Why Big Food Should Be Afraid of You with Vishen Lakhiani

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I consider myself like the ultimate human guinea pig. I'm constantly testing out new ideas.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. That's Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and this is a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation matters because we're going to talk with Vishen Lakiyani, an extraordinary man who has taken on the food industry in a way that has had real impact. And we're going to talk about that in detail. Vishan is also an extraordinary guy who's the founder of Mindvalley University and its 2 million strong student base. He's a former computer engineer and is noted for his talent to integrate information across the fields of human transformation into unified models. His ideas are being used in schools in Finland, Silicon Valley companies, and now global universities which are integrating these ideas as parts of many curriculums. His book, which I highly recommend, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind and who Does Not Want an Extraordinary Mind? I certainly do. It made the New York Times best sellers list. It's hit the coveted number one spot on Amazon five times. He's the creator of Mindvalley Quest Learning Platform, which is an extraordinary learning platform online to help people transform and live better lives. He's also the founder of A-Fest, which is where I met him and also met my wife. So I have incredible debt to this man who connected me with the love of my life. It's a transformational National Festival, sort of like Ted meets Burning Man meets Coachella. It's quite extraordinary and a great gathering of amazing minds from around the world. He's created a new thing called the City Campus. Imagine going for a month to one city with a group of incredibly smart people. It's like a college for a month in a remote city somewhere where everybody gets to hang out, play, learn, and grow. He's now working to expand Mindvalley's presence globally with the aim of bringing its teachers, tech, and programs into 100 national schooling programs in every company in Fortune 500. Imagine that if we all had companies that were interested in transformation and growth and learning. Well, welcome Vishen.

Thank you, Mark. It's such an honor to be in your podcast. I've read two of your books, Ultramind Solution and Food, what the Heck Do We Eat? I'm about two-thirds into food right now and love it. I've been recommending that book. I think this is a book that everyone should buy for their family because it's gonna shave off like so much bad health off someone's life.

So you're really interested in optimizing human potential. And that's what your curriculum is. You had course on biohacking, longevity, creating a vision for your life, many, many-.

Just to be sure, it's not like I have these courses. My job is to bring in my knowledge of engineering to produce the best learning platforms and then to bring in the best teachers and have them produce these programs in our learning platform.

Yeah, and I had the honor of being one of the guests talking about Biohacking and my genes, it was fascinating. It was really great. So Mindvalley, just give us a couple of sentence summary. What is Mindvalley? What is your vision for Mindvalley and why did you create it?

Well, I think the human species has gone slightly astray based on our current systems of operating. If you look at the Native Americans, they said, in our decisions, you want to think seven generations deep. Right now, we barely think one generation deep.

We think next quarter.

We think next quarter, right. And it's not that there are villains out there. It's just that our algorithms for how we function as a society are slightly dysfunctional. They are bungs in these algorithms. And so, for example, we are living in a world where America has pulled out of treaties to help prevent the Earth from facing global warming, which is probably a massive existential threat. So there are all of these little bugs in the way we operate as human beings, like another bug is how corporations operate extremely short term. So you have giant food companies like Nestle, like Coca-Cola, and these companies are run by good people, but because of the algorithms of how The stock market operates, they have to make short-term decisions that actually lead to bad health across the human species. Obesity is a rising epidemic. My country, Malaysia, just became the fattest country in Asia. We didn't have this problem 30 years ago. So we're seeing from global warming to obesity to the way we are treating our neighbors. Look at how In many countries around the world, right-wing politics is coming into play and people are actually forgetting that we are part of spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller puts it, and we are closing our doors to fellow human beings in need. So at a core level, human beings are wonderful people. We care about our health, we care about our children, we care about our neighbor. But when we come together in these outdated algorithms of How we eat, how we function as nations, how we create companies, little bugs appear. Mindvalley's job is to help fix these bugs. And so we're looking at creating our mission statement is to create the biggest rise in human consciousness our species has ever experienced by 2038. And we're looking at five pillars of society and developing business models and plans to transform these pillars. And these pillars are education, parenting, spirituality, politics, and work.

Amazing. What an ambitious goal. You know, it's easy for us to vilify actions and companies that do those actions because we see the harm. Whether it's big food. And I've been guilty of vilifying big food as bad actors in the space. They have tremendous ability to drive policy through lobbying, just the farm bill alone, which is our food policy bill, our agriculture bill, the United States. There's 600 lobbyists that spend half a billion dollars lobbying that. And I guarantee you it's not the broccoli lobby or the kale lobby. And they also are responding to consumer changes. And there was a series of articles in the New York Times. I encourage everybody to listen or read them. It's called Planet Fat, and there was a series of them. And one of them was about Malaysia, where you live. And it was a fascinating study about the corruption of nutrition science and the co-optation of nutrition scientists by big food, particularly Nestle. And you called me during this whole episode, and you read that article, and you were like, what's going on here? And you called out in a very public way and you asked me to participate, which I did, about this product called Milo. Now, those of you who don't live in Asia or New Zealand or Australasia, probably never heard of this thing. But it's sort of like Ovaltine, which is kind of a powdered grain sugar drink that's promoted as a sports drink. as a healthy drink, as a critical drink to maintain health and energy in kids. And it's extremely heavily marketed. And one of the things that disturbed me was this ad that I saw from a Filipino rock star, which he was a very highly produced sort of music video with lots of dancing and singing and graphics about this thing called the energy gap. Now, I went to medical school and I never learned about the energy gap, which they purport that four out of five kids have it and makes them tired, low energy. True.

And I can give some context to that. So, the ad I sent you was from Nestle Philippines. And again, I'm not trying to vilify food companies. I believe the people, one of my cousins works for Nestle, right? Such a good man, like good people work for these companies. The bug is in the algorithm of how companies run. Our job is to simply help patch these bugs so good people can do good work. Now what, so the bug that happened in the Philippines was that- and by.

The way, I'll just say a lot of the things that we have now in our food supply are unintended consequences based on ideas that these companies had that were driven by policy makers. So we were all told to eat more carbs, to eat less fat, to not worry about sugar. And so they created products that were low fat, high sugar. Nestle told me, for example, I met with the president, Nestle told me that they want to change the Lean Cuisine formula, which is an $800 million business for them. And the FDA, the Federal Drug Administration, United States, will not allow them to change the formulation because it says lean. I said, why don't they just change lean to mean if you eat it, you'll get lean, as opposed to the fact that it's lean and no fat. Sorry to interrupt, but that's the kind.

Of thing that goes on. Yeah, so there's outdated advice in governments, outdated beliefs within companies, and that's what we need to fix. And sometimes as activists, we got to push a couple of buttons. And that's what I did in Southeast Asia. What was going on in Malaysia is that I grew up in Malaysia, and in Malaysia, kids are encouraged to drink Milo. Now, Milo is an Australian sports drink.

They call it a sports drink.

And there's athletes on the COVID of the boxes. And on the box, there's pictures of athletes reading. Which is misleading. 'Cause Milo is mostly maltodextrin and it's 40% sugar. 40% sugar.

Now, you- It's the same glycemic index as Coca-Cola.

Exactly, exactly. And as you know, there's been a lot of modern research that shows that sugar, when it's given to a child, could potentially lead to, now you called it- Diobesity. No, but there was something else. When I interviewed you, you said it could lead to a permanent degradation in the kids performance in school.

Oh, for sure.

Right? A massive gap. Because- Achievement gap. An achievement gap, that's the word you used. Because sugar can cause worse memory that's been tested already. It can cause huge drops in energy because you get a sugar spike and then you drop and the kids feel sluggish and tired in school, like a decrease in cognitive performance. Sugar is bad for the body. But here's what's going on. Growing up as a child in Malaysia, I was brainwashed, brainwashed. And my mom was brainwashed to the point. where I was drinking Milo before going to school.

You did yourself.

I had, as a 12-year-old kid, and-.

Having that from school.

Another glass of Milo. In our minds, we believed that this was a health drink that sportsmen took, not realizing we were pumping a substance that was 40% sugar in our body. And the rest of it, maltodextrin. And by- With a sprinkle of chemicals.

And by the way, starch, has a higher glycemic index than sugar. So, below the neck, whether it's maltodextrin or table sugar, your body can't tell the difference.

Right? So, what happened was the New York Times exposé on Big Food. I read that article and I was freaking pissed off. I mean, I'm a health guy, right? I've seen how taking care of my body has completely transformed my health. I had an aunt die from a heart attack. She was 50 years old and obese. I don't want that happening to more people. And so I started working with my mom, working with my dad, because they're approaching 70 and they've been operating based on bad health advice. And when the New York Times article came out that showed that my country, Malaysia, is officially now the fattest country in Asia, and that the Malaysian nutritional society was having their papers vetted by Nestle before it went to the government, before it went out to the public. Of course, that made me furious. Right? Because what right does Nestle have to vet the documents coming out from the Malaysian Nutritional Society, which is meant to be a research body?

They fund them.

They fund them. They fund them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. And at the same time, Nestle is pumping these highly misleading ads in Malaysia and and other and neighboring countries. So I released a video on Facebook and I didn't know what was gonna happen to the video. I held up a can of Milo and I used a marker and I colored everything below a 40% line blue and I said, look, this is what you're putting in your body. And that video went viral. People started sharing it. In Malaysia, people communicate through WhatsApp, right? People started sharing that video, people translated it into different languages and the next thing you know, it became like the biggest news item. in Malaysia for about a week or two. Now, the press completely shut me out. Nestle went on a PR campaign, they blanketed the press suggesting that I was wrong with all sorts of excuses. They said, look, people add water or milk to myllo, so it's not technically 40% sugar. They said that some of that sugar is naturally occurring sugar, for example, such as lactose. And I was blocked out from the news media. There's a radio station that they've been trying to get me to come to appear for the longest time. I always was too busy. Finally, they brought on some amateur nutritionists who suggested that Milo was really okay giving out, and she gave out a point of bad facts. And so I called up the radio station and I'm like, Hey, I'm happy to come on and correct this. And they said, no, bringing you on would be against our policy. So I got shut down by the news media, but it didn't matter because social media blew me up. And for about two weeks, people were stopping me in the streets in Malaysia.

Going, Hey, you're the Nestle guy. You're the Milo guy.

Now what happened? Not the Milo Valley guy. You're the Nestle guy. Right. So what happened? What happened was Milo sales actually went down, right?

And- Do you know how much?

I heard rumors, people, rumors were coming in from grocery stores, from people who, from different areas, I can't reveal where all of these rumors are coming from, but within three weeks we did notice this. And again, I'm not saying there's a correlation, but within three weeks Nestle themselves dropped their health ratings for Milo in New Zealand and Australia from four and a half stars to one star. And within three months, Nestle introduced zero sugar Milo to Singapore.

Now, was it artificial sweeteners or?

Don't know. I don't know. Haven't looked into that yet. Now, what I heard from friends of mine who work from Nestle is that Nestle was always thinking about these things because they knew that Milo was a bad product. But this social media campaign helped push the right buttons to make that decision to introduce, for example, zero sugar Milo come into reality significantly faster.

It's really important because what you speak to is the fact that the conventional media is funded often, I don't know in Malaysia, but certainly in this country, is funded by big food and big pharma.

Well, it is.

If you look at television advertising, it is almost predominantly food big food and processed food. And the worse the food, the more the advertising and drugs. And so these companies are loathe to actually do anything to subvert their bottom line. I remember once I was on the Today Show and I came up with this idea with a producer in the elevator because I was doing another segment. I said, why don't we do a show about this hundred calorie snack packs? And we'll do a show and we'll show 100 calories of blueberries or 100 calories of nuts and compare that to 100 calories of Oreo cookies or 100 calories of chips or whatever it was. And they had great ideas. So we did this show and during the show, the host kind of didn't quite like it. I don't think she was prepped properly. But it was like, look, 100 calories of blueberries has these qualities. The food is information. 100 calories of Oreos, has this information, which is sugar and processing and so forth, trans fats, this is gonna do this to your body, it's gonna do this to your body. Same calories. And the whole idea that calories are all the same is just not scientific, and yet it's what the food industry pushes, the government pushes, nutritionists push, doctors push, that it's just about energy balance. And Coca-Cola's done this with the Global Energy Balance Network. They created a whole nonprofit, which they funded, which they built the website for, which they paid scientists to promote. And it was really about this whole idea. And then after that, Shub was never invited on the Today Show again.

I know, it's fascinating. It was fascinating, yes. I mean, think about this, Nestle, and again, please understand, I'm not vilifying Nestle. I'm saying the algorithm is broken. Yeah. I believe the people at Nestle are good, but Nestle spends $3 billion on advertising every year.

They're an $80 billion company. So obviously, it's the hundreds.

I heard that. Yeah, it's the biggest food company on the planet. And in Malaysia, it's the biggest company.

On the stock exchange.

Right, so obviously the newspapers don't want to mess with Nestle.

Yeah, and so, you know, what also this speaks to is a fascinating phenomena, which is that conventional media is beholden often to big companies for their advertising dollars. But social media is not. And so it democratizes information in a way that allows us to actually as citizens, as consumers, as individuals to make huge impact. I mean, think about the impact of one guy like you who got pissed off, who grew up on Milo, who realized he was fed a bunch of lies, who saw the corruption in the funding of the food science and nutritionists that were making government policies and said, hey, I've had enough and I'm going to speak out about this. And if three people see it fine, it went to millions of people. And that led to Nestle saying, wait, we're going to change what we're doing. We're going to change the formulation of a product that's been around for 50, I don't know how many years. And it wasn't, you know, through anything other than someone just speaking up. Vani Hari, who's a close friend and I think you probably know her well, they call her the food babe. She found out that in Subway bread, there's azodicarbonamide, which is a yoga mat ingredient.

Oh my god.

And she literally brought her yoga mat in front of subway and did a little story and it went viral and they removed the yoga mat ingredients. She went to Kraft in the UK. They don't use these chemicals that we know in children based on research cause hyperactivity and behavior issues, but they use it in the United States. So she literally got a petition with 200,000 people, went to the headquarters and would not take no for an answer until they let her in. And she's done this with, you know, Chipotle that was putting trans fats in their Burritos, it was a healthy, quote, healthy company.

Activists like this are so needed because they're helping fix these bugs. You know, when I spoke to my friend who worked at Nestle, and he was actually told not to speak to me because they knew we were related. But after that, he later left Nestle to join a different food company, and that's when he could share with me. And what he said was, you know, I asked him, how did people at Nestle feel when this campaign happened? and he said, you know, it helped us get clarity because a lot of us suspected that what we were putting out was unhealthy. And we ourselves, there were activists within Nestle who wanted the conversation to happen. And this just helped the right conversations happen.

It's true. I just met the president of Nestle for the USA, he's now the CEO of Nestle Canada, and he shared with me things that I wasn't aware of. And I think these are consumer driven changes in these companies because one, consumers aren't buying products anymore. People don't want the junk anymore. Two, people are speaking out about these issues. And three, people in the company are genuinely interested in changing the products. So for example, he told me that Nestle's does not do any advertising to children for their junk food, for the processed food, which I was not true.

I mean, you were just talking about the energy gap. in the Philippines. For sure. Like look at that ad. It's directly targeting- He might have been.

Talking about in the United States. So I agree. And the other thing he told me was that there's an organization, I'd say it's called the Grocery Manufacturers of America. It's basically the food industry trade group for grocery stores. So all the big food companies are in it. And they were fined, I think $17 million because during the last election in Washington State, They created a secret consortium to fund policies, I mean, fund advertising and fund campaigns to subvert the GMO labeling ballot. So they were trying to stop any GMO labeling. And it was found to be illegal. It was found to be collusion between these companies and they were fined for it. The grocery manufacturer of America is trying to stop or oppose any change to food policy that would limit the sales of the products of their companies. So Nestle, Unilever, and Mars and Danone all withdrew from Grocery Manufacturers Association. They created a new organization called Sustainable Food Policy Alliance.

That's phenomenal.

And they are focused on changing climate change. So they're looking at changes in creating supporting regenerative agriculture, soil health, water conservation, I mean, they are looking at how do we change the formulation of our products? How do we support things like GMO labeling? And I think people don't understand that the consumer behavior, the choices we make, what we put in the end of our fork, what we buy with our dollars or whatever currency you guys have, is actually having an impact on these massive companies. So it's like David and Goliath. David is actually counting here and making a difference in what the behaviors of these companies. So what you did is just one very important important example of how people need to take action. They need to be activists. They need to vote with their fork. They need to change what they're doing. And these companies are listening and they are also caught in a legacy of unintended consequences. I mean, nobody said, oh, we're going to create a bunch of products that are going to make people fat and sick and kill millions of people. Nobody does that, right? I mean, they're not evil, but they often have unintended consequences of their behavior. And it's very hard to backtrack, like with this Lean Cuisine issue, because they They actually can't change the formulation because of stupid government regulations. So they're caught in this trap where they have to have lean or low fat.

Yeah, when these products blow up, when these products blow up and you suddenly realize that there's a flaw in the product, but you have to hit your next sales targets, bad decisions happen.

Yeah, I mean, I just spent four hours at the Nestle headquarter in Cleveland, which was quite amazing. all the people working there, unless they were trying to manipulate and co-op me, which I don't think they were, they were generally interested. They knew my work. They understood the change in the food system. They understand the need to make a difference, things like climate change and the quality of food and be a contribution. So, you know, I just think, well, let's just get rid of them. Let's outlaw them. You know, we don't have horse and buggies anymore. We don't have CDs anymore. Why do we need them? The truth is, you know, the health food market is a very small and the organic market is a very, very small part of the market. You've got maybe $45 billion versus $1 trillion. And so we really have to think differently about how we engage with these companies and how we push them to do the right thing. And I think there's many people in them that do want to. There's also actions that are reprehensible. And Marion Nestle just wrote a new book called Unsavory Truth about how nutrition science is corrupted by big food. So they'll publish studies that are actually false. So they'll manipulate the data, they'll hire scientists, like in Malaysia.

Yeah, and studies can be faked all the time. I'm sure you heard the story about this activist who created a fake study that eating chocolate is good for you. It got published in an actual peer-reviewed journal, got picked up by newspapers and magazines, and he had to go on TV and confess that it was a fake study designed to show how these studies can be manipulated.

And the media is always the sexy headline.

The media is always the sexy headline. So actually, no, chocolates are not healthy. So.

What advice do you give people to help them sort of make good decisions about this? You're highly educated, you're very attentive to things that lack integrity, and you kind of pick up on those signals. But for the average person, how do you advise them to sort of think.

About- the average person has to understand. that in the world today, in any given day, you're being bombarded by 300 advertisements. If you don't have a vision for the type of life you want to lead, if you don't have visions or goals for your health, other people are going to hijack and put their visions of what they want you to do in your head. They're gonna tell you to eat this or drink this or that this substance is what you need. You have to start with your own vision. if you lack a vision for your health, for how you want to feel, how you want your body to operate when you're in your later years, and even like next year, you're going to end up being bombarded with advertising, with subconscious manipulation, with bull ideas, and people are going to hijack your brain and make you do things that they want you to do so that they can get money out of your wallet. So The first thing is you gotta have health goals. You gotta set goals for how you exercise, how you eat, for the type of body you want, for the type of energy levels you want, and then you gotta get educated. I personally think, Marc, and I'm not just saying this 'cause I'm on your show, but I've been reading a ton of books on longevity. Your book, Food, what the Heck Should We Eat, should be the first book that everyone should read. It's such a useful digest. Now the other thing that you wanna know, so the first thing is have goals, second thing is study. study, study. Listening to this podcast is good, reading your book is good. The third thing is spread the word. I mean, you've heard the idea that we are the sum total of our five closest friends, right? And studies now show that if your closest friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. But likewise, if your closest friends are fit, you're more likely to get fit. So we influence each other. And so as you start getting educated, if you start creating these health goals, share them with your friends, share them with your family, share them with your company.

Without being annoying. Without being annoying.

Right, right, right. Without being annoying.

And you show them by example. You show them by the change you make in your life.

Exactly.

You show them.

Help enlightened ideas spread. Yeah. Lead by example. And I think if we do these three things, we can go a massive way towards basically improving the health of our planet, but also improving the health of our own individual bodies.

Yeah, sharing our stories is key. we're here at A-Fest in Bali. And a guy came up to me this morning, Matthew from Australia, and he said, you, don't know me from a bar of soap, which I thought was a great expression. And he said, But you saved my life. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, 10 years ago, I was severely depressed, had chronic fatigue syndrome. I didn't know where to turn. I tried all sorts of medications. And I read your book, the UltraMind Solution, and I just followed it. I just followed all the steps. I corrected everything you said to correct. and it completely cured my depression and my chronic fatigue. And I just really want to thank you. And now I'm running a business that is about wellness and health. And, you know, it's just, when people share their stories and the changes they've made and their examples and they take ownership, that's really what catalyzes change. Because you're more likely to respond to what your friends are doing and the social proof of that than you or I getting on a podcast or writing an article or having a website. I mean, it's really, when you hear that, oh, you did that and you got better, that's amazing. Right, right.

And you also just shared a really important point, right? And that really important point is that the food that you eat, right? Like this guy who's talking to you, it helped him come out of depression. The food that you eat directly influences your moods. And people don't get that. They think, all right, I'm going to eat healthy, so I'm slimmer. I'm going to exercise so my body feels fit. But no, it's so much deeper than that. It influences your mood, it influences your performance at work, it influences, therefore, your odds of getting a raise, because the wrong food is gonna negatively impact your cognitive functioning, which is your ability to be functional at work, to generate ideas. So you've got to get educated.

So you have a podcast called Mind Valley Podcast. And in it, you talk about this concept called consciousness engineering.

Right.

And consciousness engineering is such a fascinating concept because from my perspective, you know, in order to really be fully expressed in life, to be conscious, what does that mean to you and what does that look like?

Well, in my case, what I do and what consciousness engineering is about is understanding that our education system is so incomplete. We're basically in an education system that hasn't really updated itself for decades, right? And maybe they are tiny little updates, but mostly our education system doesn't really teach us the function in the modern world. I mean, how much nutrition education do we get in school? Do we really learn how to exercise properly or how to have like better marriages or how to parent well or manage our money? Be better leaders or manage our money. None of that's in our education system. So conscious engineering, is a model where I bring on remarkable minds like you who have figured certain things out and then we attempt to have the audience model what's going on in your mind. True, understanding two things. First, your models of reality, right? So your models of reality are how does Mark Hyman see the world? That's different from how other people see the world. That's a model of reality. It's a belief that you have that's unique to you sometimes. But Beliefs are things that we can pick up from other people. I can hear you share a belief and go, Damn, that's a pretty frickin' empowering belief. I want that. And someone can adopt that belief. And the second thing we attempt to understand in consciousness engineering are your habits. How do you eat? What do you eat? How do you exercise? How do you meditate? And then we help people model beliefs and model habits so that you can become the best version of yourself.

So that's really how my teaching is based. And that's what I want to go deep into because you know, from my perspective, if you want to become conscious, if you want to be empowered in your life, if you want to actually be fully expressed in every area of your life, whether it's health, whether it's work, whether it's love, whether it's other relationships, whether it's whatever it is, how do you get there? Well, you have to set the conditions that are right to grow all those seeds. And the foundational condition, and I don't say this just because I'm a doctor, is your health. And if you don't attend to that, you can't perform at a level that matters. And you talked about education. If kids are going to school on soda and flaming hot chips and garbage, which most kids in the world are, or maybe without breakfast in some cases, then how can they learn and focus? So just as adults, it's the same thing. If we're stuffing our faces with lots of sugar, processed food, nutrient-depleted food, it's hard to become awake. And if you're vitamin B deficient, if you're vitamin D deficient, if you're omega-3 deficient, if your gut flora is terrible because you're actually not eating the right foods and fibers and prebiotics, it's gonna affect your brain. We know that your gut flora regulates your mood, your emotions, your focus, your cognition, your energy, your immune system, It changes your risk of dementia and autism. I mean, it's powerful and we don't even give the second thought to how do we create something that actually creates vibrant health that allows us to function. So, yes, exercise, yes, meditation, yes, building healthy relationships. But if you don't take care of the soil in which all that can grow, which is your health, then it's very, very hard to become conscious and to engineer a conscious life. So I think that's a key part of your message. and we all want to sort of level the playing field. So if we're all doing things that aren't caring for our physiology and our body, then we're not able to be high performing humans, which we all would love to be. I mean, if you have a racehorse, it's a million dollar racehorse, you're not going to feed it burger fries and a Coke, right? You're going to get the best quality feed. It gets flax seeds to get the omega-3 fats. It's trained properly, it's rested properly, it's.

Taken care of in the right way.

So that it can be a high performing system.

And it's not just that you eat this way and you function this way if you're an athlete. I mean, as long as you have a job, you gotta be conscious of what you're putting in your body because the wrong food is gonna affect your ability to actually produce the best ideas, to think properly, to be productive at work. So think about what this is actually costing you in terms of the potential for raises, the potential for promotions, the potential for hitting your business targets. It's not just making you sicker, it's probably making you poorer.

Yeah, it's for sure. And you also have hit on something that is not only understanding that the concept of food is medicine and all these modalities, but you've created something which is really striking to me, which is the power of community as medicine. And we're here at A-Fest, which is something that people beg to get into. There's thousands of applicants for 300-400 spots. People come from 40 countries longing to be part of this community because you've created a container that allows people to connect. It's not a bunch of people sitting looking forward in a lecture hall for four days in the dark in some beautiful place. You create experiences for people to connect, to build friendships. I met my wife here. Right. Right? And her dad met his wife here. It's funny, isn't it? And you showed a picture the other day of somebody who met somebody here who now has a baby. You've got a baby. How many babies is Avesta created? And it's not just a place for people to hang out, but you really are intentional about creating connection and community because it's one of those ingredients for health that I think often gets ignored. And loneliness is one of the biggest drivers of disease. prevalent. I think 40% in America identify themselves as lonely and don't have a friend to call when things go bad. If you go to an average audience, do you have that one friend to call when things go really bad that you can be completely honest with? How many people say yes, not as many as you might think. So that tell me about your vision of community, why you created this and how you've come to understand how important that is.

Well, I created this because I was one of those people who didn't have that friend to call, right? And it's not unusual. I'm a CEO. In a recent study, 50% of American CEOs report suffering from loneliness. And loneliness overall is up 300% in the Western world. Now we think we're more connected, right? As Mark Zuckerberg says, Facebook is gonna connect the world. But no, like reading someone's social feed and giving them likes or comments is not real connection.

It's curated. It's not who they really are.

It's curated.

I had EHA, my life's a mess. It's like, here's me in Bali looking so cool, right?

Exactly. So loneliness is up 300% and then Harvard Business Review just released a study that said that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It is worse for your health than being clinically obese. And those are shocking statistics. So, as an education company, we know that one of the best parts about education are the friendships we make at university and school. And so we didn't want to just be an online education company. That's only one part of the picture. We want it to be a company where you could get educated online, but you could also form a tribe. You might, as in your case, Mark, meet your future wife. You might meet your future business partners. But ultimately- Or your best friend. If you want people to, absorb great ideas, to have healthier lives, you got to give them community.

I mean, just the whole concept of Mindvalle University is so attractive to me. I mean, I secretly want to figure out how to get a month off and go to some cool city and hang out with a thousand people and build great deep friendships, learn together, play together. I mean, it's the amount of, I mean, and I have a great community and I have, great friends and I have a wonderful wife. But even so, I'm still longing for that level. Remember when you were in college and you had that, it was like the most nourishing thing. And yet, people don't understand that social determinants of health are the biggest contributors. It's a bigger factor, like you said, than smoking, your diet, exercise. Stress is the thing. And stress comes from isolation and loneliness. And we have an increasingly disconnected world. being on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook isn't the solution. In fact, it may lead to more loneliness and depression. We have a guest called Cal Newport on our podcast who's an MIT computer scientist, a millennial who's like, I am never on social media. I have not signed up. I don't have an account. I actually like to do deep work, which is be really present instead of checking something every five minutes.

He's written an amazing book.

Yeah, I don't know your process, but for me, in order for me to really do deep work, I have to just turn everything off. And if I'm writing a book, I just shut the world out. I might check things at the end of the day or the beginning of the day, and then I'm out. And then I actually go deep into thinking and learning and connecting. And it's a very different way of being than this distracted bites. I mean, I remember when I first started doing videos, you're like, oh, you do a seven-minute video. then it was a five minute video, then it was a three minute video, that's a one minute video, and that's a 30 second video. I'm like, this is ridiculous, which is why I wanted to do this podcast, which is deep conversations about things that matter. And I think people are longing for that because people listen to podcasts.

Yeah, yeah, they do. And podcast, by the way, great way to learn, great way to upgrade your models of reality, your systems of living so that you become immune to so much of the crap that's out there.

So, you have a unique position, a vision, which is that you've brought in the world's best teachers, thinkers, leaders in the worlds of health, performance, business, longevity, biohacking, envisioning your life, all these really amazing people who spent their lives digging deep into how to optimize human experience, performance, quality of life, love, energy. What have you taken from that for yourself? and incorporate it into the way you are and the way you live. What are the big lessons here?

I consider myself like the ultimate human guinea pig. I'm constantly testing out new ideas. So, I go through everything, right? So, this week, I'm working with a vision coach to test how to train my brain so I can reverse astigmatism. Don't know if it's going to work, but it's part of my experiments. I'm testing out new models of building tribes. I'm testing out a new concept from Google called OKRs to create high performance teams. So I constantly test this out. And I have the luxury of having a massive team around me. Mine values about 300 people. And so as an education company, we don't just want to blindly teach. We want to test turn ourselves into guinea pigs. And then when I have, when we discover great ideas, get this out to the world. So there's so many things that we're currently testing out right now. We are testing super slow strength training to help our employees pack on muscle. We're testing ways to train our employees to run Spartan races. What's a Spartan race? A Spartan race is like, it's this incredibly fun race, which is, it's about anywhere, it goes anywhere from five from five kilometers to 23 kilometers, but it also involves obstacle courses. So you're using your entire body, right? So a lot of people in my team are obsessed with Spartan races.

So what are the things, the top things that you've incorporated yourself that have.

Made the most difference? So there's a number. And first is meditation. So I studied multiple meditation styles. I started teaching meditation for five years. I developed my own style called the six phase meditation. and then I made that free on the web. And that's taken off. There were articles about it recently in Billboard, in Ebony, when an R&B star, Miguel, confessed that he uses this before getting on stage for his concerts, right? And so Six Phase is free, you can Google it, but that is the unique meditation style that stacks on six different transcendent practices in 15 minutes to optimize your brain.

Sounds pretty good to me.

For high performance states. WildFit by our mutual friend Eric Edmeads. WildFit is incredible. WildFit allowed me to completely change my relationship to food. If you look at pictures of me two years ago, I was seven to eight kilograms heavier.

Which is like 16, 17 pounds.

Yeah. That's huge, right? And when you lose that much weight, and it's not just a weight loss.

And you're not a really tall guy.

Yeah. So that's a lot of weight. Yeah. When you lose that much weight, you know, it changes the way you look. People were telling me, I look younger, my energy systems are up, my skin cleared up. It's amazing what happens when you change the way you eat. I'm working on a, well, we're developing a super slow strength training protocol called 10x. Um, those of you who are interested in super slow strength training, the definitive work is Doug McGuff's Body by Science. And the whole idea here is how can we rapidly increase a musculature? Cause musculature has one of the highest correlations with longevity. And you know what's the biggest cause of accidental death for Americans 70 and over? It's falling down. It's because their muscles are weak, their bones are weak. It's called sarcopenia. Yes, they break and they break something. My father turned 70 this year, so this is like a personal quest for me. I wanted to ensure that my father could have enough strength so he could extend his life. Doctors told him he had five more years. I'm like, hell no, dad, we're not gonna let that happen. and so 10x is about increasing musculature so we can live longer and we don't necessarily have to go through sarcopenia. So there are lots of different things I'm testing out, I'm modeling, I'm either I'm the guinea pig or members of my team are guinea pigs. And it's really fun, like I love what I do because my job is to identify powerful new ideas and then help inject these ideas in the human species.

So yeah, you know, so we all know meditation's key and there are different styles and what's the best. We all know that eating right is the key and what's the best, which is why Road Food was actually eating. We all know that exercise is key and we're learning more about how to hack exercise to do more in less time with more benefit. And we're also learning about sleep as the other thing that is foundational to health. So we've got these foundational things that aren't sexy, they're not new, but they are foundational because what people have to realize is that we are biological organisms and if we don't care for them, they break down. You know, I mean, I'm almost 60 and I just feel like, you know, I'm 40.

You look amazing for someone who's 60.

Yeah, and I feel like, you know, I plan on getting younger every year is my goal.

I love that about you.

More fit, more wise, more stable in terms of my emotional mental capacities, more energy, reverse my biological age. I just did my telomeres. It was about 85% above everybody else my age, but I want to be 99% at a patient I've been treating for years and she does everything I say when I don't actually do that.

Look at me, you're almost 60 and I barely see any gray hairs. Yeah. She.

Is 99th percentile. And I'm like, wow, okay, that made me really motivated. It's great.

I have to say, Mark, you take incredibly great care of your body. I love it. And I love it because you live what you preach.

I do. I feel like I have work to do in the world. I have relationships that matter to me that I want to be able to show up for. I want to be able to focus and pay attention. and that's the most incredible gift is you can give someone as your presence. And it's hard to be present when you have brain fog from eating crap and not exercising and when your emotions are volatile and all over the place because you're not learning how to calm your nervous system with meditation or learn about the nature of mind, which is something we often don't really relate to. And it's exercise just like anything else. We expect to build muscles by exercise and we also have to build the strength of our mind. and the quality of our mind through things like meditation. So all that's really key. All right, so you are a very thoughtful guy and you've thought about how to make the world a better place a lot. And it's what your whole life's work is about. So if you were king for a day and were an autocrat, could do anything, what changes would you make? What policies would you employ? What laws would you create to actually change the world for the better?

Well, there are so many different things. But I'm gonna stay away from opinion and just look at science right now, right? Look at science and look at, look at what philosophers are saying where humanity is heading. For sure, right? Concepts like meditation should be put in every school. But I think the greatest thing we need to do that should be public policy, that should be in education, that should be in terms of how we elect our leaders is understanding the concept of unity. You know, Neil Donald Walsh, who wrote the great series of books, Conversation with God, said unity is the number one value of advanced civilizations. Charles Darwin in 1872 spoke about a concept called diffusion of sympathy. See, a lot of people think Darwin was the guy who wrote of survival, who coined the term survival of the fittest. Actually, he did not. The term he used more was this concept called diffusion of sympathy, which means expanding your kindness and compassion to wider and wider circles beyond your tribe, beyond your nation, to all nations, to all life, to all sentient species, to all earth.

And- It's interesting, Jason Silva, when you interviewed him yesterday, said, I want to end nationalism. You asked him that question.

Exactly, and that's where what I think we need to focus on next. We need to create an earth flag. We need to create a vision for what our human species can be unified under. And that's something I'm working on.

So how do you stop the other view?

A flag where a kid in Afghanistan, a kid in Mexico, a kid in the US, a kid in Malaysia can all look up to and go, I belong. Right? So now to create an earth flag, there's gonna be enormous resistance because we are getting people to understand that they are bigger than just their national identity. But the problem with national identity is, It leads to politicians manipulating a bug, and that bug is fear. So politicians who lack vision, and you see this happening in Brazil, in the United States, in Britain, in Hungary, in Italy, men with no vision who have no vision for how to leverage exponential technologies like AI, how to leverage healthier farming practices, how to help conserve the environment, how to create more conscious business, men with zero vision. Instead, since they lack vision, they aim for division. And they do that in a very simple way. They make you fear. They talk about building walls. They talk about, they come up with bullshit numbers regarding immigrants trying to sneak through borders or refugees carrying diseases. None of these are true, but people buy into it. You have entire news media like Fox News media, right? That helps spread these. But what happens in these situations is these companies, these countries take a massive step back. What I want to teach the world, what I want to do is inject the concept of unity in every school, in personal growth, within religion, within workplaces, within parenting, so that we can become immune to division, we can become immune to nationalism, and we can create healthier countries and healthier companies.

That's amazing.

I remember that. That is what Mindvalley is really aiming for.

So we kind of eliminate the concept of other.

Yes.

That we're all a human race. Right, because we're all human.

It doesn't exist.

People say to me, how can you treat this Christian who doesn't believe in homosexuality, it should be outlawed and people should be put in jail? Or how can you talk to a Republican or so a Muslim? Or like, listen, everybody's a human being first.

Right.

Everybody's a human being first, and then they're whatever they are. And if we can connect to that humanness in each other, It changes everything. It's a game changer.

And they are no villains. And this concept of unity means that the people who disagree with you politically, right, you still embrace them. But you have to help inject unity in them too, because they've just been brainwashed to see themselves and see their belonging as part of a narrower circle than what it really should be.

Yeah, I mean, it's true. And I think it's just knowing the other is not other. Right? I lived in China when my son and daughter were young and my son went to this school. My daughter would call the International School of Beijing. And they were people there from all over the world. And my son's best friend was the daughter of the Ugandan ambassador. And so he's grown up not seeing color. Most of his friends were not white. They were either Indian or Hispanic or black. I mean, it was just fascinating to see how he aggregated to a very different community than, you know, it's typical. So, you know, your vision, maybe there's a reason your name is vision. Vision, vision, it's always sounds the same. And that you really have kind of catalyzed some of the most important things that as humanity we need to be thinking about, which is how do we eliminate ideas of other? How do we start to build consciousness? How do we use the technology of creating a conscious human soul, spirit and being? I mean, that is just unbelievable. So thank you. Thanks, Vishen. Thanks Vishen for your view and your contribution being on the Doctor's Pharmacy. You've been listening to Doctor's Pharmacy with Dr. Mark Hyman. It's a place for conversations that matter. I hope you've loved this conversation with Vishen Lakhiani. And if you like this podcast, please leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. share it with your friends and family on social media, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.