CEO of a very, very large company. They have over a hundred thousand employees. And I was meeting with him last week and he said, I wish everybody understood how anxious I am all the time.

Yeah.

You know, and it's not just the VCs, right? It's the very painful realization that ending the game of life with, you know, in Millionaire Acres, or ending the game of Monopoly with all of the real estate doesn't guarantee anything. It doesn't guarantee misery, but it doesn't guarantee happiness.

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Up.

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High performance, why thank you.

My ego thanks you. And for the record, I just want to say this. My ego is smaller than yours.

I don't know about that. I've got. No, you're probably right.

I forgot I was going because I amused myself so much. But the idea of performance there was. I would ask guests. In fact, I wrote a whole book called Game Changers about the answer to this question. It was what are your three pieces of advice for people who want to perform better at everything they do as human beings? You want to perform better as a human being, not perform better in your job or your sport, but in life. And from that evolved a bunch of of commonalities between 400 guests on the show and to date that book, it wasn't my bestseller by far, but it, it's the highest number of stars on Amazon and it's one where people will stop me in the street and say I read Game Changers and It changed my whole life because it was like a distillation of that. Not perform better at your job, not perform better at one thing, but what should you do? And funny enough, it was mostly about relationships and intimacy and choosing who you wanted to be and things like that that were not the world of high performance. You grind it out and all that. If I was to ask you that question, three most important pieces of advice for people want to perform better at being human, what would you say?

Now, it may be a struggle to come up with three, so I'll start with one and see where my mind takes me. I coined a phrase a number of years ago called radical self inquiry. Radical self inquiry. And I often say it's radical because we so rarely do it. And what is the. Is a process by which we slowly and compassionately strip away the mask that we wear so there's no place left to hide. I want to hold that thought and move on to an expression, a question that grows directly out of that. And this question was a, quote, game changer for me personally. And this question bounces around the Internet all over the place. And the question is, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions they say I don't want? I phrase that question very, very carefully. I use the word complicit, not responsible. Because when we start to do radical self inquiry, there's a defense mechanism that kicks in. And the defense mechanism goes like this. It's not really my fault, it's everybody else's fault, or, and this is an equally powerful defense mechanism, it's all my fault. And the truth is it's neither. So complicit relates to the word accomplice, which relates to the notion of, I am driving the getaway car. I'm not sticking up the bank teller. The second half of that question is, I say I don't want. I say I don't want to be dictated to by my ego. I say, I don't want to listen constantly to my anxiety, which then might make me resentful and angry. And yet doing so has served me in some ways. Now, why am I responding to your question this way? I have found that I can move away from suffering and more towards happiness on a more consistent basis when I am willing to look at myself a little bit with some love, with a lot of laughter, to say, how have I been complicit in creating the condition right now that I'm complaining about so that I can then make conscious choices about how I want to live that may not be Three. But I think that's the most important thing I would say.

Why do you avoid saying it's your fault and therefore your responsibility and you just say you're complicit?

So it's a good question. The challenge with it's my fault is that it's going to set off a do loop. Remember do loops from our early computing days where the processor gets stuck for Tran 101. Right. Right. We get stuck in processing the same information again and again and again, which is I'm a piece of shit, I'm terrible. And the truth is you're not broken, you're just stuck. Right. So there's. Daniel Pink writes about this well in his latest book the Power of Regret. When we get stuck in this guilt driven do loop where the, the result is constantly that I'm insufficient, that I'm broken, we actually can't move forward. But when we substitute regret, or as I said to offer to Daniel in a conversation, we had the word remorse, which I think is a super powerful word. By understanding that, for example, let's say that I, as a child, we endeavor to be an entrepreneur because it's going to give us a sense that we're in control of our own life. And the root behind that may have been the fear that we got by watching our father or our mother not be in control of their own life. In my case, it was watching my father lose his job at 10 years old and me making a deal with myself. I was never going to be dependent upon somebody else for my job. So that not understanding that that's actually what the driver is means that the choices I make remain stuck in my unconscious, stuck behind the mask. And the irony is the whole point of it was in order to feel safe, was that so that I could feel that I was in charge. Well, it turns out I'm not in charge. My unconscious is in charge. That's why that notion of complicity is really, really important.

I see why you take it in that direction. I've worked with about 1500, let's say highly successful people who've come through my neuroscience brain upgrade program. It's a five days using computers to guide your brain into the same state as an advanced Zen meditator. It also has a lot of deep inquiry. And universally it doesn't matter how wealthy or successful you are. The process is based on a very specific gratitude and then forgiveness. It's actually very Buddhist in its, in its structure. And I've never had anyone go through who didn't have work to do with their parents. Because there's all sorts of things that you say, well, I know my parents did that. I vowed to never do it again, and it becomes really kind of scary. When I was 30, I was fortunate to learn this, but I thought I was free of all that, and I realized, wait, I either do exactly what my parents did or the exact opposite of what they did, but both of those are states of control. And you realize how many decisions that felt like the right thing to do were just ancient programming in your tissues before you even had a prefrontal cortex. And they're still driving.

Dude, you speak in my language. I remember bringing some of this to a Buddhist teacher of mine who said with a. With a fairly thick Chinese accent, after I was complaining about some miserable aspect of my life, he just shook his head and said, dog tied to stick. And I was like, what the hell? He said, dog run away from stick. Dog tied to stick. Dog run to stick. Dog tied to stick. And it was a really profound metaphor for exactly what you're talking about. I will not be anything like them. Oh, I'll be just like them. Oh, wait. Dog's still tied to the stick. You know, the answer, of course, is to slip the collar, but that's the radical part. That's the part let's say, God bless you if you in your 30s, figured out how to slip the collar.

It took me about 10 years, but I feel like I've slipped the collar at this point. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's the slipping of the collar that actually enables us to realize we've been collared all along. And to your point, sometimes we're living out the. I call them subroutines, that low level programming that we don't even realize is operating right. The subroutine is, I am nothing unless I make a lot of money. Or the subroutine is if I pursue money, then I'm bad. Right. I mean, there's all these sub level programming going on. And, you know, for me, I wrote. I recently wrote a new book called Reunion. And in Reunion, what I'm really trying to unpack is what are the subroutines we inherited from our ancestors? Oh. Meaning our great grandparents and our grandparents. Because the more we start to unpack those belief systems, like, you know, I had a client who just struggled to be able to relax and celebrate the wins in their company. Well, after unpacking it, we stumbled upon ancestors who had survived a genocide. Mm.

It's common.

It's incredibly common. I mean, as soon as I said it to you. It's like I could see your whole body resonate. It's like, oh, right, foreign.

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So is my son.

Oh, you were as well?

No, my son.

Oh, your son was okay. And it affects you until you slip that collar. Literally.

Yeah.

And then. But. And it's not a conscious thing. It's in. In my work, I call the MEAT operating system, the MEAT os, like Mac Os, but better. It's below what you're not supposed to know what's going on in there. And meditation is one of the ways of looking inside and, and seeing what's in there. But once people clean that stuff out, they go down one of two paths. One is ancestral trauma and the other one is past life trauma. And I've chosen because I think it's rational to believe in past lives. Because if I'm wrong, I won't know, and if I'm right, it just makes me less fearful in this life. So I don't even care if it's true. I think it's actually quite real. But it doesn't matter if I think it's real or not, because. Right, if you're a computer science atheist, it's still the only rational way to approach life from what I've. I've come to discover. So when people do that, they, they tend to be called in one direction or another. And forgiving, or at least letting go of a reactivity to forgiveness is a trigger word for a lot of people. So we'll say becoming non reactive or becoming free of what feels like some. Someone stalking your people. Yeah, right. It's a major thing. And it reminds me of Stephen Porges, who was a guest on the show a couple times. Father of polyvagal theory. And you know, our vagal nerve is controlling a lot of these responses in the body. He tells a story of how he used his technology in London. In a large room full of people, he just plays certain sounds that caused you to be able to let go of trauma. And he had to stop playing the sounds after about 30 seconds in London because everyone in the room was melting down. And he said, dave, usually we have some therapists there. Usually there's 20 or 30 people in a room of hundreds who really need help. And he said everyone did. And he just realized everyone in London either lived through the bombing of London or they're displaced and they're immigrants, they had to leave their countries. And so everyone there was traumatized, at least in his room. And he said it was a much higher percentage of trauma than he'd seen in other places. And we're all rational, we think adults going about our day. And someone plays a sound or someone pushes an old button that you don't even know you have, and then you get this huge physiological feeling and then you become anxious or you become depressed. Why at the upper echelon of leadership, why is it worse?

Well, first of all, I just want to give you a word that may bring together the dichotomy that you identified before between looking at ancestors or looking at past lives. I think what we're really saying is the transpersonal matters. Ah.

So you have to bring in Stan Grof in transpersonal psychology, who's also been on the show. Love it.

And Stephen's experience was speaking to that because it was either direct experience or indirect experience. But. But that was in the room. To your question. I think the challenge and the reason that this shows up, and I'll give you the metaphor that. That comes from Plato, right. Man is trapped at the back of the cave, mistaking shadows on the wall for reality. You know, we're chained back at the ca. You know, at the back of the cave with our face to the wall, thinking what we see is in fact, what is going on. Why does this matter in leadership? Because. Because we give folks who are unfinished half baked enormous power. See, when business leaders or political leaders take that privileged position and have not done their work, they're not the only ones who suffer. Everyone around them suffer. So I'll reverse it by saying the more power one has, the greater the moral obligation one has to. I'll curse again. Trigger warning. Get your shit together and grow the F up. Because, you know, the subtitle of my first book reboot is Leadership and the Art of Growing Up. And I liken the work that you are doing, the work that you encourage people to do, the work that you've clearly done, and elevate to the process of actually taking one seat as a fully grown adult.

Yeah.

See, in that way, taking responsibility is very different. It doesn't produce guilt. It actually produces agency and authenticity. So it's very, very important because people are hurting. I'll share one more thing and then shut up. I remember years ago, I was a guest on a CNN special about depression in Silicon Valley. And after my appearance, I got a phone call from the head of HR for a very, very large software company. And she said, jerry, we need your help. Because. And this is what shocked me. Health care claims for depression and anxiety for the children of the employees had been up 35, 45%. And this is pre pandemic.

Yeah.

So one of the consequences of those with power not doing this kind of work is that children suffer and they didn't deserve this. You know, we talk about this transpersonal trauma, this interpersonal, intergenerational experience. Here's a challenging question. When is the lineage of trauma going to be broken?

It only gets broken when someone decides to break it. And then you don't give it to your kids, or at least you give.