How to Make Life-Changing Decisions Without Fear – Joe Hudson : 1314

If you've already dialed in your diet and your training, but you're still hitting a wall, it's probably not just aging. There's a powerful compound that your body used to make, but it doesn't make it anymore. It's called creatine, and it might be the missing link for your performance and your longevity. Puree has a solution for you. It's called Creatine plus. Because creatine isn't just for your muscles, it's for your brain and for your mitochondria. Creatine supports mitochondrial function, which supports cognitive clarity. And it's one of the most underrated tools for having more br brain energy, more recovery, and even for longevity, especially as you age or just because you pulled another all nighter. Puree's Creatine plus is next level clean and effective. Each serving has the clinically backed 5 grams of creatine plus 400 milligrams of taurine. This is a powerful amino acid that can support your brain, your muscles and your bones without any kind of jittery or stimulant side effects. Puree tests every single batch for over 200 contaminants. And they have the certified clean label from the clean Label project. You can even scan the QR code right on the bottle to see your batch's results. It's unflavored, it's easy to mix. Just toss it in water or your morning shake or even your danger coffee. No extra steps, no strange taste, just results. Add it to your routine and give your body and your brain what it's missing. Go to Puree.com Dave that's P-U-O-R-I.com Dave to get 20% off, including subscriptions.

I oftentimes say that one of my love languages triggering people.

When I get triggered, I am so excited. There is directly pointing to some part of myself I can't love.

Joe Hudson is a master coach who takes people to the edge of who they think they are and shows them what's possible beyond it. His work doesn't just change lives, it shatters limitations and rewrites them.

Just receiving a compliment, which is receiving just a little bit of love, can be so destructive to people that almost everybody you meet can't actually let it touch them. If you fully let that compliment in, if you fully accept it and let it touch you, it's going to erode part of what you think you are, which is the ego.

How do you teach people, whether they're leaders or not, to tune into an inner knowing Instead of to brute force it.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Hey guys, quick reminder.

If you're listening to this on your favorite audio podcast app and you haven't been over to my YouTube channel, check it out. Just search for the Human Upgrade or find me under Dave Asprey.

Bpr.

I post full video versions of every episode and a bunch of other cool.

Content outside the pod.

It's a great way to go deeper.

Into the content and connect with other biohackers like you. So leave a comment for me. Yeah, I'm actually gonna read them and poke around while you're there. There is a lot of stuff specifically for you. It really helps and it means a lot to me.

What percentage of people in the world do you believe actually know their authentic self?

You believe, kind of the human development tech on it, it's less than a percent.

Does that make you sad?

No, it doesn't. Because the same studies show that, like, overall humanity is getting closer and closer to that. So what? It doesn't make me sad, but it makes me motivated.

There you go.

I love that it used to make me sad. Yeah. Yeah.

Feeling empathy for everyone all the time is a poor strategy for personal development.

Right? Depends on what you think empathy is. I think.

Yeah.

So I think for me, if empathetic means I'm with you, but I'm not in you. No, I think it's. I think it's a great strategy if you redefine empathy. I like that. If it's. If the empathy is, I'm in your story, I believe your reality, I'm fully with your emotional state, which I don't actually think is true empathy, then I would say, no, that's a horrible strategy for self development. And it's basically driven out of a fear of, I'm not going to get my needs met unless I can influence you. Because I had a parent who was telling me that their needs were more important than mine.

Wow.

So generally, I think that's how that works. But if the empathy is, oh, I'm with you, but I'm not in you, then I think it's an incredibly useful tool and, and, and correlates with how well you can be with yourself.

Yeah. Okay, I like that.

Yeah.

What's the difference between empathy and compassion?

Yeah, I think the first way to think about that is the difference between compassion and being nice.

Oh, that's.

That's a big gap.

Right?

There's a huge gap. Right. So nice means I'm going to try not to offend you or upset you. Compassion means I'm okay to upset you and offend you. If that's actually for the greatest good.

Right.

Empathy is a very intimate thing, I find. It's like, oh, I'm with you in this situation. Compassion is. Are you willing to take the action that is. That is good for everybody? I think there's this misconception that happens, which is something to the effect of. My friend was a Catholic, and like so many stories with this guy, which are amazing, but he asked me one day that he has this issue where he doesn't know if God wants him to be good to other people or good to himself. And I said, oh, so your God is a sadist. Like, he set up a world.

This was Catholicism. Just double checking.

Yeah, this is a Catholicism.

Just kidding. I grew up in a Catholic family.

And he's like, I don't understand. I said, so your God set up a world where. Where that's the choice. That's not my experience of the choice. My experience of the choice is that if you're doing the thing that's deeply, deeply right for you, it's also deeply, deeply right for the people around you. And. And so much damage has been done when folks do, I'm going to sacrifice for this person or this thing. I think that's oftentimes where, like our giving, our charity, our relationships fall apart when you're not actually looking for the thing that is good for everybody involved.

Because you're only looking at what's good for the other person, you're saying, or for yourself.

Either one is destructive. There's a saying that is a quote from the soul of money, but it's from a tribe, and I think the tribe is Ecuador. But they say, if you're here to help me, no, thank you. If you're here to work together for a mutual freedom, let's get to work. Because when you're helping somebody, you're putting yourself above them. And there's like, that in itself is destructive. Wow.

That goes to spiritual ego. And there's a lot there. Oh, yeah, there's that famous book Debt, that talks about the history of debt. And the Inuit have this tradition where if someone comes and gives you some of their hunter kill, you don't thank them, because thanking them creates debt. And like, we're people and we just feed each other if we need it. And so I don't want to owe you. I don't want you to owe me because I know that whether or not there's owing, if I'm hungry. Hungry. And you've got some food, you'll give it to me. And it's a completely different view.

Yeah.

You think we can bring stuff like that into the modern world?

Absolutely. How so? My experience is that oxytocin and serotonin are more powerful than dopamine. My experience is that all the technologies we've created up until now can only really deliver on the dopamine. And so if you show people the power of oxytocin, if you show people the power of connection, if you show people the power of deep intimacy, then it has a way of providing that. But it only happens right now. I think with AI, this could change. But right now it only happens if people are in so much pain that they are looking for something different.

Some of the spiritual tech that's changed my life and that I brought into biohacking is very much about oxytocin. Things like heart rate variability training, neurofeedback. Like, there is tech, even some that now I've added AI to some of it where you can use it for something besides dopamine. But a little spice of dopamine usually helps people be motivated to get the oxytocin. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not a wonder. It's not. But it's just a. I think it's a preponderance of or waiting or recipe.

Yeah. You've developed a lot of self awareness in your process of learning how to coach other people, Right?

Yeah. Okay, Daddy. I mean, I was in a room for seven years, meditating, doing nothing else but worrying about money from time to time.

I understand the feeling. When I interviewed Kimbal Musk, yeah. I'd ask him a hard question and he would take a deep breath. Really cool guy. And then he'd like, look up here and he would come back and his voice would change. He sounded a little bit more like Elon. And he would go into, like, compute mode. It was really cool. And asked him about, like, what was going on.

Yeah.

When I ask you a good question, you reset your nervous system. You go. And then you look up to your. Let's see, this is your left. So you look up to your left.

Yeah.

And then you look up to your right. What are you doing when you do that?

That's a great question. And I'm doing it, which is awesome. Be aware that I'm doing it while it's happening. So. So neurologically speaking, if I'm thinking to myself, my prefrontal cortex is engaged, but nothing else is engaged. But as soon as I talk out loud, other parts of my brain start getting engaged. So a lot of the work that we do actually requires people to speak out loud because it's so much different than the thought in your head because you're actually connected. So in general, what I'm doing is I'm being connected to my entire system. I'm getting whatever it is, 11, 20 bits of information from my head a second. 11,000 bits of information, or 11 million some crazy amount from the rest.

Mitochondria, a lot of sensors and compute nodes, for sure.

So I'm checking in to see if there's congruence between. And the way I feel it is there's the head, the heart, and the gut. And the way I teach it is there's the head, the heart, and the gut. And so the way I think about the head is that's the prefrontal cortex. It's the thought. The heart is the emotional center of the brain, the mammalian center of the brain, and the gut is the reptilian part of the brain. And so I'm actually looking for alignment. And then I'm going up into my brain to figure out how to describe it.

Got it.

Right.

And then I'm checking that there's, like. How do I say it? And then there's the. Does that actually resonate in the entire system? Okay, I can say it that way.

So you're doing error correction kind of code there. Double. It's so cool that you mentioned congruence, which is something that is required for leadership and I think even just comfort in your own body, because everyone knows what it feels like to feel one thing and to do another. And it's kind of good, because I feel like punching that guy, but instead I'm gonna smile and preten.

Be happy.

That's better than punching the guy, right? But it costs you to do that. Yes. How do you teach people to get into congruence?

There's really three ways. So on the head, it's all about deconstructing the thought process and deconstructing the sense of I. So if you look at almost all people who are in pain, narcissism, depression, they're constantly having thoughts about themselves.

Yeah.

Always me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I, I, I. And if you look at almost every mode of healing, that is. That. That is a hack. That is like, oh, my gosh, that changed a lot. You're getting them out of a sense of I. So you can do that with a dangerously addictive drug like ketamine, which can get you some results, or less addictive, less dangerous psilocybin. But you can also do that through meditation. You can also do that through deconstructing your thought process, noting. Noting that all of your thoughts are not true. You can also do that through relationship. You can also do that through learning to love all of the emotions. Seen that your emotions aren't particularly personal to you. So any way you can kind of separate your sense of I from what you actually think it is, that's the prefrontal cortex. And separating yourself from your thoughts and deconstructing your thoughts. Big part of that in the heart, it's all about emotional fluidity, clarity, but not management of the emotional system. So what that means is falling in love with all of the emotional experiences. So if I go into your brain and I take out the emotional center of your brain, you stop making decisions. It'll literally take you half an hour or an hour to decide what to wear or what pen to use or something like that. And so we're actually making decisions emotionally. And you know this because it's like, how many decisions have you made to feel loved or to feel appreciated or to not feel like a loser or to. And so to learn how to. And this is really corresponds with your work to learn how to lean into the difficult emotions and then see their signal and actually enjoy them and go like you would. An ice bath totally changes that whole world. Because now when I'm making a decision, I'm not doing it to avoid one thing or get to another thing. I'm okay. I would be happy to feel like a loser, and I'd be happy to feel like a winner, and I'd be happy to feel disappointed. I'd be happy to feel excited. And so that's what it is on a heart level, and then on a nervous system level, on the gut level. It's very much about learning to feel pleasure. It's very much about, oh, if I'm safe, I'm in pleasure. How do I allow myself to. And I don't mean pleasure like sexual pleasure, though that's great. I mean, just a simple pleasure of being alive. Just a simple pleasure of doing the dishes or having a conversation with somebody, and then that tells your nervous system, oh, I'm not under attack right now. And so you can do that with breath. There's like thousands of ways to do that as well.

I think half what you just said aligns with some of the chapters in my last book where we're seeing the Problem set similarly. And I'm thinking about what my brain does with that question about when your eyes go up there. There's a body of work that says that there's about either six or eight areas where your eyes look when you're accessing different parts of your brain. Have you come across that research?

Well, I mean, I know about the micro expression and I know that like one side is apparently a lie, but I find it's more about auditory response and visual response and, and left brain, right brain, and like into. Are you looking at the intuitive side? But yeah, I've seen some of the research, but I, I haven't been like, it hasn't clicked in my system.

It's mostly from the 80s and it appears to be pretty accurate. And I wish I could cite from memory right now who did the research, but I found it to be valid. And usually when people are remembering, they're looking. I think it's up and to the left or right. But I know for me, like, even now when I'm talking, I go up and left because I've learned that I already know the stuff. I just have to not be worried about thinking about. So if I think about thinking about it or think about remembering it. No, I just have to chill.

Yeah.

And for some reason when I look up here, it's easier. And then I'm like, oh, it appears.

Right.

Right. So I don't really know what's going on in there, but the better I am at stopping the thoughts, shutting down the default mode network temporarily, and then just aligning. The congruence thing you talked about, it's like, oh, the answer was already there. I just had to relax and receive it versus have to like, power through. But my whole career in Silicon Valley was very cognitive, very powering through.

Yeah. Yeah.

How do you teach people, whether they're leaders or not, to tune into an inner knowing. Yeah. Instead of to brute force it.

As soon as they realize that the thinking is better that way, then they do it, which is what you've done. So all you have to really do is, is to show them that that's. That's real. So for instance, somebody thinks they have to make a really big decision and they feel the fear behind it, they release the fear behind it. The decisions made. Somebody feels stuck. They like, listen to their body intelligence. They're like, oh, wow, there's some anger in there. They move that anger and it's clear what they need to do next. As soon as they realize that decision clarity comes from the emotional situation, comes from somatic awareness, then it's over. But you have to give them that experience. As soon as they have it, then they start doing it.

Got it?

Yeah.

How would you give someone that experience for the first time?

So the first thing to do that safely, the first thing you need to do is create like a really powerful feeling of connection. So typically what happened is that we were told as kids certain emotions aren't allowed and if we, if we have them, then we are going to be punished or we are going to be chastised or we're going to be bribed out of it. Something's going to happen. And so don't have these emotions. And right now if I say to you, hey, stop having every single emotion in your body, like really actually try to attempt to do it.

It's like, don't think of an elephant.

Right. But. But really, if you, if you attempt.

Yeah.

And you're like, I'm not going to feel anything.

Doesn't work.

You have to tighten.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Temporarily suppress. They're still happening, right?

Exactly. Yeah, they're. Yeah, they can't stop. But you have to suppress them. You have to hold down the muscles. And so. And then over time, if I'm constantly holding back my anger, then. And I'm going. My anger going towards myself. That's like a critical parent hunch.

There's all vegan.

Say it again.

You become vegan when that happens.

Sorry guys.

Just kidding.

The universe is actually quantum. At least that's what quantum physics hard science is showing us. Even though we don't really see it, a lot of things that we do in our life drains your energy and it disrupts your quantum energy. There are things you can do about it. Chronic stress, EMFs, environmental toxins make you feel bad. I think we all know that. And we work to eliminate those or to reduce them as much as we can. But what if you could actually increase your quantum energy field so that you are more resilient to that these things, it turns out you can. And there's a technology called Quantum Upgrade that comes in. It's a cutting edge quantum streaming service that provides quantum energy. Yeah, I know that doesn't sound believable, except it works. And it's not a woo woo concept. The team at Quantum Upgrade ran randomized double blind placebo controlled studies to get the hard data. And in one study, Quantum Upgrade as a service completely neutralized the negative effects of 5G exposure on blood flow. Another double blind study found it makes red blood cells more flexible and improves their ability to carry oxygen, it increases ATP production by up to 29%. And those are just a few of the cool things it can do. When you sign up, you can link your phone, your home, your business, even your pet with their energy source. And the cool thing is you don't need to believe in something for it to work. Quantum Upgrade has the science, the testimonials, and now over 13 placebo controlled studies backing what they do. Even though it sounds pretty incredible, I use it because I like to follow the science. Try Quantum Upgrade free for 15 days. You don't even need to enter your credit card. Go to QuantumUpgrade IO Dave and just click Pay later at checkout. 15 days. Give it a try, see what you see. Have you ever had a cut or.

A scrape or a burn?

And of course you want it to.

Heal quickly, but you don't want to.

Use topical antibiotics on your skin because there's lots of reasons that you want to avoid those. There is a solution called Active Skin Repair. This is a skin health company that helps you heal with non toxic natural ingredients. It's a medical grade formula that uses something called hypochlorous acid. This is a natural molecule that your body already produces in order to heal faster. When you apply active skin repair, the molecule mimics your natural immune response so it cleanses, it soothes irritation, reduces inflammation, and it helps support your body's healing. You can use it pretty much anywhere your skin is injured, cuts, scrapes, burns, sunburn, rashes and anything else that's damaged your skin. It's also safe and non toxic, so you can use it on any part of your body and even on rosacea, eczema or acne prone skin. They have more than half a million happy customers, thousands of five star reviews. And the ingredients are so safe and.

Clean that you can do them even.

On very young kids. And now you have one solution for all of your family's skin health and repair needs. Go to ActiveShipRepair.com to learn more about.

It and use Code Dave to get 20% off your order.

Emotional constriction leads to physical muscular constriction. And so when you're. So to get out of that traumatic experience, you need to feel safe. And so the one, one of the most important things that you have to do is create a deeply safe container. So that's the first thing you have to do to get there is have that safety. If you do the emotion without the safety, you have like a really good chance retraumatizing.

Yeah.

And then the Second thing is, oftentimes you have to kind of fake it for a bit because the brain and the psychology has been like, we're not going to do this no matter what. Because I know I'll get unloved. I know I will get abandoned. I know I will. So there's this nervous system responsive. I'm not going to do that. And then, and then there's definitely ways of moving anger or fear that are going to be more effective than. Than other ways of moving anger or fear. You can write all your angry thoughts. Not as effective as moving your body and yelling. And so that's a big part of like learning that whole thing and then learning how to handle. Never to do it at anybody, never to do it in a way that creates shame. Doing it in a way that you like and what you do after the experience, because people can be very changed by that experience. Wait, I'm feeling my body different. My hands are different. I don't know how to shop. All those things happen in our work.

Do you believe in God?

That is a great question. I. I can speak for sure, many religions, I think of them as languages. So I can, like, I can work with Christianity and I can work with a little bit in Islam and a lot in Judaism. I can speak that language. My experience of God is universal. So my experience of God is everything is God and I am everything and I am God and God is me and you are God and everybody listening is God. So that's my experience of it. But I don't really concern or think about like, that whole thing is very irrelevant for me, you know, like, the principles in all the religions I think are amazing and I want to live by them. From surrender to unconditional love, to Christ consciousness to awakening. I think they're all pointing generally in the same direction. No self, all self. I spent a lot of time in a lot of the religions and I. And I have like such a deep love for them and. But I don't have like an idea that there's this thing that is separate that I.

When you talk about higher authority, it made me think about that. And I think you expressed that really beautifully. A lot of people wouldn't know this about me. I was one class away from having a minor in religious studies in my undergrad. Just full disclosure, it's hard to fail a religious studies class when you're studying computer science and just have to say, like, it patted my gpa, but it opened my eyes to a lot of wisdom that I wasn't open to at the time I look back and I'm grateful I did that. Right. What do you say to clients who are easily triggered?

Fucking great. There you go.

Best answer ever. 10 out of 10.

Yeah.

You're like, look, you found something to work on.

Exactly. Yeah. Being triggered is the best to be excited. Like, when I get triggered, which is rare and rarer. I am so excited. Yeah. There's directly pointing to some part of myself I can't love, can't accept. Some part of myself that I don't. I haven't fully integrated.

If people only got one thing from this interview, what you just shared is. Is some of the strongest medicine there is. I oftentimes say that one of my love languages is triggering people.

Yeah. I am. I am called Fu Joe Hudson on. On Twitter for that reason.

Oh, my God.

I love that.

I find with. With people when they're doing 40 years of Zen, usually on the second or third day, they'll have, like, an ego eruption where they finally got through to their core issue. And all of a sudden it's like, Dave Asprey's an asshole. And like, yeah, yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, that's it. Right. And then if they keep leaning in, usually within like a half hour, an hour, like, the whole world changes. Right. And that last fight from the operating system or the ego is. Is like, don't you dare look in here.

Ah.

And that's right before the breakthrough.

Yeah. But.

Okay, these are people who are coaching with, you know, the top people in the world with you, or they have computers stuck to their head. With me.

Yeah.

How is someone who's at home and feeling triggered going to deal with this?

Man, there are endless tools for that.

What's your favorite?

My favorite tool, super gentle, super simple, is every time you judge somebody, which is a minor trigger, there's an emotional experience you're trying to avoid.

Yeah.

Ooh. So when you find judgment, immediately go, what's the. If I couldn't judge, what's the emotion that I would have to feel? And go and hang out in that emotion for 20 seconds. No, it doesn't even require more than 20 seconds. But just go hang out in that emotion. Even better. If you can hang out in that emotion with wonder what is going on here? The way you would with, like, a. Yeah, the way that you would with, like, a nice bath. Like, oh, here we go.

Okay, great.

And that is, like, an amazing tool. It will stop a lot of the narcissistic, I'm better than you behavior.

And.

But it'll make you allow. It'll allow you to receive so much more love. So the thing about the emotional journey that I think people really don't get is usually, say, depending on society and sex, it's usually anger or sadness that is the hardest to first feel, and then fear. But then it's excitement and joy and love and those things. Like, I can be in a room with people and we can do 45 minutes of anger release. And everybody just keeps going. They're like, whoa, maybe a couple.

Anger feels good, right?

Yeah. A couple of them maybe don't. But then I'm like, let's do pleasure. And like, five minutes in, I'm like, hey, everybody, we're still doing pleasure. Because it's actually harder for us to allow those positive experiences in because they are just as destructive to the ego as the. As what we think is. Wow.

So happiness and joy are as scary as fear and death to the ego.

Yeah. The only difference is that the human experience is doing this. This with the. Those they're like, oh, I want joy, I want love, but they're pushing it away all the time. Like, jealousy is a great experience with this. Jealousy is like, I want your love, I want your love, but I'm going to make sure I don't get it right. And so. But if you actually. When somebody actually starts to feel it, it's. It's annihilating. So I'll give you an experience of this. Usually when you give somebody a compliment, you say to them, oh, like, that was. That's a wonderful thing that you just did. Most of people will basically at that moment call you a liar. They'll be like, oh, no, not really, I was nothing. Or they'll think to themselves, they don't really know me. Or they're just saying that to get something from me. That's what most people will do. The reason is because if you fully let that compliment in, if you fully accept it and let it touch you, it's going to erode part of what you think you are, which is the ego. The ego is just what you think you are. So here I am. I think that I am bad at this. I think I'm good at this. I think I'm better at this. I think I'm worse because of this. And a compliment flies in the face of that, just rips that thing apart. And it's funny because even people who are what other people call arrogant, oh, I got this whole thing together. They're usually the worst at receiving the compliment because they. Because underneath there's this very deep I'm really not good. I have something to prove.

Right.

And so just receiving a compliment, which is receiving just a little bit of love, can be so destructive to people that almost everybody you meet can't actually let it touch them.

I don't think anyone's ever mentioned this on the show. And you're right. I had to work with a therapist for quite a while, maybe 10 years ago, because I've received a lot of compliments. Some of them are really big. Like, you saved my life. You changed my life. I just want you to know. And these are people, you know, they've written me a letter. They just want to hand it to me, and they're, like, shaking, and there's tears. This is big stuff.

Yeah.

And what I was doing was like, oh, thank you. But I was not letting it in. And my therapist called me out on that. And I really had to work on receiving. Like, receiving is scary.

Right.

To really let it in. And my biggest fear, I found out was I didn't want it to feed my spiritual ego. Like, what I'm doing is not about me. Right, right. It's about service to others, which is, you know, Arthur C. Brooks would tell you, you know, flow state research will say, like, service to others is just.

A better way to.

To do stuff.

Correct.

But. But I was just afraid it would make it about me. And it was that fear that was holding me back. How would you have coached me to get around that?

Let me jump out of context for a second, then I'll get back to that. The first thing I would talk about is what I would call disowned narcissism. What's that meaning? That there is a part. There's. On one level, yes. It's really important to feel like, oh, I am channeling. This isn't about me. I am of service. This is something that is. I'm called to. That's really, really important. What's also really, really important is to own the power.

Yeah. And it feels good to help people. I mean, let's face it. Yeah.

But to own. To be like. Yeah. So if you look at the. The cult leaders, oftentimes, like, there's this great moment of this with the Nixium guy, and it's in one of the documentaries, and you see him and he's like, with his harem. You don't know it's his harem at this point, I think it's the vow or whatever. And he goes, I don't understand why everybody really likes me. Like, I don't know why everybody's coming to me looking for the answers. And it's like, oh, that's actually the thing that makes somebody dangerous is if they can't actually own what it is. The power that they have, what they're doing, and the. The specialness of it right next to the, oh, this isn't about me and I'm of service. And you see this happen with CEOs. CEOs get crazy destructive.

Yeah, they do.

If they don't see that, it. They're not. That they. They have this power. And it's not about them, but it's both.

So you sit in power and you also hold humility at the same time. But if you just hold humility and you. You suppress or ignore the fact that you have power, that becomes toxic.

Yeah. And you'll act it out. And the way you can experience this, like, in this moment, is so if you close your eyes for a minute and feel unconditional love, just feel what it is to be an unconditional love. And now stop that. Because you get there really quickly, clearly. And then now feel what it's like to be incredibly empowered. You don't have to fear for anything coming.

You don't.

You're not even considering the future. You're just.

Those are directionally different. For me, the unconditional love goes here and goes out, and it's big. And the power goes up.

Correct. So. Exactly. So feel that.

Feel the empowerment, you're saying, of the combination.

Nope. Just one. Yeah, yeah.

The power goes up and then out, and then unconditional love goes out and then up.

Right. Okay. So. So if you go back and forth between them, and then you put them together. And then put them together.

Okay. Like, simultaneously. Because there's an order of operations for each of those.

Unconditional love, then empowerment, then unconditional love, then empowerment, and then putting it together. Right.

Like together at the same time. Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. Got it.

That's.

That's actually. That's where my energy normally sits.

Yeah.

But I never thought of how it turns on in order. Okay. That's super cool stuff. Wow.

So. So. But basically, what you'll learn if you do that exercise is that real love doesn't exist without empowerment. Real empowerment doesn't exist without love.

That's a big deal.

When you put those two together, you feel like, oh, this is. This is like their complete.

There's a lot of disempowered victim cults where they're just swirling in this victimhood and bitching to each other about stuff.

Yeah.

What's happening there?

Oh, man. Victimhood. So it's just another way of people processing fear. Right. So the way. There's this thing called the drama triangle. I'm sure you're familiar. I don't. I call. I call it the fear triangle. I don't think it's drama. It is. So we do fight, flight or freeze with fear. There's like feed and fawn and whatever, but sure. But the main thing is fight, flight or freeze.

That's the first F word in our framework.

We agree.

Right.

And so if you fight, then you get scared and you bully. If you freeze and you get scared, you're victim. You feel stuck. If you fly when you are scared, then you go and try to please somebody else. You leave yourself and you go and try to please somebody else. They're all just reactions to fear. And it's all just the way that we were. We were taught to respond when we were kids.

Right.

So the victimhood is just, I'm scared, and so my thing is to feel stuck, and therefore I must be oppressed. And so I need an oppressor.

And you're gonna. You're gonna find one whether it's real or not.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's never real because we're like, we always have choice. And. And that's a hard thing to say because obviously there are, you know, people right now in Ukraine who are getting. Who are victims of bombs. And so that's like, without a doubt, that's true. And at the same time, they have a choice in that moment on how they're going to handle that. And that is the empowerment.

Yeah.

You know, it's that a man with a gun has no power over a person who isn't scared to die.

I interviewed Teal Swan a while ago. Very interesting take on the world here. Yeah, we talked earlier. You can create safety just in your feel like, oh, this is a person who's not a threat. Right. And you can probably, I'm guessing, shift your energy to be a threat when you want to be. You know, if there's some crazy drug addled person coming at you with a knife, like, you're not going to look like a peaceful monk at that time, at least not if you're healthy.

Right.

So actually that kind of happened to me in San Francisco recently. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. It was all right. He didn't have a knife. But just the energetic state change. I didn't really have to do much. Just once, it was like, oh, wait, this is A threat. And then he went away when he was coming into attack. And I'm grateful for that because I would have had to kill him. It would have been messy and not fun, but I would have. Because that's what you do. When I'm creating safety for someone, like if I'm working with a client or there's medicine ceremony or whatever, there's a very specific set of things I'll do in my field, and then you'll see the person relax. But men and women respond very differently to safety.

Safety.

And yeah, for sure that that's true.

And earlier you described your safety is your responsibility. So if I was a woman client in front of you, and there's some very powerful women in leadership. Yeah, right. How does a woman create safety in herself and her team versus how a man does it?

Yeah. So I. Half my clients are women, and generally they're much better at it. And if you look at the. If you look at the way there's these two things that create safety and leadership, and they don't seem. They seem like they're opposing, but they're not. One of them is how clear I am with my needs, and one of them is how helpful I am. Men tend to be better at. Here's what I need. Women tend to be better at helpful. But if you get both, and you get extremely loyal folks. Because if I tell you what I need, this is my expectation. This is what success looks like. You can feel safe because it's not about whether I like you. It doesn't mean that you have to worry about my mercurial nature. It just means, you know what you have to do to be successful. Here. That's. There's a safety to that.

Oh, yeah.

There. And. Oh, wow, you're here to help me. You're also, like, you're there for me.

Oh, great.

Now I feel doubly safe. And so I. This is where I want to be. And I'm growing as a human. And so a lot of loyalty ensues more often than not. What I've seen in the workplace is that a woman is able to do both more often than men.

You say by being both.

By creating very clear about what they want and help. Being helpful.

Got it.

And if you do both of those two things, that creates, like a cognitive feeling of safety.

Right.

It's, I think, also a somatic one.

It's a somatic one. It's going to create that. There's. From what I've seen, and at least in my world, both men and women can express both polarities of this when they choose to. In fact, the ability to slide between them, especially if you're coaching, is really important. But there's like a mother or grandmother energy.

Yeah.

Right. And that's going to sit more, more naturally in a woman. Right? Yeah. And that can create a type of safety especially. Well, it can do it for men or women, right? Yeah. And then when a man is creating safety using masculine energetics, it's more like a sense of, of there's nothing to worry about because it's an I've got this.

Yeah.

So you can just do your thing.

Yeah.

And we could do that for other men, we could do this for women. But the response of a man to that kind of safety versus the response of a woman will be different.

Somatically to me, it's more about whether they have mom issues or dad issues.

And just call it out. Yes.

Yeah. So if I'm working with somebody, so my wife works with me, if someone's got a mom, literally when we'll do exercises, we'll be like, mom issue, mom issue, mom issue. Terry, you take those. Dad issue, dad issue, dad issue. Joe, take.

You take those. So good.

So it's really just about what, what's the safety they didn't get as a kid?

Can everyone be self reliant?

Nobody's self reliant. They can think they are, they can try to pretend they are. But like how many people just to get the chairs we're sitting on and say, well, it's like there's no such thing as self reliance. And it's. I think it's a disease of our society in particular. I mean it's again, we're thinking about ourselves. We're not seeing, we're not seeing that we are in a related integrated. We are part of the whole thing. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite stories on this is this. Some. I can't pronounce her name very well. Sambu. She has this book called the Spirit of Intimacy. And she's from a tribe in Africa. And when they're in that village, in her village, she describes it as if there's a marriage that's in trouble. It is not a marriage problem. It is a village problem. The same way that we used to think, oh, I have a zit, I have an acne problem. But now we're like, no, that's actually like a entire biome problem. Like it is an entire system problem. They see the problem of a marriage as a system problem. Wow. And so the entire Village is like, we need to work on that. And so they actually have a ceremony where they all work together as a village to help get this, this, this marriage problem. And so you asked earlier, like, can we do that as humans? They do that as humans. So yes, of course we can.

Let's do some rapid fire questions.

Yeah.

Why do smart people still make dumb decisions?

Research is really clear on this. Really smart people can delude themselves quicker and more deeply than dumb people. Wow. It's really just, it's really clear. And, and so the reason is because they're using only their head, they're not using their entire system. And so they logically boom, boom, boom, boom. And they convince themselves that they're right. And so that's why you see like great investors just make. Whoa. Bad decisions. There's this great thought process I love, which is the consciousness of the creator is in the creation. And really, really smart people make AI and AI does the same thing. It's right, it's right, it's right. And then it's just, nope, I am totally hallucinating, but I think I'm right.

I have noticed that in fact, applying psychology to AI interactions makes it work better.

Yeah.

Josh Whitten has been a friend for.

I know Josh. You know Josh.

He's been for like 20 years.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And you two are really similar.

I could see that. Yeah. And he, they call him a robot psychologist now. And he's saying, no, this hallucinations, they're following the same things that humans do. And if you try to hack your AI, it's not going to feel safe and it's going to change the way and I think he's right. So. Too funny world. That wasn't a very rapid fire, but it was so good. Okay, so we're about to be in a post artificial general intelligence world where we have things much smarter than us. In fact, I think we probably already are. What's the role of emotional mastery in that world?

I mean it's, I think it's the only advantage we used to have an advantage of. I'd say wisdom is the advantage. Emotional mastery is part of wisdom. I wouldn't call it mastery, but clarity. But generally we used to be able to get ahead because we knew something like, we'll put up with that asshole attorney because they're really good, because they know a lot. We'll put up with more of that. All that's gone and all that's left is how do I motivate, work with, influence, myself and others. There's this great moment. We raised our kid in a unique way where we were very much, we don't care about the intellect, we care about how you are with your will. Before we work on intellect. And now they're fine, they're going to great colleges. But before we work on intellect, I want to know that you know how to be with yourself. And my sister had kids who spoke three languages at seven and my kids just hadn't even learned how to read for the most part. And, and somebody said to me, I, I was worried about it and some. Somebody said to me, said, well, you can hire someone to speak a language, you can't hire someone to be you. God. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. And that's the same thing. Now you have AI can do all the stuff. The question is, who's going to be you? And that's wisdom.

Just goosebumps from that. I went on a similar path. I learned to read at 18 months and I've read more books than most people because of that. And that comes at a cost. My kids didn't learn to read till they were seven or eight. They went to a school that was all about emotional intelligence and just becoming embodied. And they're doing exceptionally well and they're very competitive high school and it didn't seem to hurt them.

But I think it's the same with ours. They're both thriving and have great relationships and have self control and love themselves and have deep relationships with their friends and their family.

And one of the most beautiful moments as a father that I experienced was when one of my kids, I'm not saying which one, just for privacy, whatever, sat down and said, hey, dad, I'm going to fire this friend because they're out of integrity and I just don't like what they're doing. I didn't learn to do that till I was like 40.

Right.

I'm like such a good thing. Right? Yeah.

So congratulations. Yeah.

It was one of those things where it's always an experiment. You can't a B test your kids. How do you know? But I like to think emotional intelligence is important. So you do too.

Yeah.

Do people mistake thought for intelligence?

Hell yeah. Why? What's the difference when we're thinking to ourselves. So let's just take the like critical self talk that happens. Right. And I think of this, it's like 50,000 thoughts a day. Something like that is what a human being is having a third of them.

About tacos, by the way.

And so. So I find most of them. And there's actually a place on the path where those thoughts really slow down, is my experience. But if it's a normal human having that experience, a lot of those are repetitive negative sel talk. Right. And when you see that neurologically, it's all happening here. But when they actually talk it out loud, then it actually activates other parts of the brain. It's not just in the prefrontal cortex. And so the reason that people mistake thoughts for intelligence is because the thing that is intelligent in us is doing all the work. So they're not seeing that it doesn't correlate with the rest of the system them. It's all just happening in this little snow cone thing over here, shaking its own world up.

Do you still have a mean voice in your head? No, I'm either. Yeah. How many people on earth would you say walk around with a mean voice in their head?

But back to that, like a little more than 99.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think there's. There's two forms of mean voice, to be specific. There are some incredibly intelligent people where they don't really have a. This is a. Also a fairly small, but probably more people who. There's people who don't understand that they have a voice in their head yet. And then they'll figure that out. There are people who actually don't have it, but they have all the somatic sensations of a negative self talk. So they're still in the shame cycle, but they're not. It's just not happening with a. With a voice in their head. And then there is. Oh, that whole editor of life is gone. And that. I would, I would. My experience is that happens with what a Buddhist would call an awakening, the beginning of the awakening stages.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's just like the editor is gone and it doesn't. My experience is it doesn't just for most people, it doesn't drop all the way away. There's. Maybe there's still something nagging you to get shit done or like. But the, but there's. The primary voice drops usually like relatively all of a sudden where it's like the. You didn't do that. Right. All that stuff goes away.

For me, the, the critic is gone. The voice in my head is 99 gone. But it shifted to like a somatic awareness. Right. I just know it in my body without having to think about it, without having to voice it, which seems to be a more efficient way.

Yeah, but. But there's still. There's still something that happens where it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. But there's a way in which even that drops.

Yeah. It's the non reactivity. Yeah. What's the first somatic signal that you're out of integrity?

Kick in the gut.

Kick in the gut. Okay.

Kick in the gut.

So you're gonna feel it, like right here. Okay, got it.

Yeah.

It's gonna feel horrible when people are in an interaction with another person and then they feel that kick in the gut that they're out of integrity. What do you coach them to do?

Do. Be an integrity.

Stop it.

You know, this is. So here's. This is. This is a really good question. So typically what happens is someone feels like they're out in integrity and then they tell themselves they should do something different and they're like, I should do this, I should do that.

Which is shame.

Which is shame. Which means that shame is a stagnating effect, meaning if you're ashamed about something, you try to stop doing it. And so if you look at in your life or if somebody listening looks at it in their life, everything that they've wanted to change for the last decade, and they haven't changed, there is a should and a shame attached. It is a really inefficient way to make a change in your system. So what I will encourage people to do is just feel the pain of it.

Yeah.

Just feel how shitty that feels in your body to be out of integrity. Don't avoid it. Don't go into your phone. Just be in that. Because if you actually feel that enough, you won't do it anymore.

David Hawkins, I think one of the 20th century's most enlightened people, certainly in the west, he teaches Just feel it. It takes 20 minutes to feel any emotion all the way through, and then you're done. But if you resist it, you can feel it for years. Right. It seems like that's in alignment with what you just said.

Yeah. We have something. We have a tool that's free for people and they sign up on the mailing list, which is called emotional inquiry. And it's basically a 15 minute process to bring wonder into any emotional experience.

Wow. What's the mail list? How do they do it?

Just go to Art of accomplishment and put your email in. Easy. Okay.

I guess you might want to do that.

We have a whole bunch of free experiments that people can use and run. Cool. Yeah.

How do you read a room without saying anything out loud?

Yeah. So this. That opens up one of the coolest things. Most people go into a meeting thinking about what they're going to say how they're going to present. I typically go into a meeting and teach people to go into a meeting about how to listen. If I listen to you like you are the Dalai Lama, I'm going to hear something different and you're going to say something different. If I go into the room and I think that I'm going to listen to you like I'm better than you and that you're trying to scam me, you are going to say different things and I'm going to hear different things. So for me, it's just about how you listen. And my experience is listening with openness, meaning I'm willing to feel whatever needs to be felt. Here is you get all the information that you need really, really quickly. That most of what, when we don't hear something that's happening in a room or with a single person is because we don't want to feel something makes so much sense. I don't want to feel like my CEO sucks. I don't want to feel like this person's out of integrity or that I'm being conned or that the money that I thought I was going to make, I'm not going to make. So we listen differently.

What's one emotion that most people refuse to have and really should?

Well, you can't refuse to have an emotion, but refuse to feel or admit or, like, accept. I would say fear is the one that I see people.

Yeah.

Even like some of the. The, you know, fear is the enemy. Fear is the thing that gets in the way of love. Fear, anger is just fear. You know, all those things. Man, fear is fucking amazing. I love fear. Like, you want a direct path to your freedom? Just go every place that you're scared. Oh, man.

Yes.

It's like the. Just, like, lean into gently. You don't have to go fast. You don't have to beat yourself up. But gently, just start leaning into the places you're scared. I'm scared to have that conversation. Okay, I'm going to have it. I'm scared to feel that thing. Okay, I'm going to feel. And it is the most direct pointer towards your freedom. And everybody's trying to get rid of it.

When I was about 25, I decided that I was going to do everything I was afraid of on purpose. And I don't know, maybe that was some weird masochistic urge or something, but I just was thinking for some reason, I just felt called to do that. Like, I, you know, I. I would rather deal with this and I think I believed at the time that fear had logic behind it and fear happens irrespective of logic. And it took another five years for a very wise woman to tell me that fear's an emotion, doesn't have to be logical. I'm like, oh God, my whole model of reality just crumbled. No, but that's how it is. Like you're gonna feel it or not.

And you don't get to choose often. You're gonna feel it because of something that happened in your past.

Almost always. Right.

Trauma is like a time travel machine. And you're scared because of some, some action that happened in your past that you're trying to avoid in the current state.

How can you tell when logic is just fear in disguise?

That's easy. Logic becomes binary. It's this or this. It gets a false end. Oh, I will get fired or I will be homeless. But you don't think beyond homeless. And if you have to make a decision, those are three keys. If I think I make a hundred choices, I've made a thousand choices. In this conversation, I haven't had to make a decision. As soon as my brain goes, okay, now I have to make a decision. I'm in fear. As soon as it's trying to avoid a false end, I'm in fear. As soon as I'm thinking binary, it's one way or another way, I'm in fear. Which is like if you look at our society, it's Democrat or Republican, anything's polarized. It's all fear. Wow. It's all fear.

So fear is, and we think it's logical, but it's almost never.

Never.

Yeah, I teach that emotions happen and then thoughts happen to justify the emotions. Is that accurate?

Accurate. Everything I've read shows that to be accurate. I think that there's, you know, there's some edge cases, you know, a snake, you see a snake and you're going to jump before the emotion hits or before the logic hits. So there's a nervous system component in that that I don't think neuroscience is fully like groked or put together yet. Yeah. And I do think that you can have, there is a dance, meaning you can have, you can do research, have some thoughts and it can change the way that you feel. So it is a dance.

It's a two way street.

It's a two way street dot typically when we're acting in the world, what you're saying is absolutely the case.

There's a bit of neuro fetishism in the world right now. I just made up that word.

It's great.

It's a good one. It's so true. Where I've arrived is that there's an embodied intelligence that happens way before neurons get a signal that it rolls up from the lowest level, which would be mitochondrial. The frontline environmental sensors. And they have their own intelligence. They vote with each other, they talk to each other. They're quantum entangled. We know all this stuff.

Right.

So there's the behavior of the body that all the embodied leadership stuff.

The body is before the nervous system.

Nervous system is a communications network. After the body does and feels and decides some shit, it hands it to the nervous system, which then hands it to the brain. We process it at low levels and we get it to our prefrontal cortex a lot later. But why do we ignore the body and go straight to the nerves? It feels like just a model issue.

My answer to that is if you take a kid who was physically abused and you put a quarter in one hand and a key in the other hand, they won't be able to tell you which is which because they have learned to stop listening.

Wow.

Same emotionally. If you were told emotionally you're going to be loved or not loved or rejected or punished for having emotions, you stop feeling your emotional experience. And so the grand majority of human beings have been taught either only listen to your body when you're doing something like playing basketball, because it's going to hurt so much if you actually pay attention to your body.

Yeah.

Because you're going to be in such. You're going to be. Be growing up in an environment that's so out of integrity that it's just going to hurt to be in it. And so stop listening.

Reminds me when I was in my early teens, high speed mountain biking was like the only way I could do that because I know if I think I'm going to wreck.

Yeah, exactly.

So then I could just go fast enough and not quite wreck. Then I could feel totally. And I didn't know that's what I was doing. But I think a lot of extreme sports sports people are just doing that.

Yeah. The guy I do the podcast with who asked me a lot of questions, he was like a world class air sports guy.

Yeah.

And that was his. It was because of that experience of being in flow, of understanding the fear differently in this system is what brought him into the self work sounds like similar to you.

Wow. Yeah, it's. And people arrive at rev where they're going different paths. Why don't people say what they Mean.

They'Re scared of the consequences.

Are they scared of the consequences because of the culture in their workplace or because of their childhood? Both.

Depends on the culture of the workplace. But just to be clear, they're scared of the perceived consequences, not the actual consequences.

Typically. Right, too.

Right. Like, so oftentimes I'm working with somebody and they're like, I feel like I want to quit. I'm like, great, how about we do this experiment in ex in advance. Just be exactly who you want to be and see if you get fired. And so good. 80% of the time, they thrive in that workplace. 20% of the time, they leave or get fired.

Yeah, right.

But everybody thinks they're going to get fired. There's no that entire group, everyone's like, I will get fired if I am myself. I'm like, well, if you're going to quit, who cares then? And it's just the opposite happens. So we want empowered people working with us 100%. Yeah.

You mentioned what percentage of your cognitive resources you're burning to be someone you're not every single day. As a CEO of multiple companies, I don't want my people wasting that much energy because even if they don't waste the energy in what they're doing at work, then when they go home, they won't have anything left for their relationships and for taking care of their health. Like, don't waste that.

Also, you can never be accepted. If I'm loved for who I'm not, then I can't be loved for who I am. Wow. And so people are not being themselves and therefore can never actually get the love or accept acceptance that they want.

Wow. That's profound. And yeah. So show up at work as who you are. And if you're an, you probably should do some therapy.

If you're an, you're not showing up as you are who you are.

Very, very well said. Joe Hudson. This has been a remarkable interview. Thanks for coming to Austin for it. Artofaccomplishment.com People can get your list. You have your podcast, anything else you.

Want to tell them about, YouTube channel and come to the free workshop so you can actually taste it. See if it's right for you.

You beautiful. Well, thanks again.

Yeah, pleasure. Thank you.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast. Consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions, directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.