Beauty, Longevity, Biohacking, Building Perfect Eyesight, The Wild Diet, Memory, Learning & Beyond With Vishen Lakhiani.

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. I don't know why I'm talking like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. By the way, Winnie the Pooh, that new Winnie the Pooh. It's actually a fantastic movie, Christopher Robin. I watch it with my kids. I love all the little sayings that Winnie the Pooh has in there, and I wish there was a whole book full of Winnie the Pooh quotes. If that exists, let me know. I'll totally go out and grab it and just read Winnie the Pooh. Read Myself to Sleep with Winnie The Pooh and Piglet 2. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And as promised, I've got my friend on the show today, Vishen Lakhani, and he has as been a previous podcast guest a long time ago. Vishen will tell you a little bit about his backstory during today's show, but one of the things he's done among his huge range of accomplishments is he has designed meditation apps. And way back when, I hosted him on the show to talk about meditation and how to use apps to meditate better. Since that podcast, I mean, the whole app world for meditation has freaking exploded. From oak to calm to headspace to all these newfangled apps. But Vishen was one of the first, so I'll link to that first podcast with him in the show Notes for this episode, which you'll be able to Access over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com quest that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com quest why quest? Well, because Vishen's gone on and really taken a deep dive into the world of transformational education. You may recall if you're a podcast listener for the past year or so, that myself and my family lived in Estonia for a few weeks over the summer and we were specifically there to attend Vishen's university. He actually does a university every year called Mindvalley University, in which entrepreneurs and forward thinkers from all over the globe arrive, often with their families to learn from some of the world's best teachers. He creates these really cool transformational learning experiences and he'll tell you a little bit about those too, on today's show. In addition to that, however, he also creates these amazing online courses on things like nutrition and fitness. There's a great one in there on kind of like building your ideal life using something called the Lifebook. My friend Jim Kwik has a really good one on brain biohacking and memory. There's a whole host of quests. We'll talk about those because they're very unique. They're not like anything you've seen before, like Udemy or Khan Academy. Far different. So we'll chat about that a little bit. And he also has an incredibly popular book that I recommend called Code of the Extraordinary Extraordinary Mind, one of the most popular books on Amazon for a while, and I'll link to that one as well. So again, I'll put tons of goodies for you over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com quest if you want to stock Vishen even more than you have to stock them on today's show. And recently I even worked with Vishen and his team to create something called a Beauty and Longevity Quest. A beauty and longevity quest. So we're going to chat about that a little bit too, because Vishen got to fly up to my house and spend some time in the cold pool and doing snow angels out in the frigid, icy tundra. So, Vishen, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, Ben, thank you so much for that introduction. That was humbling. Firstly, I got to say this. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and when I introduced you on stage in Tallinn, Estonia, and I said, Ben is the guy I listen to most often, that was the truth. I love your podcast. I love the guest you bring on and the topics you cover and that crazy, awkward sense of humor. So it's an honor to be on the podcast that I actually listen to most. And I guess everyone listening. Kudos to you. You've got great taste.

That's great. Let's try to make this as awkward as possible. Then we'll just stay awkward the whole time. What part of the world are you in right now? Because I know you bounce all over the place.

So I'm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I'm Malaysian by birth. I'm about to fly to New York to Film to film with eight different authors, including the guy who founded Spartan Race. I'm so excited about. Oh, crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I'm doing an episode with Joe. My entire team right now. Well, not my entire team, but a good chunk of them is training for the Spartan Race. So we are a Spartan Race obsessed company.

Oh, wow. I had no clue. I literally was just with Joe over at Spartan World Championships in Tahoe. He's nuts. What he tried to do when I showed up, first thing he did after I saw him was he wanted to stick me in a container for 24 hours and have me run on a treadmill while eating bananas as part of a fundraiser campaign. I politely declined because I had work to do while I was there and I was racing, but he convinced five other guys to do it. So he had these young men running on a treadmill in complete darkness and sensory deprivation with literally bananas and water for 24 hours to see who could run the farthest.

And.

And of course, the complete mind f. Part of it was that none of the guys in the containers knew how far the other guys in the containers had run. And Joe comes up with all these harebrained ideas. So that'll be interesting to hear. Your interview with him.

You know, that sounds like a Fox Television reality TV show. Yeah, I would pay to see that.

Except he probably does. Yeah, he probably does have. The television shows can't do for reasons of, like, litigiousness and liability. But ultimately, you know what? You mentioned your team doing the whole sport Spartan Race together. That's what I've really been impressed with on mindvalley. And a lot of people listening in may not even know what mindvalley is. And I certainly want to get into you and your life because you do a lot of biohacking and brain and body optimization. But before we delve into that.

I just want to finish that train of thought. So I'm going to New York to film eight different authors. So what we do is my goal is to develop the singular best program in every field in transformational theory. So, for example, as you know, we're working with you, Ben, on the longevity program because I love your work. We're working with Neale Donald Walsh on a program on Awakening consciousness. Jim Kwik on Meta learning and Super Brain. And so I'm obsessed with science and data and technology. I'm a computer engineer by training when applied to transformation. So mindvalley we around 300 people globally. Our headquarters are in Kuala Lumpur. We have an office in Tallinn, Estonia. And what we try to do is develop the singular best online learning experience for any type of ability that people want to gain. That is in the field of transformation. So I go to New York, I interview these authors and I try to identify who is the next great author that we can bring onto our platform. Right now we put about 100 authors on stages globally and, and there are 20, just 20 that are on our quest platform. And these authors, we create world class quality filming with their work and we put them on a technology platform that's crushing it in terms of student results. Like right now it's 8x above industry average. So anyway, that's what I do. But I'm going to New York, going to Tallinn. We're opening up an office over there. That's where we run our global seminars and events. And I'm going to Vienna to teach meditation at the un. I'm super excited about that. And then I'm coming back home to see my kids again. Wow.

Speaking of kids, by the way, according to my children, probably the two top authors you should interview would be whoever wrote Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants. So add those to your list because in the Greenfield household, those are the two top authors of all time.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Incredible book. And I know the author.

Really? No kidding.

Yes. I have a connection. I have a connection with that author. Anyway, that's a great tip. Please thank your children for me. I always your kids geniuses, but they just bet I'm literally going to make that happen.

They would flip if there was a Mind Valley quest with those guys. I don't know what you'd actually learn from Captain Underpants and Wimpy Kid, but I'm sure you could, you could pull some kind of knowledge out of those cats.

Remember?

Go ahead.

Well, remember when your children said they miss 4th of July and I organized a 4th of July party in Estonia for them? Well, same thing. We make this happen because your kids, kids are human beings. I listen to.

And just to give you guys a little sneak peek of things like the Mind Valley University or a fest. Mindvalley University. You know, Vishen throws all these amazing parties. That's one of the things they're known for with their Mindvalley event is there's just these amazing parties and after events and he decided after my kids said they were going to miss 4th of July to literally throw a giant US American flag, hot dog, French fry, beer, 4th of July party right out in the middle of frickin Estonia. And furthermore, when I was At A Fest. Where were we? We were in Sardinia, Italy at the A fest for Longevity. Every single night. I mean we were out till like 2 or 3am and one night out on the beach till sunrise, just basically partying and dancing and having an amazing time. So if you haven't yet tapped into any of his events, I'll put links to him in the show notes. But Mindvalley is doing some really cool things. So any of you who haven't kind of taken a deep dive into that, check them out.

I just want to make sure people aren't getting the wrong idea. We do not organize parties and festivals. We organize great transformational events. Our goal is to be like the part of our goal for our seminar division is to be like the Ted of transformation. But what we find, and I'm sure your listeners will relate to this, we connect best in today's world. I think we connect best with people who share our passion for transformation. So if you run Spartan races, you are going to love to be around people who run spartan races. If you meditate, you love being around people who are take that seriously. And when we bring these people together at these transformational events, they click so well. They click so well that they want to stay up till 7am talking. And we just create these beautiful experiences for them to connect. Because connection is one of the most important things you can give someone in today's world.

Yeah, it's a good point. It's not, it's not quite exactly the. The Burning man type of experience I could have just painted it as. But yeah, it just seems to. To be such a cool group of people that inevitably it turns into kind of a co combination of learning and transformation and then just this, this amazing social time. So good food too by the way. Anyways though, so, so vishen this, this whole thing with Mindvalley before I get into some of your own health hacks, the brain and body optimization things that you do, the fact that you reverse degradation in your eyesight, enhance your vision just recently, which, which I find fascinating and I want to ask you a little bit about that too. When did you actually launch mindvalley and why?

I used to be a computer Engineer and in 2002 I moved to Silicon Valley with these ridiculously big dreams of starting the next great social media Internet, MySpace like distributed community technology. And it turned out that I was absolutely clueless and I ended up losing all my money, including $30,000 that my father had loaned me. So I found myself broke, unemployed, couldn't even afford to pay for insurance, got into a car accident. And now I owed all of this money to the car I hit. Had a wrecked car, couldn't afford rent, was renting a sofa from a college student in Berkeley. I had this fabulous degree, but I had no money, was broke, and I had to hide it from everyone except my girlfriend at that time, Christina, who's now my wife. Now I was sending out my resume to every company on Facebook. But it was tough because the bubble had burst. And I remember in April 2001, 14,000 people were laid off. So what happened was I got this shitty little job dialing for dollars, basically. I had to pick up the phone and call law firms and sell them on technology. And I sucked at it. I mean, I was a computer engine. I know about selling lawyers tech. And when you're in that job, interrupting the day of an American attorney who's ridiculously busy as a telemarketer, you will hear more f you than you possibly can imagine in your life. So there I was, 26, 25, 26 years old, being yelled at 10 to 20 times a day, being told that I was a meaningless piece of you know what. And all of this made me go into a depression. And I was thinking, holy shit. I spent five years getting a computer engineering degree. I moved to Silicon Valley with this big dreams, and this is what my life has come down to. And so, in desperation, I got online and I Googled for help. And I can't remember what I put in. I think it was maybe a phrase such as, why does life suck so bad? And I discovered class. I discovered a class on meditation. So I flew down to the class. It was in Los Angeles. And the reason I took the class is because in the advertisements, the teacher who was teaching the class spoke about how she had used meditation to boost her results and sales. And that meditation was so much more than just clearing your mind. So I took the class. I flew back to San Francisco. Now, the crazy thing was when I showed up for that class, I was the only person who showed up today. Today, according to the book Altered Traits By Daniel Goldman, 44% of the Fortune 100 will have a meditation program for their staff. But back then, this was 2002. Ish. I was the only person in that class. It was really kind of embarrassing. I felt bad for the instructor. But I fly back to Silicon Valley, I fly back to San Fran, and I go through my regular week, sales week. But now I'm applying meditation. I'm applying creative visualization, I'm applying empathy and connection. Techniques, I'm applying intuition techniques. I'm applying the concept of accessing altered states. And what I find is that in one week my sales improve. Now sales. Now remember, I'm a left brain person. I'm an engineer. Everything to me must be logical. I couldn't explain how I was getting these bursts of insights, these bursts of almost intuitive experiences, but I could see the empirical data because sales is something that's highly measurable. You know how many phone calls you make, you know how many you close. You kind of average it out. And in one week my average doubled. In one month, it doubled again, in the next month, it doubled again. And long story short, in four months I was promoted three times. And I realize, why the hell didn't I learn this sooner? So I go to my boss.

I'm going to interrupt you for just a second because I know people are going to want to know. I mean, some forms of meditation involve, for example, manifestation. There's actually a great book called. It was one of the original books called the Master Key, you know the Secret and Think and Grow Rich and all these subsequent books were developed off of that. Simply involve subconsciously directing your thoughts towards the success that you want to achieve. You know, but then there's like Transcendental meditation, there is mindfulness meditation. Were you practicing a specific form of meditation as you were kind of having all the success happen?

Absolutely, absolutely. So I'm going to come to that form in a moment. I'm going to come to that form in a moment because I don't want to distract the audience. But this particular style of meditation was invented in Texas, believe it or not, by a dude by the name of Jose Silva, a Mexican American. And he founded this whole early system. It's not really available anymore. It's called Silva Mind Control. But he wrote a book about it in 1977, became a best seller. So in the 80s, Silver Mind Control was really popular. So what I took was an adaptation of that called Silva Ultramine. And recently, recently as in this year. So it's now been what, like 15 years since this happened? More actually this year. I did a deal with Silver Ultramind to bring their program, which was kind of going under into Mindvalley. And we, we called it the Mindvalley Intuition training. I got certified, I've spent 10 years mastering this and I'm teaching, teaching a class now in la. But what this program was about is going into altered states, mainly alpha brainwave frequency, theta brainwave frequency, being able to get to waking theta consciousness and then tapping into intuition and inspiration. Now, I know this sounds bizarre, but if you read, Think and Grow Rich, if you study Edison, you will see that there's a constant theme of great men, great men and women across the world who were able to access altered states for ideas. For example, I believe it's in Think and Grow Rich. There's a story of a guy by the name of William Gates II. He has around 30 patterns to his name, but what he would do is go in a sensory deprivation chamber. Now, he didn't call it meditation, this was in the 60s. And he would, in a darkened room with a pencil and a piece of paper with sensory deprivation, start writing down ideas. He got 30 patterns to his name. Then there's the famous story of offer of Thomas Edison. It is rumored that Thomas Edison would take these famous naps holding a brass ball in his hand. And as he would. As he would nap, the ball would fall. He'd have a metal plate below his sofa. It would clang, jolting him out of his nap. But what he was doing was accessing what is the theta level frequency. It's when you're in a mild state of sleep. And if you look at biohackers like Dave Asprey, biohackers are now talking about data as a level you want to access to tap into intuitive and inspirational ideas. So that was what I was doing. So specifically, this is what happened. And I'm gonna ask that if you are listening, please have an open mind. I cannot explain this. I'm an engineer, I'm a computer scientist. I cannot explain this. But this is what I experienced. So back then, in 2002, all the sales guys would go to the San Francisco Public Library, check out the yellow pages. My territory was San Antonio and Portland, Oregon. And I had to call down, call every author from A. Sorry, every lawyer from A to Z in the Yellow pages, right? So back then, we used these big, bulky yellow pages. Then we go back and check them back in into the San Francisco Public Library. Now, it was a rote process. You go with the lawyer, starting with aa, then AB and so on. Now, after I learned this class, what I did was I would get into my relaxed, meditative level of mind, give my mind an instruction. And that instruction was, I want to only call lawyers, attorneys who would be a right fit for our technology, who would welcome my call, and who, if we went into a business contract, would see their firm benefit and our company benefit. Okay? Then I would run my hand down the yellow pages, and very rapidly I would listen within and If I got a gut impulse. Yes or no? Yes or no? If I got a gut impulse yes, I would circle that lawyer's name and I would only call the yeses in one week. Then I doubled my sales just listening to my gut. That was the first big, big revelation I had. So that was what got me obsessed with meditation. So 18 months later, I was so productive at this job. I was given two roles. I was head of business development and I was also one of their top, as they referred it back then, top gun salespeople. They shipped me out to New York to run the New York office. And I did that for a while. And then I thought, I want to do more with my life than interrupting busy lawyers in the middle of the day to sell them technology. So I decided to quit and become a meditation instructor. And that started five years of my life where I was broke. My wife, I think she was pretty upset with me because if you quit a high paying corporate job from a Silicon Valley company to become a meditation instructor, you probably want to ask your wife for permission. But what happened was that five years I really went deep in the field. And then I decided to apply my engineering skills, build programs, build platforms, and that's how mindvalley took shape. So anyway, that was my journey. But it started because I was mystified by the powers that were unlocked in me as I started going deep into this concept of accessing altered states for productivity.

Wow. So the Silva mind control method book, I know you could still buy it on Amazon. I mean, is that good enough for people to get to start to wrap their heads around this?

No. No. So, so I'm now working with Jose Silva's daughter. So Jose Silva's daughter and son, Diana. Diana and Jose Jr. And I, if you were at Mindvalley University, I think, I think you left before we conducted this, but I took the silver, the silver method to the next level. And we conducted a mass intuition training event at mindvalley University. We literally trained adults and kids using concepts rooted in hypnotherapy, subconscious programming, auto suggestion and alpha theta brainwave state to access intuition to the point where they could literally, literally on command, get ideas downloaded, and also to then use this to accelerate healing. As you know, there's a huge mind body connection. So the, the program is now called the Mindvalley Intuition Training. So Mindvalley now runs this program. If you go to mindvalley.com, well, I'll give you a link. I'll give you a link. But the seminar is happening In Los Angeles, December 1st and 2nd. This is the first time I'm bringing this program to the United states after a 10 year hiatus where it was basically in sleep remote. So I last thought this in 2008. So it's been 10 years.

Wow. So, so this, this Silver method, about how long does it take per day? That the type of things you're teaching.

Two days, eight hours a day. And this was the original program I took.

But I mean like, like once you learn the method, how often are you, are you actually doing any type of training each day? Like is it part of your life? Like you, like Transcendental Meditation, for example? It's twice a day for, for 10 to ideally 20 minutes. Is this that type of thing?

No, no, no, no. So, so the reason why. So I think transcendental meditation and Vipassana meditation have a purpose. But as Emily Fletcher, the great New York meditation instructor, so Emily says this, there's a difference between hermetic meditation and modern meditation. Hermetic meditation is about getting good at meditation. Modern meditation though, is about getting good at life. It's the meditation designed for the Western mind. Now I don't think it's realistic to tell people you need to meditate for an hour a day or you need to clear your mind. In Emily's words, asking someone to clear their mind is like asking someone to stop their heartbeat. You can't do that. So Silva, Silva. And then the meditation that I developed separate from Silva, the six phase meditation, which was just written up in Ebony magazine and Billboard magazine, these are based on modern meditation. So we bring in modern science, modern data. And it's designed in the same way. Minimum effective dose exercise is designed. So it's designed to give you optimize results in less time. That's the first difference. Optimize results in less time. It takes 10 to 20 minutes a day. But at the same time, it's also designed to help you not step away from the modern world, but to actually crush it in the modern world. It's designed to give you more compassion with your co workers. It's designed to help you move towards your goals faster. It's designed to help you get more creative. Now there's a lot of study, a lot of science emerging on this. And so the two forms of meditation I teach at a basic level, it's six phase. And so six phase just blew up in popularity because last week Billboard ran an article on how the R and B star, Miguel, before he gets on stage, he takes his entourage and they meditate to the six phase. So the six phase meditation looks pure at science. It looks at compassion. It's the intersection of compassion, forgiveness, creative visualization, and so on. It's six different phases, and I'm happy to go into that later. And it's free. So I teach this free online. If you Google 6 phase, you'll find, you know, the program is free, the articles are free, the audios are free. I just wanted to get this out. Now, Silva Silva is a program that where I got the rights to from a legend who passed away in 1999, the 1 and only Jose Silva. And me and my team are now working, working to upgrade it for what has emerged in meditation science in the last 18 years since Jose passed away. And we are looking at popularizing that and bringing that back to America after it being on a hiatus for around 10 years, you know, which often happens to great programs when the founder moves on. Wow.

So those are the kind of things you do with mindvalley. You basically kind of like acquire or license the IP of a lot of these famous authors or folks like Jose Silva and his methods.

Yes, we do that, but we also bring in a lot of research. And our new program is really rooted in big data and AI. Right now, what this means is that we're measuring everything, students. We're measuring like 113 points, and then we are bringing machine learning to identify, to bring in adaptive learning models. So the future of learning, Ben, is basically this. If you want to teach someone meditation, there's a different meditation there suitable for you based on whether you are a father, in other words, a mom or a dad with kids, whether you are in a creative field, whether you are over 50 or under 20. And the way we analyze this is by getting millions of people to take these programs, having them take assessment, or soon hooking up our platforms with wearable devices and measuring sleep activity and so on, and then being able to create adaptive learning models. So in the future, if you take a program with us based on your age, on your gender, on your medical history, you get a different recommendation on a different day. That's really where we are going. We want to build the big data platform for transformation. Wow.

So when you say you're measuring like 113 points, what kind of things are you talking about that you're measuring?

So Right now, the 113 data points that we measure is based on an online assessment. Now, this was developed, Ben, by our mutual friend, John Butcher of Lifebook. So one of the things I'm doing, Ben, is I'm unifying different models of personal growth. So, for example, I look at Lifebook, and mindvalley now runs the Lifebook program globally in partnership with John. And John designed an incredible self assessment for measuring the quality of one's life. Now we take that self assessment and we apply it to Silva. So you take that assessment before you go to a Silva class, a Silva Intuition training class by mindvalley. You take it one month later and we see how one's quality of life has improved. And of course, on top of this, there is a certain amount of data analysis that comes into play. But by unifying the field in such a way, we believe that we get to create the best results for everyone.

Interesting. So the Lifebook thing, by the way, for those of you listening in, I have a whole different podcast I'm going to be doing with John on that. It was one of the most transformational experiences that my wife and I did. We actually did it in Estonia while we were at mindvalley U. We got locked away in a room for three days, but it was a cool room. It was like a castle and a medieval museum with a little chocolate shop outside. So it could have been a lot worse.

And so Lifebook is now a MindValley program. It's exclusively a MindValley program. And Silva Intuition is now also exclusively a MindValley program. So we are actually, actually merging with companies, acquiring companies, bringing them all together on one platform, and then leveraging the assets of these different transformational models to make all a rising tide, lifts all boats. That's really where we are going with this amazing.

Yeah, the Lifebook program, you literally map out your entire life, from financial to character development to family to your social life. And I actually have it here in my house upstairs, this big, black, beautiful bound book that is basically Ben Greenfield inside a book. Like, I could hand it to my kids if, God forbid, I was about to die, and they would basically be able to tuck it under their arm. And it has everything in there that is dad. Everything I stand for, everything I believe, everything I want to achieve, everything I hold dear. So I'll definitely be doing a separate podcast with the great John Butcher on the Lifebook, and you guys are going to get to learn more about that. But that's also something that Vishen now offers through mindvalley. That is a must do experience, in my opinion. It's a bucket list experience.

And just for the people who are listening, all of these programs, when we bring them in, we actually lower the price because our goal is to make this Accessible. So Lifebook used to be incredibly expensive program. Only really wealthy entrepreneurs could take it. We've made it affordable to the masses and in one year, like, you know, grew attendance by 300%. So anyway, that. That's. That's our intention. We want to make transformation available to the masses.

I like it. Yeah. Because Lifebook, I think, used to be some. Like, when I first looked into it, it was crazy. It was like 10,000 bucks. You went to Chicago at John and Missy's house. And I mean, it was. It was cool, but it wasn't really scalable for a lot of people. So I like that you guys are packaging these in the more palatable and. And affordable options for folks. I don't want to sound like a fricking salesman, but it is kind of cool that you can just go to mindvalley and kind of have a lot of it there. And of course, I'll talk more about some of the quests that you guys do, because I know you've got a diet one, you got a memory one, and I actually want to delve into some of the things that you've personally learned from putting together those quests. Vishen. But before that, I want to get to know you a little bit better. Like, you know, you did all this. You learned the meditation, you launched a successful company. You've learned a lot. And I'm curious what your typical day looks like. Like, do you have morning routines, afternoon routines, evening routines, biohacks, must do's? I mean, like, like, what are, what are kind of your personal habits?

Absolutely. Well, well, the first thing is my. My life is. Is extremely, extremely structured. I've shared this from stage. Ben. I have a slightly bizarre brain. I have Asperger's. And one of the downsides of Asperger's is that, you know, it, like growing up, not being able to read body language, having weird quirks. Like, for example, Ben, I don't look people in the eye. When you have Asperger's, you tend to look at the mouth. It's this weird thing. Right. And so I'm slightly eccentric, and I just want to get that out of the way.

Yeah, it's almost like. Sorry to interrupt, but is it almost like just like extreme social awkwardness because you have difficulty reading people or understanding what people are truly saying or thinking?

Exactly, exactly. It's this extreme social awkwardness. However, the flip side of Asperger's is your pattern recognition goes through the roof. So I have this incredible mind for processing data. Like, I can read 10 books. And then I can write a summary intersecting the data from all of these 10 books. Now, you will see that manifesting in my life as I intersect all of these different personal growth programs. So that's my superpower. Now, the other thing about Asperger's is that you get super obsessed in your work. Now, the reason I say that is because to understand me, you got to understand that I'm obsessed with my work. And my work is this. I want to build the next massive education brand in the world. 20 years from now, when people ask themselves, what is the number one computer brand? It's going to be Apple, of course. Number one shoe brand, Nike. Number one education brand. I want it to be Mindvalley. And I want this mindvalley brand to be focused on one form of education, which is transformational education. It's what you do. It's what I do. It's what I believe leads to the greatest source of human happiness and fulfillment. It's learning how to be better human beings. It's learning how to ensure that you are living in the healthiest way, that you're raising your kids as conscious parents, that you are a lifelong learner, that you're training your super brain, that you have a lifebook, that you're tapping into your intuition. It's not the education in our modern schools today that emphasize history, geography, math, and. Nothing wrong with that. My mom was a high school teacher. But the fact is, we are heading into a world where, according to Ray Kurzweil, by 2029, all of us will have our own version of Iron Man's Jarvis AI in our smartphone. All facts, data, knowledge. All of this we will have in our backup break with personalized artificial intelligence. So what do you teach people?

I was going to say, you think that'll make people stupid because we don't have to learn how to do anything?

Actually, no. I think it'll make people smarter. But here's the thing. It's not about knowledge. It's about transformation. Knowledge is data. And you can forget data. You take in data, you take in facts, you forget data. The cell phone simply becomes a better way to back up data and intersect data. But transformation is what truly leads to happy, more fulfilling human lives. Now, transformation is interesting. Transformation is a shift in your worldview. It's when you see the world in a different way. For example, a common transformational model that many people get is that they start to realize that happiness comes from within. Once you understand that, your mind expands. And an expanded mind will never shrink. That is transformation. It is an irreversible shift in one's model or schema of understanding the world. Now, another model of transformation then, is what you preach, which is that our bodies are so much more powerful than what we think they can be, that we can fine tune our bodies, that we can reverse aging. I remember when you shared your story of reversing aging. I can't remember where it was that shifted me because I realized, wow, when I become 65, I'm not going to look like my grandfather. I'm not going to die at that age. Because that was in my mind as a kid growing up in Malaysia, where, you know, the lifespan is like 70. And I saw my grandfather die of cancer at 65. I always assumed that when I hit 60, I'm old. When I hurt you, when I started following men like you, I realized that this was bullshit. And I literally, I literally transformed my body and my mind and my eyesight in two years. That was when my eyesight shifted. That was my body fat went from like 22% to 15%. That was when people literally told me that I look younger. And when I went to doctors, I literally had become younger. You see, that was an irreversible shift in how I saw my body. So transformation is where we want to take the human species. We want to get the human species to look at transformation from all of these different categories. Now, the 12th category model that we use is the one from Lifebook. So you're looking at transformation of character, transformation of emotional states, transformation of health and fitness, transformation of our love relationships, transformation of how we understand ourselves as parents. And what I want to do with mindvalley University is to accelerate human transformation to such a point that by 2038, our species has had the biggest jump in consciousness we have ever experienced since. Since, you know, since Homo sapiens appeared on this planet. That's what I'm obsessed with. So everything I do is about building the next Harvard University dedicated to transformation. And that's how I run my day today.

You know, I think it was the Wired magazine article they call Asperger's Geek Syndrome. Have you seen that article?

Oh, I gotta check it out.

Yeah. It's basically just about how many kind of successful folks in Silicon Valley seem to have children with Asperger's, because for some reason there is this link between intelligence and the ability to focus and recognize patterns, and specifically the type of things that tend to be successful when it comes to things you're talking about like learning or education or programming. And so Silicon Valley has this higher than normal percentage of folks with Asperger's and they actually call it geek syndrome. In the Wired magazine article. I'll link to it in the show notes if any listening in want to check it out. But it's fascinating. But what I find even more fascinating, of course, is how you've kind of hacked your life to kind of like take this gene and turn it into a huge amount of biological and personal success. So what kind of things do you do?

So, so, so that, that focus, Ben, means that I make myself the number one human guinea pig. But everything that I try, that works on me, I try to optimize it, tweak it, modify it and get it out to the world, right? Which includes Silva, it includes Lifebook, it includes all of these other modalities. So I start my day in the following day. So firstly, I start my day with the six phase meditation. And you guys can Google that. Six phase meditation. It's a meditation meditation system I pioneered, but it's based on taking yourself through six different phases of what I call transcendent practices. See, meditation tends to be a BS term because everything is called meditation right now. So rather than the word meditation, I use the phrase transcendent practices. To transcend means to go beyond the physical. If you are a religious person and you pray, that's a transcendent practice. When you practice gratitude and you internally close your eyes and think about what made you happy in the past couple of days, that's a transcendent practice. So the six phase stacks together six different transcendent practices in around 20 minutes. The first one is compassion. You see the world, you see everyone in the world and you give them a blessing. This is rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Now the second phase is gratitude. Gratitude has been studied by science in hundreds of different studies. And gratitude is the human characteristic with the highest correlation with overall well being. So the second phase is you practice gratitude. The third phase is you practice forgiveness. Now there's been lots of studies in forgiveness and what they've found is that forgiveness actually improves both your mental capacity and your biological capacity. For example, one study in Israel found some that forgiveness, when you forgive people who hurt you in the past, your endurance goes up. Another study at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that forgiveness actually increases your vertical jump ability. I mean, go figure. So you practice forgiveness.

That's going crazy.

Yeah, you practice forgiveness because it heals your heart. It has been shown to create better sleep, reduce back pain. It gives you more feelings of kindness and compassion. To the people around you, it reduces a psychological condition known as fundamental attribution error. So that's the first three phases, I repeat, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness. Now those are all rooted in thinking about the present, the present and the past. Right now, the next three phases are future oriented because, remember, as Emily Fletcher said, we are not practicing hermetic meditation. We are practicing meditation for the modern world. And the modern world, especially if you live in the west, is let's create, let's build, let's invent. The next three phases are designed for that. So phase four is essentially creative visualization. It's seeing your life three years in the future. It's seeing that vivid vision. This is where you look at your lifebook and you pick something that appeals to you, and you visualize and you play and you daydream. You do that for about three minutes, and there's a particular protocol. Then phase five is you visualize today. What are you going to do today? And here you practice a model where you set an intention for how every particular segment of today, that important meeting, that project that's delivered, that. That's due to be delivered, that dinner that you have with your spouse, how each of those segments go. And the final phase is a simple prayer. So whether you're Christian or you're Muslim or whatever your religious belief, or even if you're a agnostic or atheist, the final phase is called the blessing. And you pray to whatever higher power you believe in. And you know, and I know some people today kind of don't believe in prayer, but I think it's important that we see prayer, whether you believe in God or not, as something that is essentially about asking for support from whatever higher power you connect to, whether it's your own internal mechanisms of abilities and fortitude, or whether it's Jesus or whatever higher power you believe in. So those are the six phases, and we stack them together. And the funny thing is, Ben, the first five of those phases, there's remarkable evidence for remarkable scientific evidence. It's rooted in science. The final phase, prayer is rooted in. It is rooted in our experience as human beings over thousands of years in believing in a God. So it doesn't matter again if you're atheist or whatever, but those six phases are stacked together. And that is how I start my morning.

Wow, how long does that take?

I do it now. You can do it in 20 minutes. The various audios on the six days out there, mostly recorded by me at 20 minutes.

Oh, okay. So you can just literally just listen to an audio and Lay there?

Yeah, you could, you could listen to an audio. But I do it for about 30 minutes.

Oh, wow, that's gonna be hard for a lot of people to stay in bed for 30 minutes every morning.

Well, you would sit up on a chair. But again, you can do it in 15 minutes. If you find six phases too complex, do three phases or four phases. So this was the exact methodology that R and B star Miguel started talking about. And it's cost like a massive upsurge in people taking it. And I decided to just make it free. So there's an entire program on it. It's completely free because I just want to get it out to the world. There's nothing you have to pay now. So that's the first thing. Now the second thing I do is I practice.

Hold on, hold on. I have one last question. Could you do this anytime of day? Could you do the six phase thing in the evening if you wanted to?

You can do the six phase in the evening, you can do it in the morning. It's whatever works for you.

So I could do it while in the sauna?

Yeah, you can do it in sauna. And there's a 12 day program on the quest app. We'll give you guys the link later. It's the same quest that where your program is coming out, where you can just enroll in that program for free. Now the next thing I do, Ben, actually came from you. I practice intermittent fasting now. You taught me that one night in Tallinn, Estonia, when we were gorging ourselves on like crazy northern European food.

I remember that we were eating like elk and bear and honey mead. I think that was at a. What's it called for people listening. If you ever go to Tallinn, and you got to go to Tallinn someday because it's a cool city. There's some places I go to I never want to go back to. Like for Canada. Bangkok, unfortunately, is one of those cities I just don't like that much. But Tallinn, they have all these restaurants and they're inside of castles. They serve these medieval experiences. You even told me vishen they stay so true to the medieval experience. They, for example, don't serve any nightshades because apparently they didn't eat things like potatoes and tomatoes and eggplants in medieval times. So they just don't have them on the menu. And they call you my lord and serve you spiced wine, but they call it spiced, not spiced. And yeah, I think each of us ate an entire shoulder of pig or something like that when this came up.

Yeah, it's amazing, right? So what I learned from you is intermittent fasting, and I've been doing that two to three times a week since getting back from Thailand. Now, I remember your lessons on metabolic efficiency, which is basically combining intermittent fasting with a short walk with caffeine, with hemosis. I think you called it cold thermogenesis. I want to talk about that. Yeah, and I don't want to talk about that, because that's your thing. But I want to give credit where credit is due. And I learned that from you. And then I create a healthy morning shake. And this one, I brought in ideas from Wildfit, Dave, Asprey, jj, Virgin, and, you know, and a ton of different people. And it's basically a nutritional supplement. Very low calorie, but it's designed to just fuel me with all the nutritional content I need.

You can't leave us hanging, dude. You can't leave us hanging. What's in it?

So I. So I add a lot of products, including coconut oil, coconut oil, butter. Look, it tastes disgusting. I'm going to.

Oh, really?

I'm going to say that right off the top. But I'm living in Malaysia, so I don't have access to a lot of the supplements that you guys get in the United States. So I basically get raw powders, right? Raw green powders, wheatgrass, achai, coconut oil. I dump all of this together with protein. Now I use GNC gold standard whey protein. I add some creatine to it, and basically I use this as a way to also fuel myself with protein. Because the other thing I do is super slow strength training, which I know you believe in as well. The model that we use is derived from the work of Doug McGuff, who wrote the book Body by Science. So Mindvalley has taken that and developed a philosophy called 10x. And so I practice my 10x routine two to three times a week. So I spend about an hour a week in the gym just working on muscular growth.

Now, since the 10x program, like the super slow. So, you know, it's five exercises. Chest press, pull down, shoulder press, seated row, and leg press. But that's like 15 to 20 minutes. Are you doing a lot of, like, mobility and interval training and things like that, apart from the super slow training?

Yeah, I do, but not much. My exercise routine is actually not very complex. I found that minimum effective dose really matters to me, so I like to get my exercise done in a short amount of time. I remember when I came over to Spokane and I worked out with You. It was like one hour and it was, was freaking amazing.

But yeah, we were carrying sandbags up an icy driveway.

Oh, I totally loved it. I totally loved it. But right now I'm just focusing on super slow strength training because what I'm aiming for body wise is a concept called the Adonis metric, which is basically the. It's this philosophical idea. And again guys, this is just pure. It's maybe, I guess it's a little bit vanity as well. I just want to look good right in a T shirt. I want to be healthy, but I also want to look good in a T shirt. So I'm applying 10x with clear set goals. And the goal is. So here's the Adonis matrix if any of you guys want to try it. The optimal male body, which is typically a V shaped body, well, always a V shaped body should be 6 point. Your chest size should be 6.5 times your wrist size. So I know that the chest size I'm going for is 107 centimeters. I'm going to speak in metrics and then your waist should be 0.7 your chest. So in my case my waist would be like 75 centimeters. When you do that, you have a really nice physique. But it's not just about vanity because it's a challenge. Getting there, it can take two to three years. But as part of that challenge, you work out, you change the way you eat and so on. So I'm aiming for that Adonis metric. And so I work out and I eat well and I exercise to get me as close to that as I can. And it's fun. You know, in the last one one year I was super proud of myself because I shaved off like 5 centimeters off my waist. I had to get all my pants altered. But it got me one step closer to that, that metric. I'm still far from it, but that is what I'm going for.

Yeah, the Adonis index is fascinating. I used to to geek out on that when I was a bodybuilder. It's technically like 1 to 1.6 something for the actual ratio. But I got so geeked out on it. I don't think I ever told you this. I actually created like a 24 week program I caught. I called it something like the V body and it was basically designed for dudes to get the, the Adonis index. I should look that. If I can look that up and find it. I'll put a link for you guys in the show notes. But yeah, that's very cool. That you're actually measuring that? Oh, and by the way, before we get past your shake and your strength training routine of this super slow effect with the Adonis index ratio tracking, I should mention that, yeah, the shake you described to me sounds like it tastes like ass. But you need to get your hands on some of the. Some of the. Oh, Myca Organic stevia. Oh my God. Has like a vanilla stevia. And for example, tonight after wewe're recording pretty late, it's like almost 9pm my time right now, but I have this like valerian root chamomile. It's just this powder that's got every herb known to man that can enhance sleep, but it tastes like you're eating a barnyard. So I blend it with ice and a little bit of coconut water, but I add this vanilla stevia to it. And I swear, like, there's this other thing I use called triphala. It's an herb that keeps you from getting constipated, especially when you travel. That also tastes like fricking sludge. But I'm telling you, you add this stevia to anything and it just makes it like vanilla ice cream. So I'll try and send you some. If you can't get it there in Malaysia, that's awesome.

And then, Ben. Now the final thing is then I dive into work. And my work is planned like a regimen. It's like eight hours a day. I actually work relatively few hours compared to most of my friends who are CEOs, but it's eight hours a day. I have a team of around 250 to 300 people globally. And then it's just super, super, super organized. And it's all about life, like growing our numbers, growing our okr as a company. And then I get back from work and it's just family time and reading time and study time. Wow.

Okay, so I gotta ask this because I know I alluded to already, you somehow fixed your eyes. What'd you do for that?

Yeah. Okay, so firstly, eyesight. I did Lasik 12 years ago. And Lasik is wonderful. I strongly recommend it. But when I did lasik, something went wrong during the surgery. As you know, as surgery sometimes goes.

Your surgeon should have done their six phase meditation.

Right? Right. Yeah. So my left eye got slightly botched and that led to a slow development of astigmatism. So 12 years after my LASIK, I found that I had astigmatism in my left eye. My right eye was starting to get astigmatism. It had become slightly myopic and so I needed glasses. So I was wearing glasses for a while. I freaking hated it. And then I started searching for vision correction. I worked with two different coaches. I found an online course, and I was shocked at how rapidly I could heal my vision, literally in two weeks. And I kid, my vision went from 2040 to 2025, which is about two lines down the eye chart. And right now it's around 2025. And now that is just myopia. I want to confess, I've not been able to reverse astigmatism. That's the next challenge. But there are a couple of things. I wrote a blog post on it. So if you search for vision v I s h e n eyesight, you'll probably find that blog post. But the first thing is get your eyes checked with a proper doctor, not at an optometrist. The problem with optometrists is that they want to sell you glasses. And what people don't realize is that your eye power can change from day to day, from week to week, from month to month. And if you go to an optometrist and you get diagnosed there without, without a proper diagnosis and you buy a pair of glasses, you've just locked yourself onto a pair of crutches based on how you were feeling on that particular day, and your eyes will not have anywhere to go except worse. Okay, so that's the first rule. Get a proper medical checkup. Now, the second rule is, then you want to get glasses one increment down from your actual vision. So even after I got a proper medical checkup, I got glasses one increment down. Then what you want to do is install a vision chart, an eye chart in your home. So I have one in my home. I use it for myself. I'm going to use it on my son. There were many studies done that showed that simply having an eye chart in your home and just testing your vision, testing your kid's vision once a week, can reduce the onset of vision problems. So one study was done in Fox, North Dakota, by William Bates. They put eye charts in schools for around 2,000 children. And what they found is that at the beginning of the year, 6% of the kids were nearsighted. Just having an eye chart in the room caused nearsightedness incidents to drop from 6% to 1%. And not only that, but many kids developed beyond 2020 vision, which means 2015 or 2010. And it was just weird just having an eye shot in a room. It's like having a gym in the Office. We don't fully understand why, but it seems that eyesight is a lot of function of the brain and not just your eyeball shape. And you're training your brain to get used to seeing in richer detail. Okay. So having an eye chart at home is phenomenal. And then you want to get a vision coach. Google for vision coaches. Google for online vision courses.

Wow. That's the thing. They have vision coaches.

Yeah. Yeah. So Dave Asprey was telling me that. So how I realized thing is that Dave Asprey was telling me that he hired a vision coach for 12 weeks. It was one hour a week for 12 weeks, and he completely reversed his eyesight. He said it was one of the hardest things he had to do in that one hour. He said literally, his brain would be so tired he had to go to sleep. But in three months, 12 weeks, he reversed his failing eyesight.

That's amazing. Have you ever heard of the Vision Gym?

Yeah, actually. Okay. Since you brought it up, Vision Gym is the one that I've been using. It's not perfect. The way the content is organized drives me nuts, but it is one of the best. I found the vision gym.com.

Well, yeah, it's no mindvalley Quest, but, yeah, you get all these little charts and they send them to your home. They're made by. I interviewed them. Eric Cobb at Z Health. I actually bought it for my wife, so I messed around with it a little bit. And of course, she doesn't try anything. I buy her, like, the best supplements and these amazing, like, hormone herbs and everything. They just, like, sit useless in the pantry. So this thing's somewhere collecting dusk behind me in my. In my desk somewhere. But, yeah, the Vision Gym, it' sit's very similar to what you've just described. Like, it's convergence and divergence and these eye charts. And you feel like you're gonna go cross. I'd have to. You've practiced for a while, but it's essentially, you know, just like training anything. You know, you're training your eye muscles to relax after especially, you've been having them contracted by staring at a screen several inches or feet from your face all day. And, you know, my own tactic is I have a large picture window in my office, and there are trees about 50 yards out. There are mountains several miles out. There are mountains beyond those, literally dozens of miles out. And I simply take breaks. I use this software called. Called Iris Iris Tech. And it not only dims the light on my screen and dims the temperature on the screen, but it has little pop ups that remind you when to take your eye breaks. So about every 55 minutes, I simply stop and I'll either go outside or if it's super duper cold, just look out the window and train my eyes on the close trees and the far trees and the mountains and the mountains beyond those. And when you do that, a lot of people think it strains your eyes to look at things far off in the distance, but your eyes actually relax when you look out into the distance and they contract and spasm when you look at things up close, like a computer or a smartphone. Not that anybody's doing that.

Right, right. So it's remarkable how much we can train our vision, but people don't realize that, and so they. They go straight for eyeglasses, which is a crutch, and it's a real shame.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so one other thing I wanted to ask you about your daily routine, and then I want to talk a little bit about some of the things you've learned from these quests. Like you mentioned the wild diet, for example. And that is, do you have any type of sleep routine?

Well, my sleep, My sleep is heavily influenced by Dr. Michael Bruce and other sleep books I've read, for example, Sean Stevenson. So with sleep, I do have a routine. I've read your sleep routines, by the way. Ben, you are just freaking insane. So I can't see myself doing that. But, for example, one of the things I do is before going to bed, I wear those geeky orange glasses that you actually introduced me to to prevent blue light from computer screens and computer devices influencing our brains in ways that are disruptive to sleep. So I'm actually wearing them now as we're doing this, this podcast interview. And then I go to sleep at the same time every night, roughly 12:30. I give myself seven hours. I've tested myself, so I know that seven hours is optimal. And I wake up and I go straight into meditation. And meditation often does to your body. It generates some of the same qualities as a good night's sleep.

Yes.

So seven hours. I'm super disciplined about seven hours. Now, here's one of the primary rules I have, right? Nothing, nothing messes with my meditation, my sleep, or my gym. My personal growth always comes first, not my business. And I learned that from an MBA professor by the name of Sri Kumar Rao. He said one of the biggest mistakes that business schools are teaching its graduates is that it's all about the business. And he says, no, your personal growth always comes first. Your rate of learning always comes first. Your sleep, your meditation always comes first. He said, look, if your business fails, nobody cares. The question is, did you grow? If your business hits to a billion dollars, who cares? The question is, did you grow? Now, that philosophy of putting my personal growth first is how I live my life. So I have clear time blocked out for sleep, for gym, for meditation, and nothing. Even if it's like if freaking Oprah Winfrey needs to speak to me, I will not sacrifice those times so that by placing my being as number one, that gives me the fuel to do everything else. And sleep, sleep is the one that we mess up most. Right? So people cut sleep because they have an important project to deliver the next day, not realizing that even a 90 minute reduction in sleep can lead to a 30% reduction in cognition. According to Tom Rapp in the book Eat, Sleep, Move. And so people sacrifice their sleep for these stupid reasons. And I think me learning the importance of sleep was one of the biggest shifts, positive shifts I had in my life.

Yeah, that's something that is very important. What you said about meditation. And this is something I've been doing more and more when I travel. And I'm simply too busy to nap when I travel because I'm at conferences or I'm speaking or I'm going to, going from here and there and have lunch appointments and whatnot, is I meditate for about 20 to 30 minutes. And I actually, of course, as I'm prone to do, have a device that I use called the David Delight Mind Alive. It's audio visual entrainment and it plays binaural beats in your ears and then flashes these crazy lights in front of your eyes. You do it for about 20, 30 minutes and it brings you through like a full 90 minute sleep cycle, even if you can't actually fall asleep. So it's very interesting. It's a little bit different than meditation. You can combine it with meditation, but ultimately, yes, you can get by on less sleep or even simulate a full sleep cycle with meditation. It's crazy.

That's incredible. Yeah. So stacking on sleep and then meditation really helps me get in the best cognitive states I need. So I, I can measure myself in terms of my productivity by how rapidly I can think, process data, connect the dots, run a meeting. And my personal growth gives me that ability. But it wasn't like that two years ago. Two years ago I wasn't exercising well, I wasn't sleeping well. Mindvalley was a great meditation company and I was meditating well, but I didn't have the other Things in my life, I didn't have diet, I didn't have exercise, I didn't have sleep. So it was only in the last two years that we decided to go go full on into fitness. And that transformed my life in many remarkable ways.

Now, before we talk about. Because I'd love to hear a little bit more about exactly how these quests are stacked and how you built them. But one of the quests that I found fascinating, I actually sat with this guy at that medieval restaurant we were just talking about. Eric Admetus. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his last name correctly, but he just intrigued me with this story about humans living along. I think he was describing how we originally lived primarily on coastlines with lots of access to sun and minerals. And he developed a diet that simulates, from what I understand, that of our ancestors. I didn't quite have my head fully wrapped around it. And even though I have access to all of your quests, I haven't yet taken his wild diet quest. But you follow this wild diet. Can you describe it to me?

Well, actually, it's called Wild Fit.

Wild Fit. Wild Fit, yeah.

Okay. So most doctors agree, like Mark Hyman has said this, 80% of your body shape is what you eat. Vox Vox magazine had another expose around two years back that suggested that 90% of your body shape is what you eat. Most people don't get this, so they spend large amount of time thinking about exercise, buying exercise equipment, going to the gym, working out, but not an equivalent amount of time caring about what they eat. So whilefit has so far been the most effective anti diet diet program I've ever discovered because it's rooted in behavioral psychology. So Eric Edmeads was an entrepreneur. He ran a couple of, like, special effects studios, did work for Pirates of the Caribbean and so on. But he's also obsessed with living with the Bushmen in Africa. Don't ask why, but Eric hikes Kilimanjaro, hunts with the Bushmen. He's just crazy about, like, Africa because he was born in South Africa. Africa. Now, Eric gained the ability to climb Kilimanjaro in a fasted state. So literally, this is a ridiculously difficult climb. And he does it with nothing but water. Now, his philosophy is this, look around us. We are carrying roughly a quarter million calories of fuel. And he said, look, early man. They didn't have daily access to food. It wasn't about a daily recommendation, the allowance of food. Rather, we ate seasonally based on the weather, based on the environment. We ate seasonally, and our bodies tend to store fat and burn fat based on this seasonal way of thinking. Now, this doesn't map to the four seasons completely. It has to do with, like, where ancestors originated. But Eric developed a diet system based on behavioral psychology because, get this, he used to be a Tony Robbins trainer. He used to train with Tony on stage. He's a brilliant speaker. And applying NLP to nutrition allowed him to create a program called WildFit, which is 90 days. You take it on MindValley's platform as a MindValley quest. And every week, there's a different level of instruction in terms of how you perceive food, how you understand food, how you recognize why you eat, why you eat, and something that you shift about your diet. Now, because of the way it's rooted, there is a remarkable level of compliance. 80 to 90% of the people complete the program and see a massive change in their body. And it isn't just losing weight. It's total health transformation. So what happens is that people's skin clear up. People who are suffering from illnesses that they don't have, that they haven't been able to heal for years, all of a sudden, these illnesses disappear. When I was in Thailand, this guy came up to me and he had ringing in the ears, and it was so bad, he was about to resign from his job. After Wildfit, the ringing stopped. Another lady approached me. Psoriasis disappeared. So we underestimate just how much.

And both of those, by the way, are autoimmune issues. They're autoimmune issues. And so you can see that a lot of the times with these type of diets that clean up a lot of things that tend to be immune system assailants against a human or simply load the body, body with the wrong kinds of food at the wrong time of the year. I had a podcast with Dr. Dan Pompa where we talked about this like the, you know, he talked about one. One Native American tribe called the Sheep Eaters of Wyoming. And they lived high up in the mountains, and they would adapt their diet by eating bighorn sheep in the winter for survival. But as soon as the summer came around, they were eating, like, roots and berries and prickly pears and beans and mesquite pods and mustard seeds and. And acorn squashes and pumpkins. And then once the summer or the winter rolled back around, they'd go back into, like, you know, meat and fat. And that was their seasonal diet. And so this wild fit dietare you actually changing your foods throughout the year at all.

So you don't change your foods throughout the year, but In a compressed 90 day period, you accelerate. You take your body through a seasonal experience across these 90 days. So what you're eating on every week of this 90 day experience shifts. And the result is by the time you get to week, well, firstly when you get to around week six or seven, you're basically going off sugar. And this is when many people have an energy drop and it's painful for one or two days. Then all of a sudden, as Eric puts it, your engine flips. You train your body to burn fat rather than sugar and then your energy just amplifies and you start melting away fat. Like I was losing around 2, 2 and a half pounds a week in week 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. At the end of it I'd lost 14 pounds. My entire body shifted. If you look at pictures of me two years ago, I looked different from what I look like today. It was unreal. But the other thing that happened was my energy soared. Like I stopped needing to take afternoon naps after lunch. I stopped getting hunger pans at 5pm I started being able to intermittent fast. Like I could not do that before because I just always needed to snack. And so it was probably one of the most revolutionary things I did in my life. And so when it worked for me, I went and I brought Wildfit into Mindvalley and now we're working with Eric to get this out to millions of people.

Yeah, it reminds me very much of like almost like a primal or a paleo approach. Like for those of you listening, I'll put a couple of links to some Wildfit recipes that are just hanging around out there on the Internet for free. But like one, you know, it's close to the holidays is the Wildfit apple pie. But the apple pie is made with like arrowroot flour and coconut flour and you know, wonderful nutmeg and cinnamon. There's another one that is for Wildfit spaghetti and meatball but you're using like spaghetti squash and really nice olive oil and again like a little bit of tapioca or arrowroot powder to make this. The spaghetti squash tastes a little bit more like noodles. Like they've got some really good recipes. So that's another program and not to get all self promotion y and just.

Keep in mind like Wildfit isn't about the recipes. There's a huge fan base right now that creates recipes for other fans, but it's really about the 90 day behavioral change psychology, that's what makes it unique. It's not about diet because you don't bring in willpower. You're basically being, you're basically having your brain reoriented. Using NLP to crave only what is good for you. That's the shift. So that's a 90 day process. And Eric has a very compelling, almost hypnotic way of speaking. But you know, it does the job. We are seeing 80% completion rates when most diets barely hit 5%.

Well that's the thing. All of your guys quests, I forget the way that you described the metric to me, but they all have these incredible stick rates. Like you've created them in such a way that as you go through the program, it's almost like tiny habits. Or there's even a new book by my friend James Clear called Atomic Habits. Really good book. But it goes into how to actually hack your habits and stack them little bits at a time until by the end of, let's say the quest experience, you're doing a lot more than you were at the beginning. But it never at any point seems overwhelming. Is that a fair description?

Absolutely. But it's a complex task. So when you take an online course on anything, you have an 8% chance of completing it. According to University of Wichita, 8% completion rate. Our goal is to get that to 80%. But it's not one simple fix. It is the platform. So the platform is rooted in micro slice learning. So our quest are 30, 60 or 90 days and it's less than 20 minutes a day. You're not listening to an hour long video. Secondly, it's rooted in behavioral psychology. Third, it's rooted in great teachers and great filmmaking as you know, because we have you as one of our teachers and we came to film you. And then fourth we have an entire division studying human learning theory, how to optimize rate of transformation. So the abbreviation is kind of stupid Rot rot. But rate of transformation is a very, very important, important metric. Now when we stack on all of these, from app design to UX design to filmmaking to behavioral psychology to rate of transformation to the qualities of a great teacher, you start seeing completion rates go up. But as far as I as I know, we're the only organization that's looking at it with this level of brain power, science and data, right? So we're currently at 60% completion rate average. Our best quest like WildFit can get 80% and our goal is to get to an 80% average. This means we have 10x. We are literally a Thousand percent better than traditional online courses. And that's where we want to go. So we are super, super, super focused on this. We are not Udacity or Udemy. We do not have 15,000 programs. We literally only have 20 programs as a company. But our goal is if you take our program, you're going to complete it. You're going to see, see the best results you can hope for.

Yeah, when you came to my house, you guys had a, it was slick. You had a film crew here for a whole week. We were working eight hour days to film this beauty and longevity quest. And it was just me in front of the camera demonstrating exercise after exercise, walking people through all the mitochondria workouts, the lactic acid workouts, oxygen utilization. We did a lot of super slow stuff, mobility stuff, foundation, low back training we went through. You guys pretty much tapped into every shred of knowledge inside my head. But I've never really made an attempt to actually turn it into a curriculum like you guys did. And you know, even more importantly, a curriculum that people can stick to. And that's why I'm excited about the Beauty and Longevity Quest is just the amount of high end video production combined with habit formation that goes into. So I mean the whole thing, I think it's, I forget how much I think we came out to eight weeks, right? It's an eight week program.

It's a. Yeah, it's an eight week program. Yeah. Curriculum design is something that we totally geek out over. The right curriculum leads to like the right results and many people don't, don't, don't do that. Like, I think one of the things we really want to shift about our industry is that, you know, it's starting to change now. But until a few years ago it was really about Internet marketing. It wasn't about the best curriculum or the best teachers, but honestly it was about who could persuade you to buy their stuff better. And that's something that isn't healthy for the consumer. But I guess every industry goes through that shift. But right now I believe it has to be about results and curriculum and data.

Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of the quest, the beauty and longevity quest, I'm just curious because I never actually asked you this, but did you have any kind of like major takeaways? You mentioned how you added like intermittent fasting to your program and you know, but this particular quest of course isn't really focused on diet, nutrition because you guys have wildfit for that, which actually pairs really well with the beauty and longevity quest that you guys did with me. But as far as anything you changed that you learned as we were kind of going through the process of that quest. Did you add anything in, Vishen?

Well, well, actually, in a way. In a way. Your story and your talks at Mindvalley a Fest and Mindvalley University was one of the things that inspired my team to start looking at. At Spartan races. So we had five guys just complete a Spartan race in the Philippines in the middle of a typhoon. Right. With five. Geez.

That's a great way to get people to want to do my quest. Thanks.

Yeah, so these were guys who, like, one of them was Jason, whom you met, who is a host here at Mindvalley. And Jason had like 20 to 25% body fat, Canadian guy, loved cheese and milk. And now he's freaking ripped. And it's been one year and now we have 20 people training for a Spartan race in December. And which one, which one are you gonna do? It's happening in Johor. Johor is a little state just north of Singapore.

Oh, geez. I didn't even know they were doing Spartan races over there.

Wow.

I should try. I should travel over there sometime and do one with you guys. That'd be fun. I can, I can walk you through the course.

One in the Philippines was, was around 23, 23 kilometers. The one in Johor was 5 kilometers. I'm doing one. I'm doing a starter Spartan race because I injured my knee. I actually am going for knee surgery in a month. So I'm doing a starter Spartan race in January again with my team. We're hoping to have 20 to 30 people there.

You gotta go in for knee surgery.

Yeah. Yeah.

What happened?

Well, I have a genetic condition. Basically the muscles on my left knee don't operate as well. It's something I've had for around eight years. So I'm hoping to fix that so that I can stop running. I can start doing these spontane races. So anyway, it's rooted in tendonitis.

Okay.

Yeah.

I was gonna say you should talk to our buddy Harry about getting it injected with stem cells.

Yeah, yeah, I should totally do that. Yeah.

Even. Even if it's like post surgery and ping me after the, after the show because I've got a whole bunch of. Of stuff I've produced as far as recommendations for people to bounce back faster from surgery, like high dose vitamin C and proteolytic enzymes. And you can even do like cold thermogenesis and infrared therapy. There's a ton that you can do to get the body to heal faster after surgery. So I'll send some stuff to you later on. But the idea, the beauty and longevity thing, and Vish and I talked about this for a while to kind of decide on the direction that we wanted to take the course. Course, it's all based on things like, you know, not necessarily the Adonis index we were talking about, but just general symmetry, like actually creating a body that is aesthetically pleasing. We didn't design it for like extreme athletes or even, you know, so that you could go out and do a spartan race per se, even though you could with the fitness you develop in it. But it's based around actually having a body that functions well and at the same time, you know, more or less looks good naked. Naked. And then what we did was we combined that with all of my longevity hacks, the minimum effective dose of exercise. There's a lot of research out there on kind of like the ceiling, whereby there's an increased risk of mortality with a certain amount of exercise and a decreased risk of mortality with a certain amount of exercise. And we wove all that into the program. So it's got stamina, mitochondria, lactic acid, VO2, max strength training, fast twitch, muscle fiber training, mobility. And honestly, I know I keep talking about it now, but I'm pretty dang proud of what we produce. So if you guys are listening in, I mean, go check out all the quests. But the name of this one that Visha and I did is called the Beauty and Longevity Quest.

It's going to be coming out in around three or four months.

Okay, around three or four months. And at the time of this recording, it's three or four months. I don't know exactly when this recording going to be released, but either way, whether the quest has already come out or whether it's a few weeks or a few months out, I'll put everything over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com quest. I also wanted to ask you, Vishen, as far as one of the A fest events go or the. The next Mind Valley event, I know a lot of people are interested in going to that. So can you reveal like the location or is that a top secret thing or can you share with people where you're planning on for a fest or mindvalley?

Well, we have three big events. The first big event is a fest. Think Ted, right? So like Ted of personal growth kind of combined with like some Coachella, so incredible parties and bonding and connection and music. The next one is happening in Bali in four weeks. In November 1, but then we have one in May in Portugal. I can't remember the exact location, but I know it's happening in Portugal. And then there's Mindvalley University. That happens every July, where literally a thousand entrepreneur type personalities move to a city with their kids for one month to immerse themselves in culture, connection and personal growth. And they are incredible classes for the children and the kids as well. Now we're bringing a new event to Silicon Valley, which I think you'll love, Ben. It's called Superhuman Executive, and it explores how to break personal growth to transform your work. Because one of the big afflictions in Silicon Valley right now is overwork and people who are just so under so much pressure that their health, their cognitive ability is breaking down. I mean, you've read the news of what's been happening to Elon Musk lately and.

No, what's happening to him?

Well, you know, he did an expose on the New York Times. Sorry, he. He did an interview with the New York Times. He spoke about how he can't get to sleep without Indian. He's hooked on sleeping pills, he's overworked. He's been tweeting in a really awkward way that has led to the SEC suing him for his tweets. So, you know, he's an amazing guy. So much respect for the man. But he's had kind of a breakdown. And I. I think the world has so many people like Elon who have incredible gifts that the world needs, but they need to learn to take care of themselves. They need to learn the stuff that you're teaching, the stuff that I learned the painful way when I had my breakdown. Because these men, these women, they are building up our future, but they have not been trained to take care of themselves first.

So that one's called Superhuman Executive, and it's in Silicon Valley? Yep. When is that one?

It's. It's. It's happening in September 2019.

Okay, cool. I'm very interested in that. That sounds extremely cool. As is the one in Portugal. The A Fest in Portugal. I've heard amazing things about Portugal, but I've never been. So that's a. That's one. If you guys are listening in, you may actually see me at. Because I. I've got. Got a thing about visiting some of these places everybody tells me I should go to. So I'll. I'll put links and details to all this stuff over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com quest and dude, freaking Elon Musk. You need to. You need to call me up if you want some help with some of those issues. I know he's a regular listener. At least I assume he is. Him and his. I think the last photo I saw from him, he was on the Joe Rogan podcast with a flamethrower, so that might be an issue, too. Maybe he just needs to back off the flamethrower. Vishen, is there anything else that you want to share with folks? And you've been very generous with your time, but anything else you want to throw out there? Any other last tips for folks, folks, Anything else that you would like to express while I've got you captive on the podcast?

Well, I think I want to reemphasize that quote from Professor Sri Kumar Rao, right. The most important thing you can do for your business is to focus on your health, on your mind, on your sleep. In short, on your personal growth. You have to put yourself first. This isn't a selfish way of looking at the world. This is a way of giving yourself the attention, the love, the quality of rest and downtime so that you can operate at your optimal best. And when you do this, everything else in your life improves. Your relationships, your social connections, your happiness levels, and most of all, your productivity at work. That was one of the biggest lessons I learned in the last couple of years.

Yeah, even your vertical jump. To your vertical jump. And by the way, for those of you who think that's bunk, it's actually, I found the study and I'll link to it. It's called the Unburdening Effects of Forgiveness. The effects on jumping height. It was published in the Social, Psychological and Personality Science Journal. And literally, I'm not kidding, people actually tested and had a higher vertical jump after they practice the unburdenedness and the lightening that forgiveness can give you. So if there's nothing at all you learned from this podcast, you now know how to dunk a basket basketball. Just go. Go forgive some people. So, Vishen, thanks for coming on the show, man. This is fascinating. I'm gonna link to all this stuff over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com quest and last thing I want to say, man, is keep up the good work. You're making some amazing changes in the world with this whole transformational education thing.

Thank you, Ben. I appreciate that. And I appreciate you and thank you for this amazing podcast. I truly enjoyed this.

Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Vishen Lakhiani signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Want more? Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can subscribe to my information packed and entertaining newsletter and click the link up on the right hand side of that webpage that says Ben Recommends, where you'll see a full list of everything I've ever recommended to enhance your body and your brain. Finally, to get your hands on all of the unique supplement formulations that I personally develop, you can visit the website of my company kion@getk.com that's getk I-O-N.com.