How to Stay Present No Matter What – Don Wood, Ph.D. : 648

So if you think about something that happened to you 10 years ago and you feel fear, I call that a glitch. It's an error message.

Okay.

But everybody's dealing with that to some degree or other. And so once we get that trauma resolved, the mind stops using that. That trauma is being stored in what I call high definition, and the mind sees the brightness and intensity to it and thinks there's something happening now, and it's not really happening.

What percentage of the population do you think has this kind of programming going on in the US?

Pretty much Everybody to some degree.

Exactly.

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This special edition of Bulletproof Radio is a live interview at Joe Polish's Genius Network event, which brings together a group of really amazing entrepreneurs, people who are doing stuff to change the world. I've been a member for a long time. Joe's been a guest on the show. Talking about addiction and trauma and telling a really powerful story. But this is not an interview with Joe Polish. This is an interview with Don Wood, PhD, who's a guy who's spent many years researching how trauma affects our minds and our lives. And you might have noticed in a few of the most recent interviews, I've talked about trauma really openly because it turns out trauma is not even well defined. And every single person listening to this, yes, including you, had something in your back— in your background, in your life that was traumatic, even if it was a small trauma. And it turns out these can have an effect, and it's oftentimes an invisible effect. You want to be a high-performance human who shows up the way you choose to show up at everything you do, including your relationships, your career, your community, the things that matter to you, your art, your sport. Well, you're going to have to deal with the fact that those are subtle inhibitors of how you show up in the world. I've done a lot of work on my own stuff there, and I want to be really clear that state of human performance that is Bulletproof involves looking square in the mirror, finding your trauma, getting rid of it. And that's why I'm bringing guests on to talk specifically about this stuff, even though it's a little bit woo. In fact, this interview though is with a PhD, and it's not woo. We just think trauma is that way.

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What Don's here to talk about is his more effective ways of dealing with trauma using neuroscience using proprietary cutting-edge techniques that he's developed. Because here's the deal, no one wants to spend 40 years sitting in a cave dealing with their trauma because we actually have stuff to do in the world. Don, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Dave.

All right. What's your PhD in?

Clinical counseling and psychology.

All right. How many years have you been practicing?

We started developing this program almost about 10 years ago, and I started really studying trauma back then. Mainly because of my wife and daughter. My wife grew up in a very traumatic household. Um, I grew up in the complete opposite. I had these loving, nurturing parents and never really experienced any trauma.

Oh, come on.

I mean, little trauma.

There was a time when your mom stopped breastfeeding you and you were really pissed off about that.

Well, I was adopted, so—

well, you never experienced any trauma? Adoption's a little bit traumatic there.

Uh, yeah, but again, nothing major, like, in terms of what she was experiencing.

So we're talking physical, sexual, emotional abuse kind of stuff?

Exactly.

All right.

So I've had things happen to me, but what I said was happening is that if things were happening to me, I had such a nurturing, safe environment that my nervous system kept getting regulated.

So you were gifted with parents who made a safe space for you.

Very lucky. Yes. And so my wife didn't. So when we got married, I thought to myself, she's going to be living in my world now, so that's all going to calm down. And it didn't.

Why did you pick someone— and I'm going to be really rude here— why did you pick someone who would be batshit crazy? 'Cause if you were heavily traumatized and you haven't done your work and you haven't had that safe space, you will act crazy. Why'd you pick that?

Well, I was 19. Ah, there you go, okay. She was beautiful, right?

The truth comes out.

Yep.

And you loved her enough to help her.

Yes, and I saw it very quickly, but she really was operating sort of differently. So she was living in fear. She didn't get into addiction, she didn't get into any of that kind of stuff, but she was just constantly worried all the time. And then when we got married, all of a sudden it's the same thing. And I'm like, why is she constantly— I'm not like her father. I'm not yelling. I don't do what he does. But she was still living in this fear. So that's when I discovered that what was happening is that the trauma was looping for her.

Yeah.

So if I said something like, no, I don't like that, she could respond with, why are you mad at me? And I'd go, honey, I'm not mad. Why do you think I'm mad? And she would— the reason that was happening, though, is because her mind was listening so carefully to the way I spoke. Because as a child she had to listen very carefully to recognize when Dad was starting to get out of range. And if she picked that up in me, right, then all of a sudden it wasn't what I just said, it was all the data from her childhood flooding in, overregulating her nervous system.

That makes so much sense, and that exactly matches the, the type of things that I've worked on myself, and even just the neuroscience stuff from 40 Years of Zen, where People come in, you say one thing, they hear another.

Exactly.

How do you know you're not doing that?

I probably am to some degree. And I may have said it when I said, no, I don't like that. I may have had a little bit of frustration in my voice, but I can't recognize it. So what she hears is, no, I don't like that. And I'm thinking, how could she be interpreting what I just said that harsh? She'd start to cry. And I'd be going, why am I hurting her? I'm not trying to hurt her. So I was trying to speak calmer, to be very careful what I said, but I could still do it. We'd come out of a store and she'd say, "Can you believe how rude that clerk was?" And I'll say, "I don't think she was rude." And she'd go, "Well, you see the way she said that when I asked her that question, or the way she put the clothes in the bag?" She was seeing it everywhere, not just with me.

So she was hyper-aware of other people's just nuances and then putting a value or a thought on them that wasn't real, but it had been based on her patterns.

Right, because her mind was bringing in all the data. This is where I say the problem is coming in, is the way the trauma is stored in memory. So there's a thing called the time slice theory, and the time slice theory is developed by two scientists at the University of Zurich that said, is consciousness streaming? And most people would say, well, yes, it's streaming. But what they're saying is that the subconscious actually pulls in the data 400 millionths of a second before you're consciously aware of it. When I read that and I did the research on that, I said, this explains what we're doing in our program.

Exactly.

In the 400 millionths of a second, your subconscious does a Google search. What does that look like, sound like, smell like? And it starts bringing in that data. The problem is your subconscious operates in the present, just like the animal brain. So if it sees something from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and it sees it in the present, it makes perfect sense that it would create a physiological response. The purpose of an emotion, a feeling, a sensation, or a thought is a call for action. The purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. So if you think about something that happened to you 10 years ago and you feel fear, I call that a glitch. It's an error message. But everybody's dealing with that to some degree or other. And so once we get that trauma resolved, the mind stops using that. That trauma is being stored in what I call high definition, and the mind sees the brightness and intensity to it and thinks there's something happening now, and it's not really happening.

What percentage of the population do you think has this kind of programming going on in the US?

Pretty much everybody to some degree. Exactly. And everybody has it. Again, like I said, I wasn't really traumatized as a child, but I had events and experiences. So to some degree, I would have had that. As an example, I had something when I was 16, 15, 16. A mentor of mine had a nervous breakdown. And so he was a gambler. He used to play tennis. And he was a hustler, gambler. And he taught me a whole bunch. But one day before he had his nervous breakdown, he was playing in a match against another pro from another club. And he got really— and he never got frustrated. He was very Zen. And he turned around and he said, this is a waste of my time. This guy couldn't take a game off of me. And he said to me, you come in and play him. Now everybody's watching, their club, our club. He says, you play him one set, same amount of money. So I was playing against this other pro. And I'm only 15 turning 16. I'm beating him 4 games to 3. And Vic calls me over to the fence and he had never done this before. And he turned around and he said to me, he says, "Stop messing around." He used another word. "Stop bleeping around. Finish this guy off. You're playing too conservative." And he had never done that. I lost the next 3 games. And then every time, and I never understood this, I never liked to bet. So I've never bet. So we play golf and everybody wants to bet. Every time we bet, I never play well, and I never knew why. And then one day we weren't betting, and one of the guys playing with us said, you really do play better when you don't bet. And my son laughed and joked and said, yeah, he doesn't like losing money. And all of a sudden I felt this pit in my stomach.

You felt it.

Yeah. And it all flooded. I was excited because I went home and told my wife. I said, now I really experienced it. That was a trauma in my life.

Okay. Now, when you married your wife, you were 19, you noticed this stuff going on, but you didn't have a PhD in counseling. Is that what your motivation is? Is that why you went out to get that? You wanted to figure out what was going on with the person you loved?

Not just my wife, but my daughter. So it was really more my daughter. So my wife wanted me to find an answer for her. So when she was 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn's. And so they told her she got to change her diet, got to take gluten, got to take dairy. And she ended up having 4 resections of her intestines. I mean, she really had it bad. And so when I started looking at trauma, I said, I think her Crohn's is because of the trauma.

Wow.

That I believe trauma creates inflammation in the body.

Oh, it totally does. And it's known that trauma will do that.

Yep. But that is affecting the immune system and the neurotransmitters. So my wife kept saying, you gotta find an answer. And so I just started studying trauma. And what I realized is they're not treating it right. They're teaching you to live and manage with the symptoms. You have anxiety, you have panic attacks, whatever it is, we're going to teach you to manage it. And I said, that doesn't make sense.

It really doesn't. If you think about it, like, oh, I'm afraid of flying. Oh, the answer is don't fly. Right. Well, you actually needed to fly to be functional. But there are a bunch of people who've done very deep biochemistry research on, for instance, gluten, which is one of the lectins that really does stuff to your gut lining that is inflammatory, even if you don't have a trauma. That's behind it, but it's probably more inflammatory for people who have the inflammation and the cytokines and things like that who are more traumatized.

Exactly.

I mean, are you going so far as to say Crohn's is purely trauma? No. It's okay if you do. I mean, if it is.

No, I believe there could be, so there could be diet, but it could also be trauma.

Yeah, trauma is a factor. I absolutely believe it. And I don't know that it's always a factor, but sometimes it is, right? Yes. How do you define the word trauma? I've used it in episodes since the beginning. I've interviewed different experts on trauma, but they all kind of have a different way of describing it. And the reason I'm asking, when I started this path, look, I'm an engineer. There's no reason for me to be traumatized, therefore I'm not traumatized. There's no reason for me to be afraid, therefore I'm not afraid. Hyper-rational sort of stuff. And when someone said you're traumatized, I'm like, have I been in a car accident? I'm not traumatized. So what is trauma the way you're talking about it?

Trauma is a glitch. It's an error message. So the way I always explain it is if you think about something that happened to you 10 years ago and you feel fear or anger, you feel an emotion that's affecting you. So trauma to me is if some people have experienced severe trauma and they're higher functioning, it's what I call your own personal atmospheric conditions. So if my atmospheric conditions were much clearer growing up, and then I get into some trauma like I experienced, I'm able to deal with that better because I don't have this flood of data coming in. So to me, it's all in perspective. So my wife, anytime something would go wrong, she— her nervous system would be totally dysregulated because she had so many things that her mind was thinking about. I could have something happen and I could deal with it better because my system had learned how to regulate. And I could stay present easier. So I think it's all relative depending on the individual and what they've experienced, especially in childhood.

I'm glad you said especially in childhood. When is the earliest that a trauma is going to affect you?

I think it starts almost immediately. I believe it can even go all the way back to childbirth.

What about before childbirth?

Possibly.

Conception. Conception or trauma in the womb even?

I believe so. Yeah.

Now, I've got to ask this because it's part of your story. You were adopted. I mean, is being adopted traumatic?

Because of the way, I guess, I always understood I was adopted. So that was right from the very beginning. My parents were very upfront. They didn't hide it. Now, I didn't know my story. Um, and anytime I asked my parents about it, they would get not upset, but they would get emotional. And I didn't understand why. And then when I was 18, a friend of mine found a— gave me a note of a number to call to find out about my adoption. I had no real interest in it because the way I looked at it is people would say to me, aren't you mad that your mother gave you away? And I'd say, no, quite the contrary. I think that was an amazing gift. How she did that, I don't know how she did that. I saw it completely different. I saw it as a sacrifice.

Your parents taught you a real secure attachment. That's pretty unusual for people who are adopted. Adopted.

Very unusual. But that's how I always looked at it. And so if I did even just sort of question it, they would get a little emotional. And then I found out when I was 18, my mother found that note. So then she said to me, she says, okay, I'm going to tell you what happened. She said, our family doctor, who I knew he died when I was 9, was actually my grandfather. His daughter got pregnant when she was in medical school. And at that time, single moms pregnant, right? So he went to my dad, who was 45. So they were older. And said, I want you to adopt this child. And so what happened is, is they agreed to, and then the grandmother found out and sued my parents for 2 years.

Oh my goodness.

And I never understood why my birth certificate had the issue date was 2 years later. So the reason they got emotional is because, not because I was asking about the adoption, but that flood of that fear of losing me was coming in. And then it started to make sense. And so I never had any real interest in finding my mother or finding my father or anything like that, because to me, if she knew where I was, she had to know where I was. If she didn't reach out, I didn't want to hurt her by reaching out to her. It was sort of a mutual respect.

The reason I'm kind of going deep on this, I have some very close friends who are adopted, and I've worked with a good number of people who've done the real intense letting go of things from 40 Years of Zen who go through adoption. And usually there's some part of the baby that's like, where's my mom right now? And you don't exhibit the typical anxiety in the way you carry yourself that can happen even in highly functioning, smart, intelligent, good-hearted people who just haven't gone through and done this. So it sounds like your parents did some pretty Olympic-level parenting for you there to let you sit back and do that. So I think you're very lucky.

It was really interesting because one of the things I also found out was I used to get these really bad stomach pains when I was really little. And I can remember that. And Dr. Rowley, who is my grandfather, he basically said to my parents that you have to take tension out of this home. The tension from what they— because it really hurt them financially. They really got— because they weren't wealthy people.

So drawn-out lawsuit.

Absolutely. So they must have been tense. So I think they went out of their way to take all that tension because they realized— and Dr. Rowley was very naturalistic, holistic, He said, "Tension's creating those stomach pains." He's feeling it. I had no idea, right? But he knew that I was somehow being affected by it.

You're a neuroscience researcher and you're working with people to release trauma, but you actually have done some pretty heavy-duty work on helping missing kids be found. You've started Child Watch and you've helped to locate 250 missing children over the last 20 years? Correct. Why that as your mission?

Well, when we— I'm originally from Canada, so when we moved down to the United States, we—

Sorry, I live in Canada. Sorry, my Canadian friends. I had to say it.

That's right.

Yeah.

So we did it about 27 years ago. And when we moved down, before we had moved down, there was an organization to look for missing children and we had donated some time to them. So when I moved down to the United States, we were having to get our citizenship. So one of the things that they said is, well, until you get that, right? What are you going to do? So we started a nonprofit foundation. And because we had done work with missing children, we said, oh, we'll get that started and then we'll do other things at the same time. But I started again looking at that from a business standpoint, saying, wow, they're not doing that right, right? The way they're looking for missing children, right? The law enforcement weren't organized and prepared to look for missing children. So when I started, I went to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. And I said, "Give me some old cold cases and see if we can help." So I went and I got my PI license to add the credibility to it. And what I started doing is starting to do the investigations. And we got 12 cases from FDLE and we solved 11 of them. No kidding. And not because we were doing anything that law enforcement couldn't do. But for example, I worked with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department who had 8 detectives and over 3,000 files that they worked on.

So they just don't have the bandwidth.

No. So unless a lead came in, they weren't following it up. So I could track down and work with the families, find the leads, and then be able to help them.

And you were just doing this as a nonprofit.

Yeah.

Wow. Well, thanks for doing that work. That's a pretty big thing to bring a child back to their parents.

Very rewarding.

You ended up starting this thing. The reason I wanted to interview you really is you talk straight up about clearing trauma to improve performance.

Correct.

So it's not about just stopping suffering, which is actually really useful because spending your whole life suffering is kind of a waste of time and unpleasant, and that's what a lot of people do.

Right.

And so you're calling it the Inspired Performance Institute, which is a very different mindset on trauma than most people where it's sort of like, oh, your trauma's leading to your addiction. You're like, yeah, that might all be true, but like, don't you want to kick ass? So kudos for nailing why it matters. So after you spent years looking at your wife as the ultimate guinea pig, right? Right. You also had something happen to your son Tyson, had some serious head injuries as well. I mean, are physical traumas a part of your thing? Is this more emotional traumas?

More emotional. But I also learned something from him because we thought maybe it was emotional, but he had a— fell off the monkey bars when he was in elementary school. He hit his head on a wall at middle school and he ended up with retrograde amnesia.

Wow.

And so he hit his head on a Wednesday. On Friday, he was playing baseball and they were getting ready to start the game. He was at shortstop and he broke out crying, screaming, "How'd I get on a baseball field? Did somebody hit me in the head?" And he repeated it for 30, 60 seconds over and over and over for hours. And what they said is that he hit his head on Wednesday and woke up on Friday to him. And all of a sudden he's in a baseball uniform.

Unbelievable.

Yeah. And then he just started— we saw him starting to regress. And then he ended up when he was a teenager in high school, he bought marijuana from somebody and he owed him $5 and the guy sucker punched him and knocked him out. And that was the third head injury.

Wow.

Then we really saw him go downhill. But everybody who we took him to kept telling me he's got major depression. We just need to medicate him. And I said, I think he has traumatic brain injury.

Good for you.

And we could not— I could not get a neurologist to write me a SPECT scan. So Dr. To a man who you've worked with, right? He's really big into those. And so I kept saying, a spec scan will show us what we're looking for, right? And it was like, well, no, we'll do an MRI. And I said, an MRI is not going to give us the detail. So finally we went to Dr. Harsh in Louisiana and we drove up there.

He's been on the show.

Oh, has he really?

Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, beautiful.

So we ended up, we took him up there. Dr. Harsh did a spec scan, did a dive, did another spec scan and said, it's definitely TBI. So we have our own hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

I do too. Funny, really. Um, I, I also interviewed Mark Gordon on the show about a year ago who flat out says he does not believe that you can have PTSD unless you've had a traumatic brain injury, which is pretty extreme. But he had some, some interesting cases there that, that when people can't let go of a trauma and they get really obsessed on it, there's almost always a corresponding brain injury, even if it's from 30 years ago. I do know 90% or thereabouts of people who come through the 40 Years of Zen program, we look at just a 24-channel EEG scan. You can see, did you hit your head? No. Did you hit your head? Oh yeah, when I was 2. You have to ask them a few times before it even comes back because it's there. Certainly, you can see where I've hit my head. I did have amnesia the last time I did it. I took a knee to the head at a recreational event at Burning Man. And I came back and I swore like a sailor and I couldn't play Go Fish with my kids. My memory was shot and I had amnesia for a few days where the doctor looked at me and said, "You have a bleeding in your brain and you need to deal with this. This is a big deal." And I looked him right in the eye and I said, "Okay, so I can fly tomorrow? I got a conference." I couldn't compute my— My wife being an ER doctor, she just rolled her eyes and she looked at the guy and she said, "I've got this, don't worry," because she's drug and alcohol addiction and she knows what she's doing. But having experienced it firsthand, what do you think of that theory? Is PTSD, which is an extreme form of trauma, is that tied with brain injuries or any other physical injuries or is it something else?

I haven't heard that, but that doesn't sound crazy.

There's some relationship.

There's possibly. I know a lot of— I worked with Dr. Maxfield, who's another pioneer in hyperbaric Dave Asprey, uh, therapy out of Tampa.

Yep.

Because I had him look at my son's, um, MRIs and, and fMRIs, and he said that— he says, I can see that he's got traumatic brain injuries. And I said, well, how do you see it and these other neurologists and radiologists aren't seeing it? He says, well, you got to know what you're looking for. And he says, a lot of times these veterans who are coming back from war are being diagnosed with PTSD and they actually have TBI.

That is so common from all these explosions.

And he says, yeah, the concussion, right? The intensity of the bombs, even though they don't get hit with anything, the compression on the bombs are actually creating the traumatic brain injury. And then what are they doing? They're flying them out, right? Which is the worst thing you can do.

Yeah, no oxygen for a little while, right? When your brain needs hyperbaric. Yep. And we see the same thing. I mean, Daniel Amen's been on the show a few times and his work, I credit him very openly with helping me to see I had a hardware problem before I thought I was just a moral failing. I'm kind of failing out of Wharton here, guys. What do I do here? That gave me huge hope. It's funny because we're here at Genius Network, Joe Polish's event, and I actually met Dr. Amen for the first time here. I benefited from his work for more than a decade, but I hadn't actually connected with him in person. And we've become good friends since then. And just this idea that our brains are way more delicate than we think, and we're taking these kids and putting them out on the field, like your son, after they've been injured. I feel like maybe the work you're doing around glitches, there's a tie-in with this brain injury, and maybe there isn't. Sometimes it's not a physical injury, it's a learning that, oh, every time I do this, which is a normal behavior for a kid, I get yelled at or hit or whatever, that also, it may not show as a physical injury, but you'll see electrical changes in the brain. Parts of the brain will become overactive or inactive. Dr. Amen can see it. We can see it with an EEG. It is actual neuroscience. So now talk to me about what you do at the Inspired Performance Institute in order to clear a glitch. So we had an example from your wife. You would say, "I didn't like something," and she'd say, "Why are you mad at me?" Like, "I'm not mad. I just wanted—" I'm going to eat my salad with less dressing. It doesn't correspond here. What's your technique?

Well, basically what I did, and that's the reason we called it a performance program as opposed to trauma therapy, because nobody wants to go through trauma therapy.

Let's face it, if you have trauma, you probably don't know it. I mean, the vast majority of people who will insist that they have nothing, they do.

Yep. And my wife was high-functioning. So if you had met her, she didn't get into addiction or anything. If you had met her, she's great woman, great wife, great mother, taking care of her kids. But she had nightmares constantly. And she was living with that. So I could see that and I could see how it was affecting her. But she presented so well and I was sworn to secrecy. Nobody could know what happened to her as a child because she kept saying, this is a reflection on my family, on who I am. There's a shame component. Shame component. And I kept saying, no, there isn't. Right? I loved you. I married you. It had nothing to do with the way I saw you, but that's not the way she thought. Interesting. And now she can talk about it to anybody.

Okay, so she lost the shame over it entirely. Yes. Which is such a powerful thing to be able to just say. It's the same thing with addiction.

I say the same thing is that we're treating it wrong. We're shaming them, we're guilting them, as opposed to saying— what I say to them is, I understand why you got into addiction is because you had emotional pain. You found a resource that stopped the pain temporarily, and because you repeated it, you built a code.

Yeah. Now, it's funny. My wife might— she might get pissed at me for saying this, but she'll be cool with it. It's for a good cause. Early on when we got married, she broke a blender. The pitcher broke. Sometimes we drop stuff. It doesn't matter. And she just started crying, and it was like, The old things, just like you're describing. Some old thing from, I don't know, when she was a kid, something happened. And I'm like, "Look at her, look, it's just a blender." And it took actual processing for her to just realize, "Oh, I'm highly emotionally reactive to this making a mistake." And so she did the work on it. Unfortunately, because of her background in drug and alcohol addiction, emergency medicine, and counseling, she could identify, "Oh yeah, this is what's going on here." We had a conversation about it and she was able to work through it. The thing is though, the techniques to access, they're not rational, right? In that this is all the realm of feelings and emotions and patterns, which is why it's so hard, I think, for smart people especially to deal with this because you're saying it doesn't make any sense. So how do you, in your program, go through and help a smart, high-functioning person who wants to be higher functioning deal with stuff that doesn't make sense?

Well, I spend probably, we do a 4-hour session. And in that 4-hour session, I spend about the first hour and a half going over the science of what I've discovered, the time slice theory, how our mind is storing this information, how it's creating the glitches because your subconscious mind's in the present accessing data from 10 years ago, trying to protect you against what it perceives as a threat. Once they have the concept down of what we're dealing with, then what I say is that when you had that traumatic event, that was being stored in a beta brainwave state, a very active, high-definition state. So we're going to spend the next few minutes, I'm going to get your mind to get into an alpha brainwave state, very, very relaxed.

This should sound familiar to people who've heard any of my interviews about neurofeedback. Yeah. Okay, got it.

And so while I've got them in that alpha brainwave state—

How are you putting them into the state?

I just basically take them through a process. I'll have them close their eyes, they listen to my voice for about 2 minutes, so I get them calming down.

Visualization stuff, okay.

And so they're just sort of calming down, and I can recognize when they're there. And then what I'll do is then I'll say, now let's take 2 or 3 different events in your life, and you can pick any order, whatever one you want. And I say, I don't need any details of it. If you want to share the details of it, that's fine. If you don't want to share the details, that's fine. And they'll say, well, what do I need to do? And I'll say, if you can share it, I'm looking for a 2 to 3 minute description of that event. And as you're doing that, I'm going to run some techniques with you as you're going along. And so if you don't want to talk about it, we can do it just visually. I'll have you just see it. I have no idea what you're experiencing, but I use the same techniques. Or 3, and I do this a lot with rape survivors, is I'll say, I'm going to teach you a new language to talk to me in, and it's called flowing. And there's only one word in the flowing language, and it's flowing. So instead of saying, I walked into the room, you're going to say flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing. So every room, every word is flowing. But in order to even say flowing, they have to go into memory. And as they're in memory, seeing the details of the memory, I've got them in alpha brainwave state. And I believe what we're doing is just providing a counter frequency. So the memory that was stored in beta comes back into an alpha brainwave state and is reprocessed.

It unquestionably, the idea that you can take someone into alpha and use that alpha state to do forgiveness processing, that is a core part of 3 of the 5 days of the neurofeedback stuff that I do as well. But I have a device right here, actually, on the desk in front of me. It's a cerebral electrical stimulator, and this is like a consumer-grade one. We use a clinical-grade one when I'm doing stuff at the facility. But, um, this thing is called an Oasis, and it lets you run a shaped current back and forth across your brain. You can tell it, I want alpha, and it'll put the brain in alpha whether, whether you want it to be there or not, because there's a current going from one ear to the other a certain number of times a second. You'll be in alpha even if you're fighting it. Does that work? Can I just use electricity to let go of my traumas?

I don't know about that, but if you get into the alpha brainwaves, then we can reprocess. And that's why I say we do 2 or 3, then the mind applies what it just learned to everything else.

That's not how I do it either. I know you can dial up an alpha state with sounds. You can dial up an alpha state with the electrical current. You can even do it with magnets. And we do those things for neuroplasticity. When I'm working with people, but you're talking about doing it with just words and your presence. Is your energy a part of it? Are you putting yourself in a meditative state so they're resonating with you?

I believe it has a lot to do with my voice, my pacing, the structure. So even in the hour and a half when I'm talking about the science behind it, I'm telling stories in there and the subconscious mind responds to stories, symbols, and metaphors. So they're already in alpha state Pretty much from the beginning. And then I do the exercises just to sort of take them through that. And then I'll say, okay, let's take one of those events. You can do it visually, you can talk about it, or we can do it through flowing. And then as they're going through it, I'm keeping them present. Okay. In the room with me while they're processing it. And the mind just updates it. I just say, we're just, we're doing the opposite of what they did with The Wizard of Oz and took it from black and white to color. We're taking it from color to black and white, and the mind stops responding because it realizes there's no threat. This is just information. It's just a glitch.

I'd like to get your feedback on this. One of the things that I've noticed through, geez, I might have picked this up in a book somewhere years ago, or it might just be from talking with a lot of people, but when you're playing back an event in your mind that may or may not have been traumatic, Dave Asprey, every time you see yourself from outside your body, as in you're seeing like you're the guy behind the camera and you see yourself in a room or something, pretty much by definition that means that it was a traumatic event because you left your body. True or false statement? I don't know. I don't think that.

I haven't experienced that because one of the things that we do use is one of the techniques is disassociation to bring them out of that experience so that they do see it from a distance.

Oh, it's useful if you're using it as a tool to say like, let's look at this from your adult mind at what happened when you were a child. But if you go back to a memory and it's a memory that's non-traumatic, this is in my experience, right? And I'm asking you to shoot holes in my theory, right? So if you're saying, "Oh, what did it look like when I looked around? I remember the sky looked like this color and it felt so warm and snuggly and there was the crisp leaves and they smelled like this," you were in your body. But if you say, "What was it like?" and immediately you're seeing yourself from outside your body, it means you dissociated, but it wasn't done consciously. And so I usually, when people describe that, I'm like, "All right, you might have some work to do there. Feel into that, think about that. What were you feeling at the time?" And they're like, "Oh, actually I was really scared." I'm like, "All right, there's probably a trauma there." How does your TIPP method from your institute, how does it differ from something like EMDR, this eye movement dissociative response that some therapists are using. I've talked about it in a few episodes before.

Yep, EMDR works if it's done by the right practitioner, but it just takes a lot longer.

Okay, so the results you're seeing, one 4-hour session, how many traumas do you clear per hour? 3. 3, okay.

Not even per hour, just 3 altogether.

Okay, and so you're saying just 3 is enough for most people to have a profound difference in their performance?

Yes, because what happens is that when they go to sleep at night, the brain goes into that theta brainwave state and starts processing what they just learned. So I worked with a lady who had really bad sexual abuse as a child. We cleared 3 traumas. And she said to me, she said, we're going to be here all night because I got a lot of these. I said, we're not going to do any more. Your mind's going to process everything else. The mind and body are designed to heal. Once it got this process down, it's going to apply it. So I ran into her about a month later at a store and she ran over to me and she says, I got to tell you something. She says, there's no question that those traumas we worked on were clear. I could think about them. I wasn't feeling the emotion. She's, but when you told me my mind would clear the others, she said, I didn't believe you. She says, but I was at Universal Studios on the weekend with my daughter and my husband, and I was riding on the escalator and I was looking over the railing. And she says, my daughter said, Mom, look at what you're doing. And she says, I never told you I had a fear of heights. We never discussed it. And it's gone. Wow. I could go up to the top of the escalator and look and watch people walking underneath the bridge. She says, that was impossible before. So whatever event created that also cleared. Right, when it learned that process.

Have you noticed a correlation with people's general health, what they eat, their exercise, their sleep quality, with their ability to process trauma?

Oh, that I don't know. So I definitely know it affects health. So if we have this unresolved trauma, then we're definitely going to get sicker because the trauma is creating inflammation, which affects the immune system, neurotransmitters, and people are getting sicker and they're feeling bad. And the current solution is we're going to We're going to teach you, if you got anxiety, we're going to teach you how to live and manage and cope with it. And what I say is it's an error message. Why would you want to live and cope with it?

Let's eliminate it. Yeah, get rid of the error so that you don't pay that cost. The reason I'm asking is you said a couple things. One, you'll go into alpha if you're not making much electrical energy because you have, oh, I don't know, Crohn's. You can't absorb food or you have any of the mitochondrial issues I've talked about ad nauseam. You'll actually have less electrical energy to make alpha brainwaves. So part of what I evolved into the work that I do, it's like, look, let's turn up your energy production so you have enough leftover energy to do reprogramming work. That means that if someone is better able to make alpha brainwaves, they can respond more strongly. And actually measured it, and you get about 2.5 times more of the focused work on resetting before people just sort of hit the wall. You know what I mean? Like, "Okay, I've done my 3 and I'm just exhausted. I got nothing left." So we could stretch that. But what triggered me to think about this is for many years my sleep was crap. And you look at the percentage of the time that I would have theta states when I was asleep, it was vanishingly small. Now I interviewed the guys from LifeCycle, They make this lion's mane Australian mushroom extract. And if I use that, I mean, last night I slept 6 hours and 6 minutes, and I got an hour and a half of REM sleep, which is the theta state that we're talking about, right? If I don't take that stuff, I probably would go back down to half hour. So when people are doing trauma resolution and they have poor sleep hygiene, are they getting the same benefits?

What I found is that when people, after they've gone through the 4-hour session, they sleep like a baby.

Okay, so their body will You don't force them into theta because they need it.

They need it. Okay, got it. A lot of people will say, "I can't sleep." I got two texts from two people who just went through the program last week, and in both of them they just said, "I slept like a baby." I have definitely seen that.

If I do a lot of trauma clearing work from any of the different disciplines, and I'm kind of a tourist of that, I'll try any of that stuff once, whether it's drumming, sounds, energy work, I don't know, I'll give it a shot. Yeah, that night it's usually going to be a much higher percentage of either REM or deep sleep. And I find I can enhance it with turning the lights off before I go to bed and just the things that make you sleep better. But it's true, you will be pulled into a deep sleep. And you find with your clients, they just go to sleep. Go to sleep.

And that's why the mind gets so much work done.

Okay. What advice would you have for someone who wants to get a deeper understanding? By the way, you wrote a book, "You Must Be Out of Your Mind," which has some of the stuff. Read my book, is there an exercise, breathing, an awareness? Like, what would you share for someone listening? Go, huh, I wonder if I have trauma. What should I do about it?

Well, usually this is the way I sort of relate to it. I'll say, somebody says, well, I'm not really— I had a lady say, I don't really remember anything that was traumatic to me. And I said, think about any kind of an event or an experience. And so she worked at a church, super Christian, all this kind of stuff. And then And she says, "Well, okay." She says, "I remember when I was little." And she started to describe that when she was in church, she started talking and her grandmother took the hairbrush and hit her on the head. Ow. She was sobbing as she was talking about it. And as we discovered, what she discovered, she says, "You know what? I lost my voice that day." Yeah. And she had never recognized it before. So she wasn't, and her grandmother wasn't trying to hurt her or try to damage her.

No, there was no intent in a lot of this.

Yeah, it was just like, you don't talk in church, right? And so she hits her on the head with it. But to a 6-year-old child who doesn't have any life experience, right, that's traumatic. I can tell a 6-year-old that a guy in a white beard and a red suit flies around the world overnight delivering packages, and that makes sense to a 6-year-old. So because they don't have enough life experience, they start putting meanings and attaching meanings to these events. What does it mean about me that this happened? And then that gets stuck. So when I work with people, I worked with a guy from business. He just couldn't get his business off the ground. He says, I've I'm thinking about everything, I'm trying everything, and nothing was working. And really what it came back down to is he grew up in a household with parents that were very conservative, who believed that in order to be successful, you got a job, you got a pension, you bought a house, and you retired. So every time he would do anything that had any risk in business, as we all know, as entrepreneurs, is full of risk, he would change his plan. He would go in another direction trying to avoid, to stay away from the risk. Once we got him through the program, he did about $1 million worth of business that year.

'cause it reset his mind. I really think the bigger your business or the bigger your goals, your business is a direct reflection of your energetic state. And if you're walking around with a bunch of unconscious trauma, you're gonna mistreat your employees. Not 'cause you choose to, not 'cause it's a conscious decision, but specifically because it's invisible. It's an unconscious decision. And then you'll wonder why, you know, all the shit hit the fan and it's, It's very frustrating and confusing, and most people sabotage their careers this way. I see it over and over, and it's almost like the way you want to hire someone for your business if you're an entrepreneur is you want people who've done enough work on their own trauma so they're aware of their reactivity patterns so that they can show up consciously to work instead of reacting unconsciously at work. Well, okay, here's another question. You've worked with CEOs, executives, world-class athletes, veterans. I used to believe that pretty much everyone, when you get rid of all their traumas, is a good person. That's our fundamental human nature. I'm pretty darn convinced now that around 4 or 5% of people are actually sociopaths and psychopaths. And maybe even after you clear out the traumas, they're still assholes. Am I right?

I don't know. I tend to be more optimistic thinking that we're pretty much born pretty good, but that could be something from genetic malfunctioning or something like that.

Like the bad seed or something. Yeah. There probably are a few genuinely evil psychopathic, sociopathic people who know what they're doing and they do it anyway because they kind of get a little thing from it. And maybe they were traumatized, maybe that's just who they are. I'm on the fence about that. I like that. I also wonder if I've been a little bit naive throughout my path of evolution where really a lot of people who I would've perceived as as hostile jerks or whatever. They're actually just traumatized people and they're working on becoming better people and that that's our core drive. But I don't know, I'm asking a bunch of experts in the field, are the true sociopaths and psychopaths, are they fixable or is this just institutionalization kind of timing?

Well, the whole premise that we start off with our whole program is that there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with your mind. Your mind works perfectly fine. What's been interfering with it performing at its highest level. And my experience has been there's been events and experiences that your mind filters through. So if I had a filter and I pour water through the filter, the water is going to come out clear. But if I stuff it full of mud and I pour water through it, it's going to come out muddy. There was nothing ever wrong with the water. It's just filtering through, which I call atmospheric conditions. So my wife's atmospheric conditions were dark and stormy. So her thoughts, are going to be filtering through it. Her thoughts are not going to be clear.

That statement that there's nothing wrong with you is a really big thing. I had become super convinced, like, there's something wrong with me because, like, I, I want to do certain things and I'm just— it doesn't work. And it was Dr. Amen's work that was like, oh, there's nothing wrong with me. However, I have a hardware problem, like, like there's something wrong with my brain. And I did a bunch of transpersonal psychology work and work on my own traumas, I'm like, "Oh, okay, there's a bunch of things that are occluding the real me that are in the way," that filtering analogy, or you can be a bright shining light, but if there's dead bugs all over your windshield, it's not going to come out. And whatever the metaphor is, just those words, "There's nothing wrong with you, even if you're doing stuff that you're ashamed of or that you don't want to be doing, there's a reason for it." I think that's incredibly liberating.

And that's how I start with the whole program, is I say, you couldn't have done it any other way based on the way your mind produces thoughts. So if your mind is filtering through all this garbage to come up with a thought, it couldn't have come up with a different thought. And so once we clear that filter out, it's going to change the thought process. So one of the things I do is we set a target. And what I say is, my target for you is when you leave here today, your mind's going to be updated, rebooted, refreshed, and adjusted, which will now allow it to operate clear, calm, at peace with understanding, which then produces thoughts that are beneficial, appealing, and possible. And so that's my intention and target for them when they come in. And so when their mind makes those updates, it changes its operations, which changes its product.

So people come in, they go to Florida, And they spend one 4-hour session with you. Correct. They sleep at a hotel, they fly home.

Then they listen to a series of audios each day for about 28 days. Okay. And we have 21 days of what we call walking out behaviors, because we're dealing with two memory systems. We're dealing with the implicit memory, the way we store all the details and data. And then we're dealing with the procedural memory, which is what we learn through repetition, the same as the animal brain. Okay. So that memory builds codes. And that's what I say addiction is. Addiction is if you had a lady come in who had been on heroin and she said to me, I have self-destructive behavior. And I said, really? Why would you think you're self-destructive? She said, well, I'm sticking a needle in my arm with heroin. Don't you think that's self-destructive? I said, no, I think you're trying to feel better. And I bet you when you stuck the needle in your arm, you felt better. So the substance you were using was destructive, but you're not. And because you repeated it, Your subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between good or bad or right or wrong. It's literal, right? So because you repeated it, your mind said, this must be important for our survival. And it built a survival code connected up to the substance. That's why it's so hard to stop. And if you're continuing to loop in the trauma, your mind's going to continue to activate that code. So we first work on the implicit memory to break down the trauma that stops looping. Then we want to start building the new code. And we're getting a lot of success with addiction because of it.

What do you think causes addiction?

I think it's pain originally, and that they want to stop this pain, emotional or could be physical. All right. So if they're in emotional pain and then every time they think about it or in an environment that's keeping them in that active loop, they want to feel better. So the mind and the body, right, are constantly reaching homeostasis. So if we can take a drug and it can stop our mind from feeling the pain, that makes perfect sense. So I say to people, the reason people use drugs and alcohol is because it works. They weren't intentionally trying to go out to be an addict, but their mind built the code. And so once we get their mind to stop looping through the trauma, then all we have to do is get the mind to understand that that code. So I say, if you walk every day 2 miles to get food, food, right? But there's snipers and landmines everywhere you're walking and trying to get the food, but you get there and back every day. And then somebody says, why are you going that route? There's 100 yards down the road, there's a big supermarket, well-lit, it's really safe. Your mind won't go there instantly because it doesn't know that route. So you're going to have to show that route every day and repeat it and go down 1 yard, 10 yards, 20 yards. And what I say is repetition is like research for the brain. You've proven to it that this is a better code.

And that's why you have these audio files as part of the program. What's going on? Are you using NLP? Are you using binaural beats?

Binaural beats. We have tambura music. We have flutes. We have wind chimes. All that as I'm talking and taking them through.

So it's like a hypnotic sort of an experience.

Yeah, very meditation, very quiet, peaceful, keeping them in alpha brainwave state. And basically then they answer 5 questions every day along with the audios. The audios, the questions are designed to start saying, is this the behavior you want? Is this who you are? Right? And it starts questioning because when we get into a habit of behavior, our mind stops thinking anymore. We're just operating. So we want to challenge the operational system each day with the questions as you're listening to the audios and then start thinking about new ways of doing things.

Okay. And so people are spending one 4-hour in-person thing. Does it work over Skype? Skype? You ever do it over Skype? People do it from home?

Yeah, I've done it on Skype, Zoom. We also have an online version of it they can do online, and I've done groups. So I did a— do you know Shanda Sumpter? She's out of San Diego.

I've heard of her, but I don't think we've met.

I think she's in the Genius Network.

Okay, then we've probably connected. I've met everyone in Genius Network at least once, but it's a big group.

It's a big group. Yeah, so I went to her— this is a few months ago— and she had 140 people. I took the whole group of 140 people through the session. Wow. And people just said it was transformational. We cleared trauma. So what I did is I would bring one person up, I would do a demonstration with that one person. And there's something really exciting about a group because there's an energy when you start watching people transform right in front of you and clearing a trauma. Then I take the group through the same technique. Then I bring somebody else up, we do another demonstration of another technique. We got phenomenal response. People absolutely loved it.

There's pretty good data that if you're in a room full of people in alpha brainwave state, magically your body's going to resonate with that and do the same thing. And we've seen it with heart rate variability, and there's more data now than there used to be, and there's even more studies happening on that. But this sounds a little bit like what would happen at a Tony Robbins event. Like, I've, I've spoken at Unleash the Power Within, you know, there's 15,000 people But when Tony gets up there on stage, he'll lead the entire group through trauma release processes in a room of 10,000 or 15,000 people. It's pretty mind-blowing. What's the difference in sort of that approach versus what you're doing in a group like that?

I think it's pretty much the same thing. So we're just taking them through a technique and then the mind just updates. But there's something special about a group like that. There's an energy in the room So when you watch somebody go through that and you see them transform, it's very powerful.

I actually don't think you can do the deepest level work without a witness because the defense systems in the mind will almost immediately start erasing your memory of the healing work you do. But when there's a witness or ideally several, your mind knows that it'll get caught because it's been seen. So it won't self-sabotage. And that's why when I do the 40 Years of Zen, it's a group thing. It's only 4 or 5, maybe up to 10 people. But you have to say, "Oh yeah, I worked on this." And once you do that, it's like your auto-erase feature, the thing that made you not notice the trauma pattern, it disables that. Do you do something if you're just one-on-one with someone? Is there something in the tapes? Is there something you're doing that, allows people to not forget the work they're doing?

I think it's really probably just as maybe what you're saying is maybe I'm the witness to them going through it. And so I've created this very safe environment that there's something about my voice, the pacing. And this is why people say, well, why don't you train other people to do this? I said, I can't train them to speak. You know how long it would take them to learn this? So I developed the online program that people can use to facilitate them to go through it.

Got it. And I mean, you have a PhD and you spent years learning how to do this. You've studied NLP. And it's the same even with some of the breathing exercises that I've done. I did a recent interview about Art of Living, and I wrote a foreword for a recent book about that. Art of Living is a set of breathing exercises done by tens of millions of people around the planet. I did it every day for 5 years. And when you go to do it in a group, you actually play, at the time it was like a cassette tape, from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the guy who invented this. And okay, I'm like, I'm an engineer. Like, why do we have to sit in a room and listen to this guy go, "Soham," which is what he says when you breathe in, breathe out. And the bottom line is because he's doing something in his voice that matters. Exactly. Do you think we'll get to the state where we can quantify that? We'll be able to have Siri incorporate that stuff. So when Siri talks to you, it'll be NLP superpowers. I believe that's probably possible with AI.

Yeah, I think that's probably very possible. And that's the problem. Like I said, I'll go to these trainings, say an EMDR training, right? And I'll know people will be leaving there going, oh, I'm going to do this. And I'll go, they have no clue of what they're doing. And they'll go, and then people will say, oh, EMDR EMDR doesn't work. Well, EMDR works if you've got the right technique.

It's the same with acupuncture. Sure. You take someone, oh, I'm going to go stick some needles in you. It's probably going to hurt and it's probably not going to work because both the location of the needle and the healing nature of the acupuncturists themselves are variables that really matter. Right. Do you think anyone with enough study can do what you do or do you think that, you know, you have a genetic gift, superpower energy?

Well, that sounds arrogant because I never really like saying that, but I do believe there's something about my voice, the inflection, the tone, the pacing. And I think I learned it from my wife because my wife was so sensitive that I learned to speak a certain way, to be very careful how I was saying things, the pacing I was using, the inflection I was using. My wife really probably trained me on how to do this technique.

I've studied so-called superpowers, you know, the people who can do it, and I've seen enough quantified brain states. I firmly disavow what it says in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, whatever, that all men, and by extension women, are created equal. Look, there are people who have powers I do not have. Their brains can do things I can't do. And I've had a Native American shaman on the show and I asked the question straight up, and like, is this from your, your genetics? Can anyone do it? And she says, God, I don't want to say this, but yeah, like, that's part of it. Like, this comes from my people. So look, some people are healers, some people are doers, and it's okay. And you can take a doer and you can get— make them an adequate healer, but will they ever be a super healer? I don't really think so. You think I'm right? I do. Okay. Yep. Yeah. And, and what I found makes a big difference for me is I have learned how to meet really good healers, and I have some abilities there, but that's not my primary mission in this life. So find someone who has a skill set, someone who can help you there, and ask for help, and that'll let you do whatever your greatest gift is. And when you talk about inspired performance, I don't think you find people who come in who are amazing artists and healers and saying, "I'm going to teach you to be a great chief operating officer," spreadsheets every day because it's not in their nature.

Well, it's like I say, I worked with a guy, Marco Cesetto. Marco's a double amputee, but he's a marathon runner. And they wanted him to improve his time because they say he's a potential Olympic hopeful, but he had hit a plateau. So by working with him, clearing his trauma, what I said to him, I said, you're already a world-class athlete. I'm not making you a world-class athlete. I'm going to give you an edge by keeping your mind present. Which like you said, releases the ATP in the cell, you have more power, more focus. So after he went through the program, 9 days later he ran in a race and he took 15 seconds per mile off his time. Holy moly. Which is huge. And then he said, "It was all in my mind." Now he's speaking at the Spartan Leadership now.

I should mention, by the way, it was Joe DeSena who's been on the show before from Spartan Races and who's coming back on the show who recommended that interview. Yeah. Thanks, Joe, for doing that.

So yeah, because he heard Marco speak. And so the next race he ran in was the Boston Marathon. He broke the world record for amputees. Incredible. And then 3 weeks ago ran in the Chicago Marathon, broke his own record by another 5 minutes.

And he gets— That's a big difference.

Huge. And so, and I believe what it was coming from is he said, the way he explained it was really simple. He says, when I used to run, I would say I got 20 miles to go, I got 15 miles to go. He said, what I found myself doing is saying, oh, I'm at the 10-mile mark. I'm at the 15-mile mark. It sounds subtle, but it was present. So all that energy within the cell is available because he's staying in the moment. His mind's not leaving and going into another space. And so I worked with him, and I think that's what Joe was saying. I worked at the world championships with Rob Killian, and Rob Killian went through the program on Friday and on Sunday ran in the world championships and won by a minute. And so what I said to Rob is, if I can give you a 1 to 2% increase by giving you the techniques to stay in the moment, that may be the difference between first and third. And he won it. I think that's where Joe is very interested in what we're doing.

Getting rid of those barriers internally just lets people show up at whatever they're going to be amazing at doing. Does it though actually turn on abilities? People, maybe they thought, "Oh, I'm too disorganized. I can't really do this." And it's a trauma because someone yelled at them for being disorganized and it sat the wrong way. All of a sudden, do they wake up the next day and they're masters at being organized? I'm curious to see.

I think they can improve it. They can improve it. Because if their trauma is coming from maybe they got in trouble because they did something and then their mind is associating that with it, then they're not going to want to go that way. So I don't believe the mind is trying to sabotage them. I think it's trying to protect them because it thinks there's a danger in doing it one way or another. So it's basically had a workaround that it's done for years. So this way we get that block out of the way and all of a sudden they can start doing it. But we're not going to make somebody who can't draw all of a sudden be able to draw. The idea is what's interfering with you performing at your highest level within your own ability.

Okay, I'm getting it. I think there's just great value in looking at these traumas. I wish we had an extra 4 hours at Genius Network now because I'd say, "All right, run me through this. Let's see if we can find something in there that I haven't already rooted out." It's funny because there's 100— actually, probably 150 million downloads on Bulletproof Radio, New York Times recent book and all that. Congratulations on all your successes. Thank you. I'm not trying to brag here. I'm just saying if people— people do, some of them look up to me, and they'll put you on a pedestal. And it's— I'm just saying straightforward, like, I still have patterns like that even though I've erased so many of them and I've progressed. Every now and then you don't know why it's there. Exactly. This stuff is going on. And that's why you work with world-class athletes, you're working with CEOs, and they have this going on. So if you're sitting here listening to this going, I don't have this, you probably do, because some of the highest performing, most successful, most visible people in the world, including And my belief, and yours, Don, just from this interview I can tell, is that look, you will perform better when you get rid of it. So if you're already kicking ass, you'll just kick more ass. And if you wanted to kick ass and you never did, you might turn that on. And so this is a fundamental part of being bulletproof, is dealing with your crap.

I love it. That's exactly right. So same thing with golf, because I golf. I love to golf. If you took the top 500 golfers in the world and you lined them up on a range and they started hitting golf balls, golf balls and you didn't know who any of them were, I'll guarantee you could not figure out who was number 1 and who was number 500, because they're all incredible athletes. The difference is, is that when it comes down to Sunday, right, who can perform? Who can stay in the present? And the reason Tiger Woods was the greatest of all time was because his mind was so— I talked to a golfer one time and I said, this is in my book, do you think you need to be confident to play good golf? And he goes, yeah, I do. I said, what if I told you you didn't? I said, confidence is a byproduct of your skill. When you execute your skill, you'll be confident. But if you rely, you build your base on the confidence as opposed to the skill, I'll guarantee your confidence is gonna fall out from under you. And then that's gonna affect your skill. Reverse it. Right? I said, so if you 150 yards out from the green and you know you hit a 9-iron 150 yards, and so you get your 9 out, you hit it. And what happens is, is the wind is coming down the fairway, but you can't feel it yet because you can't see it yet. And it knocks your ball down into the bunker. I said, I want you to develop an attitude of optimism that there's nothing on a golf course that you have to fear. If it's in the bunker, I'll hit the ball out of the bunker. I'm a great bunker player. Tiger Woods could hit the ball in the woods and hit the ball in between two trees, 6 inches apart. Wow. Right? Because he knew he could do it. If he was trying to be confident to do it, Right? That confidence would fade because he just hit the ball in the woods. The golfer said, you took all the fear on the golf course away from me. I said, no matter where you hit the ball, just execute your skill.

That is fantastic. Don, I appreciate you showing up and talking about trauma the way you do. And we just touched on it a little bit, but finding 250 lost kids is no small achievement in and of itself as well. And thanks for shining a spotlight on on trauma as an impediment to performance rather than a flaw, deficiency, or something wrong with you. I think you're doing great work in the world, and thank you. Thank you.

Your website is inspiredperformanceinstitute.com, and you can see a lot of the testimonials from people, from people from veterans all the way up to high-performing athletes who will talk about— Tim Burke, the world long drive champion, he just said he made the finals of every tournament he played in this year after going through the program, won 2 of the tournaments. And is now number 2 in the world. And he says, I give the credit to the program. He says, it kept me present. And so what I used to— when I— very first tournament that he was playing in, it was actually here in Phoenix earlier this year. And I texted him right before the finals. I said, how you feeling? And then he goes, alpha, baby. Alpha. And he says, I am so calm playing golf. Even the Golf Channel announcers were saying, Tim looks really different. When he's competing, but he stayed present. So that's really the key to perform and execute at our best. Beautiful.

InspiredPerformanceInstitute.com. If you liked today's episode, you know what to do. Figure out what traumas are holding you back and go kick their ass via whatever method you like, appeals to you. This stuff actually matters way more than you think it does. And if you're already on the path, Just keep your eyes open, your mind open to different tools that are going to let you make more progress there because you can drink all the Bulletproof coffee in the world. I think it will give you more energy, maybe enough energy to do something about being a better human being, but that's not enough. And you can say, "I've got good sleep hygiene. I eat the right stuff," et cetera, et cetera. This stuff was still sucking energy until you get rid of it. So you can turn up the energy, but what if you turn down the waste? And turning down the wasted energy, it just, it matters. So do your research, do your reading, check out this body of work, and you're going to find that there is an untapped level of performance that's within you. And that's what this whole show is all about. Thanks for listening. If you like it, leave a review. And if you haven't read Superhuman yet, it's probably because you're traumatized. So it, it's definitely a book worth reading. New York Times twice. And even if you're not traumatized, you just want to live to 180, Dave Asprey, do it. And I got to tell you something. If you've ever been to a hospital, especially when you were young, and you saw an older person hooked up to tubes, monitors, disabled, in pain, traumatized, maybe with Alzheimer's disease, you know, unable to recognize you, that is a trauma. And you have a trauma about aging. And if you read Superhuman, it's going to teach you how to think about aging where it's not a trauma. So do that for you and for every person you meet who's older than you.

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