Your Values Determine Your Learning Capacity (How to Transform Your Focus, Memory, and Motivation)

Welcome everybody. This is an incredibly important topic. One learning secret that we have never covered in depth before. You'll really want to focus on this, maybe to even take notes. It's going to be a masterclass for you. We're going to talk about how your values shape your ability to learn rapidly. We always discuss this topic where the world is, right? A world where information is doubling, you know, almost every day it seems like. The question isn't, can you learn it? It's, Can you learn it fast enough to really thrive? And so stay tuned because today you'll discover science-based methods and paradigm shifting, a way of looking at the world, your frames of mind, your mindset that will at least double your learning velocity and make you truly more limitless. What if learning faster, remembering more, applying knowledge at like lightning speed wasn't a gift for the few, but a you could better start mastering today. And my guest is the legendary Dr. John Demartini. And if I was to take time to go through his CV, it would probably take the whole episode. He is a renowned human behavior specialist, polymath, global educator. He's read over 30,000 books. You heard me correct, 30,000. Taught in more than 100 countries and helped leaders, athletes, entrepreneurs unlock Extraordinary performance. He's the author of many bestselling books. The one we're going to focus on today is The Values Factor. I highly recommend everybody get their copy. We'll put the links in the description, in the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. This is the secret to creating an inspired and fulfilling life. Welcome to the show, Dr. Demartini.

Oh, thank you for having me, Jim.

Many of our listeners were first exposed to your work when they saw the film The Secret. And everyone was kind of voting up this question. So, before we go into accelerated learning, I'm just personally curious, looking back at The Secret, what do you feel like was right? What was it missing?

Well, the secret behind the secret that I felt was left out of the secret is the action steps and the prioritized action steps specifically. If you set a goal that is not really aligned and congruent with your ontological mission, which really, really is priority to you, you decrease the probability of staying focused on it. You're disciplined, reliable, and focused on your highest value. You procrastinate, hesitate, and frustrate on lower values. So, don't waste your time on goals that aren't really most important. I had the opportunity to meet with a gentleman many years ago who was in his 60s that had a company with 27,000 employees, a Chinese fabric company and textile company. And, he owned a bunch of subsidiaries, I mean, Huggies and Armani, Corsini, all these things was part of the companies that came underneath him. And he said, everything is urgent. Don't waste your time on anything but the thing that's most important and most urgent. And of course, I learned from that. And I pretty well delegated everything other than what I really am inspired to do, which is teach, research, and write basically, and travel. But identifying that is crucial.

In the teaching, you must even learn it even deeper. You know, I'm curious then if you've consumed, you've synthesized more information than most will in several lifetimes. What's— where do people— where do you start? You know, do you have a specific process you use to learn or to extract usable wisdom? Because most people, they're just drowning in the data. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd be glad to share. I've got a— I mean, that just comes pouring out of me, those things, because that's been fascinating to me for years. When I was in my late teens and early 20s, as I would read, I was learning how to read. I didn't really start reading until I was 18. I had a learning problem.

Learning problem?

Yeah, I had speech impediment and dyslexia and learning problem, and I dropped out of school as a teenager and lived as a Hawaiian surfer until I was 18. And I started reading at 18. And I really, really, really wanted to overcome my learning challenges. And I really wanted to be someday intelligent. That was my dream, to somehow be intelligent. Because I was told I'd never read, write, or communicate, never amount to anything, never go very far in life when I was in first grade. And so when I would read, I noticed some things. I, every day I asked what worked and what didn't work, what worked, what didn't work, what allowed me to accelerate or what slowed me down. I was being acutely aware of it and documenting what was working and not working. And I noticed that sometimes I'd read a topic or a book and I'd fade. Hmm. And I'd start to get almost sleepy. My reticular activating system was shutting down. And other times I'd read it and I couldn't put the book away. I'd be so engaged I didn't want to stop and I'd be wide awake. And I noticed that. It wasn't really that hard. I think probably anybody could notice that. But why? I asked why. So initially I didn't know why, but I noticed that if I read a book that was engaging me and kind of wake up. Then if I pulled out a book that wasn't, I got about 20 minutes before I start fading. So what I did is I oscillated between books that woke me up and kind of put me to sleep and kept me going so I could absorb enough before I faded. And that was my kind of original strategy to do it. I also noticed that if I sat up straight, And try not to slouch and not lay down or whatever when I was reading, my circulatory system and cerebral spinal fluid was more functional and I was more aware of reading. I noticed that certain temperatures, if I got too hot or too cold, it was distracting. So I found that temperature that was about right. I found that if I ate or drank something that would raise my blood sugar and lower it eventually, that the volatilities of that would distract me from being present for hours reading. So I just kept inventorying what worked, what didn't work, and started putting together things that helped me, which eventually people asked me, can you help us? Led me to developing kind of a speed reading program. But then when I turned 23, after about 5 years in, I asked myself a question. Why do some people walk their talk, some people limp their life? Why do some people do what they say and why people don't? And that led me to the study of axiology, which is a study of human values. There was only 12 books in English that I could find on those texts in those days, and I devoured them. And, but I realized that people are driven by their values, their perception, decisions, and actions are based on their values. I also learned that something that was higher on my values woke me up. And something lower on my values put me to sleep. So I realized that there was a link between why I was going to sleep and why I was being awakened based on how I could see reading this was going to help me fulfill my highest values versus not. And so then I started to do an experiment on linking values, linking my content to values. I started asking, how is studying this particular topic that puts me to sleep, how's it going to help me fulfill what my highest value is? Because when I asked myself that, I couldn't see it. And that's why I was shutting down. But once I could see the ones that were keeping me awake, I could immediately see how that's going to help me do what I really want to do. So I kind of disciplined myself that whenever I would read anything, I would make links and I made that a standard procedure for every term and semester I was in school or any book I was reading. And I would sit down on a piece of paper, how specifically is reading this content, this topic, this subtopic, this information helping me fulfill what's highest on my value? Which was the evolution of human consciousness, how to maximize awareness and potential, how to do something extraordinary in life, how to help people live amazing and inspired lives. That was really what I was interested in, mastery of life. So if I answered that question 25 to 30 times, I had a neuroplastic link, kind of by Hebb's rule, I started neuroplastically remodeling my brain so I could see that that content was now on the way, not in the way. And the second I did, then I didn't have the lows when I read. And I realized I'd conquered something. I realized that I could now read nonstop without having to oscillate any topic that I made the links to. And I then later learned as I taught neurology, because I ended up developing neurology background and being a speaker at a professional school on neurology, I found out about a certain area of the thalamus, the pulvinar nuclei and the interlaminar nuclei. And the pulvinar nuclei is a gating filtering portion of the thalamus. So all sensory information that comes into the spinal cord or brainstem kind of passes through that thalamus on the way to the corona radiata up into the cortex. And it's kind of like a relay station and a filtering system. Some of that information goes over into deep nuclei and goes into the unconscious and some of it comes up into conscious awareness. And anything that was high in your value got up to the conscious awareness and activated the, just underneath it, the reticular activating system to wake you up. And if it was linked to your highest values, it went up into the medial prefrontal cortex and activated the mitochondria. So you woke up. And I found the pathways. So I realized that this pulvinar nuclei is a gating and filtering mechanism according to values and whatever's highest on a value it lets in. Because otherwise we'd be overwhelmed by infinitude. For instance, if a mother's got 3 children under the age of 5 and she's 35 years old and her highest value is taking care of those children and her ontological identity as a mother, I'm a mother. When she walks in a mall, she'll spot children's clothes, children's health items, children's educational items, children's entertainment items. at such a close for the children. She will filter out of the infinitude of information as she's going around and synchronously identify stuff that helps her fulfill what's most important. And so she has what is called a selective biased attention and an attention surplus order in her highest values. And the selective biased or disconfirmation bias towards the other Which goes into attention deficit. We all have attention deficit and surplus. So she filters it out. Once I realized that that area of the brain is filtering out according to values, I realized why that worked. So if I basically ask how specifically is studying this information helping me fulfill what's highest on my value, I can now electrify my energy, Vitalise my system. And anything that's high on your values, the space and time horizons expand. The focal fixation point when you're reading expands, and you're more self-governed in the movement of your eyes when you're reading and learning than if you're distracted by the amygdala, which is constantly making you back skip, forward skip, and wander, et cetera, while you're reading and you're not even picking up information and it's going into kind of attention deficit. So I realised that if I made a link, 25 to 30 links of how studying this topic would help me fulfil my highest values, I increased the probability of not only attention, but retention and application.

Yeah.

Because anything that's linked to your highest value, if you're pursuing a challenge that you love doing, you activate innovation, creativity, genius, and original thinking. So if I can link it to the highest values and I can think of what it is that I'm wanting to accomplish, that I'm trying to solve a problem on, that information wakes up creative new insights on how to solve problems and it's now solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented. Then something happened at 24. I got to say this, Jim, it's amazing. I was studying chiropractic, I was studying dentistry, I was studying medicine, I was studying astronomy, At the same time, doing all these different things in colleges and stuff. And I was lecturing on dental temporomandibular joint dysfunction at the time. And I had 400 doctors in front of me on dentistry at a tri-county dental association meeting. And I was supposed to speak for 20 minutes, but they gave me the whole afternoon. So it went 4 hours because they were fascinated by what I was about to share, or what I did share.

Wow.

And there was a guy there that was upset about it because he didn't want to hear me the whole time. And he was saying— he asked me this question, so where did you get that information? Whose opinion is that? Really challenged me. And without even knowing it, realizing it, a picture of Gray's Anatomy popped into my head, literally a photograph of it. And I could read the whole page. And I didn't know I knew that. I remember reading it. I remember going through the book, speed reading the material, but I didn't know I had that information consciously.

Mm-hmm.

But because he asked me a question that was going to help me fulfill what was highest on my value, unconscious information that was now passed through the pulvinar nuclei up into conscious awareness. And that was the day That my speed reading took off. Because then I realized I don't have to be consciously aware of everything I read to know it. All I have to do is be asked a question that is pertinent to the information and it will come up. And that was the goal.

How long ago was that?

This was at age 24. I'm 71 now. So it's been a while. But what happened was I then just took in information. I think I went up to 11,000 pages one day reading, and I didn't care whether I got it all consciously. I just let it go in. And then what I did is I took— went back through the material and got questions and had somebody fire questions at me on the material. And the second they asked me a question and it was pertinent, The information, there it was. So I realized we have conscious and unconscious access. And if we can take something that's unconscious and all of a sudden have it linked to something that's higher in value, it comes into conscious awareness and goes right through the filter and right up to the conscious awareness. So those were 2 very, very insightful steps in my speed learning and speed reading development. Making sure that you link whatever you're going to study to your highest values. Now I've had kids in school that were struggling, you know, maybe they're doing okay in one class and they're not doing in others, and they're not really engaged and they're just getting by and doing the bare minimum. I take the class, I find out what their values are, I have a value determination process that I have on my website, And I go through there and I determine their values, which takes about 30 minutes. And then I take the classes and the subtopics and I make links. And I'll spend, oh, maybe 2 hours with a guy or a girl. And in 2 hours, it's extraordinary what can be done with them in their learning capacities. They don't have a learning problem. Everybody wants to learn what's meaningful and inspiring and a priority to them. You know, if their highest value is video games, they have a photographic memory of the video games. But if they don't see the classes helping them get what they want, because nobody goes to school for the sake of the classes, they go to school to learn what's meaningful and inspiring and important to them in their highest values. If they can see how the classes are doing it, they're totally engaged and they'll excel. If they don't, they're disengaged and they're going to go into their amygdala and they're going to go into immediate gratification. And distraction, and they'll be labeled attention deficit and hyperactive and all these other things, and they'll go into debauchery. So taking the time to go and make the links between what the topics are and their highest value is a gold mine for people that are having learning challenges or slow learning or whatever. And whenever you do, you go out of the kinesthetic feeling mode into the visual accessing mode. And you go from video, from physical to audio to visual reading. You automatically go into a more visual reading center, which accelerates your reading because you're now breaking the sound barrier and going into the speed of light, at least.

We, we have, we have, uh, Kwik Reading students in every country in the world. And, and those who go through the 21-day program, the— when they— when people talk, one of the things we always— themes we always hear is like, It's hard to describe to somebody, you know, what's on the other end. It's kind of like trying to just teach, you know, what does a rose smell like? Who's never smelled a rose before? Um, you know, but I love the way you describe it. Um, by tapping into those values, people have purpose, they have interests. Maybe they are so focused they lose sense. They get in that flow state even where they lose their sense of self and sense of time. Things become more effortless. Um, It's kind of like without a reason, you won't get the result, right? It's kind of going from your head to your heart to your hands if you don't feel it. What's the most important— I always tell people the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing, right? So if that is their values, I know you have an assessment and we'll link to that in the show notes. If somebody's listening right now, they're curious, how do they identify their highest values? Not the ones they think they should have, based on family or society? And then the second part of that question would be, how do they restructure their learning or their days, right? Because ultimately your life is made up of these days around that.

Well, 1978, as I said, I was studying values. I wanted to know what led to values. And almost everything I read was all about how you should be.

Hmm.

And David Hume talked about is versus ought. And many people are how I ought to be instead of how I am. And I find that that is a self-defeating pursuit because you got to break on, you know, you're trying to inject the values of outer authorities into your life, the mothers, the fathers, the preachers, the teachers that raised you, conventions, traditions, and they're And that's not you. People want to make a difference and you can't make a difference fitting in, you make a difference standing out. And so the question is, what are your real values? What does your life demonstrate? I found out that your life demonstrates it. What you think it is and what you wish it would be and what you hope it will be and what you imagine it to be is not necessarily what it is. And because everybody says, I want to be wealthy, but only 1% become financially independent, you know? So somehow, There's a disconnect there. So I had to come up with, because all the value determinants that Schwartz and Hartmann and these people had were all kind of filtered based on what they think it should be. And I had to get and find something that was more objective. So I developed something. I've been using it for 47 years now, a series of questions. The first value determinant is how you fill your space. If you study proxemics, you have your proximal and distal space, your intimate, your kind of personal individual, your social and your public space. And that intimate is about a foot and a half and that personal is around 4 feet, about the distance what your hands can reach. If you look at what you keep in your intimate space most consistently, in the place that you spend most time in your life, what are the items that you are engaged in with your sensory and motor functions that are close to you, that's within a foot and a half of you, Which in my case is the computer most of the time, and then look at what that item is and what is the dominant use of it, my case teaching. It indicates what you value most because things that are important to you, you keep proximal, things that are distant or not important, you put distal. If somebody gives you a gift and it has zero value to you, you toss it, you get rid of it. If it has maybe a value for a friend, you might keep it and hand it to them. But if it has zero value, you get rid of it. You don't even want it in your space. But if it is extremely valuable to you, you keep it with you. Somebody gave me cufflinks that said love and wisdom, right? Which is very meaningful to me because I'm dedicated to the love of wisdom, the wisdom of loves. And Howard, what do you call, Howard Hughes is the one that told me to gain the wisdom of love and the love of wisdom when I was 14. And so those are meaningful to me. So I have those cufflinks wherever I go. But something that's not valuable, you toss. So space, and looking at what your life demonstrates you fill your most intimate and personal space with most consistently, that you most engage in, sensory and motor, that's a great indication of what's valuable to you. The second one is time. You find time, make time, spend time on things that are really valuable to you, but you don't have time, you procrastinate, hesitate, frustrate, you just, You can't make it for things that aren't. So looking at what you're consistently doing. Now, in my case, teaching on a computer, and I always have time for teaching. I'll squeeze in another seminar into the weird hours of 3 in the morning if necessary, because I love teaching. So you look at what do you spend your time on most? What do you always have time doing? What do you make time for? What is your— if you literally did a drone over you and looked at how you spent your day over a 3-month period, what are you spending most of your time doing? Mine's teaching. So my time and my space indicate the same thing. And these questions, these determinants, will reiterate in the answers if you're honest, because they're all pointing to the same thing. What's the highest value? The third one is energy, the mitochondria again. Whenever you're doing something that's extremely high on your value, your energy goes up. And whenever you're doing something low on your value, your energy goes down. Reticular activating system and the pulvinar pulls it in and makes you awake or puts you to sleep, to seek and avoid information. So if it's really, really high on your values, you always have energy for it. And we can all go to a social function and somebody can be talking about something and you're going yawning and looking at your watch and going, I need to go. And then somebody comes over and talks to you about what's really pertinent to you and you get your second wind and you'll go all night talking, because you energize when you're doing something that's high on your values. So how you fill your space, how you spend your time, and what energizes you most will point to a same pattern if you're honest with the answers. The 4th one is money. You find money, make money, spend money, get money for things that are valuable to you. There are women I've met that can find money for a Jimmy Choo shoe but can't pay the rent. You know, they're— because they have a higher value on their beauty and their looks and their appearance, they can find money for shoes and clothes, but they can't find money for rent or car repairs.

So— Same can be for time also for people, right?

Exactly.

You know, people say they don't have enough time, but if you look at their calendar where they're actually spending their time, It tells you what's important to them. Yeah.

You make time for it. And so if you look at space, time, energy, and matter, the STEM, those are going to give you probably 70% accuracy of what those values are. But there's more. The next one is, where are you most ordered and organized? Everybody has order and organization. So I have, research knowledge organized, I have my presentation clear and organized, my investments are organized, my travel is organized, but some of my social life or what I, you know, workout and stuff is not as organized, not as high. I do it, but it's not as high. So you look at the hierarchy of where there's order versus where there's disorder, where there's most information, we call that order according to information theory. Whenever there's missing information, we call it entropy and disorder. So our order system is literally prioritized according to our values. And so you look at where do you have the most order and organization? That's number 5. Number 6 is where are you most disciplined, reliable, and focused? If somebody really knows me, they don't ask me, what are you up to? They go, where are you presenting today? What are you researching today? Where are you traveling today? How's your investments? Those that really know me know I'm only doing 3 or 4 things. I've delegated everything else. But people that don't know you will ask you questions that it's not related. So you automatically have discipline in your highest value. Why? Because whatever's highest on your value is your ontological identity. You identify yourself by it and you epistemologically filter information maximally there, so you excel at it. And your highest value is your telos, the end in mind, which is the purpose that you feel you're dedicated to. So when I go through the Value Determination, when we find the highest value, consistently they'll say, yes, my identity revolves around it, my purpose revolves around it, and where I'm expert revolves around it. So where are you most disciplined? All 6 of those will point in the same direction if you're holding people accountable to answer it, And not answer what they fantasize, what they think it should be, what they wish it would be, what they hope it will be, but to answer objectively as if a drone's looking over you and watching you and you're videoing your life. What your life demonstrates will be revealed. The next one is, what are you thinking about, about how you would love your life to be that shows evidence of coming true? The key is evidence. And something you would absolutely love to have come, not what you think it should be or ought to be, but what it is you love. It's an intrinsic value, not a deontological duty from some outside imperative. So you find out what you think about, about how you would love your life that shows evidence coming true. I think about since I was 17, traveling the world and teaching, it's coming true. I'm looking for that. If it's not coming true, it's not it. If it's not what you'd love to have come true, it's not it. It has to have all 3 criteria. What are you thinking about, about how you would love your life that shows evidence coming true? That is the, the thinking is mainly the frontal cortex, the parietal cortex is activated under that, under functional MRIs. Then comes, what are you visualizing about how you would love your life to be that shows evidence coming true? Again, that's more of the occipital and occipital temporal parietal area. And so I'm looking for what are you seeing in your mind's eye that's inspired vision that makes you do it? Whenever you're in your medial prefrontal cortex, there's nerve fibers that go right into the visual associative cortex, which is V5, V6 on the medial portion of the occipital front portion of the lobe. And we are able to access vision when we're in our highest values. Our amygdala doesn't have the connection. So the old proverb, those with a vision flourish and those without a vision perish, It's true in the way the brain's structured. So what are you seeing for yourself about how you would love your life, you're visualizing about how you would love your life that shows evidence of coming true? That way we're looking from a gestalt perspective, from the frontal, the parietal, and now the occipital lobe. Are they all lining up? And is there a congruent gestalt and a synchronicity of the firing? That's a sign you're living in your highest value because your gamma synchronicities are confirmations of authenticity. And they line up and they fire together out of the medial prefrontal cortex. The next one is, what is your internal dialogue about how you would love your life to be that shows evidence coming true? And this is mainly the temporal lobe again. Now you're getting over into the audio area. And what are you saying? We all have internal dialogue. We may not even be aware of it. We have internal dialogue that's sometimes self-depreciative when we're not living according to our highest values or trying not to. And we have one that's affirmative, that's, in my case, it's, I'm an international speaker traveling all over the world, inspiring millions of people across the land, right? That goes through my head. I have a photographic autographic mind, whatever I read or retain. I'm always at the right place at the right time to meet the right people to share the right information. And I've got internal dialogue that I look at which of that internal dialogue inspires me and it's what I would love and it's coming true. And again, there'll be a pattern and it's the same pattern, it reiterates. The next one is external dialogue. What do you keep wanting to bring the conversation to when you're in social settings? People come up to you and said, how's your golf game? How's your business? How's your investments? How's your kids? How's your health? They'll want to lead the conversation. We all want to lead the conversation to what engages us. So what is it you lead? And when people come in conversation on it, you come alive and you converse with them and can go for hours. You lose track of time. That's an indicator. And again, it'll reiterate. The next one is what inspires you and what brings a tear of inspiration? I've every country I've spoken in, no matter what the country or language, whatever with translation, I ask people go to a moment when you've had a tear of inspiration, where you felt an aha and an awe-inspiring state of presence. That you just knew that you knew that this was meaningful and it's important to pay attention to. And it's a sign of congruency. It's a sign of authenticity. And they call it a gamma synchronicity. When the alpha theta waves come together and you get about an 8-cycle second, you get a gamma synchronicity that jumps to a 40 cycles per second and you get a gestalt in the brain. I'm looking for that state. And what is it? Because that, if you look at the content of whatever your mind is at that moment, it's a guide. to a mission in life. So I capture that. And the next one is, what is it do you, as your most consistent, persistent goals that you've had in your life that have shown evidence of coming true? Long-term, not immediate fantasies, but long-term goals that you've kept going on and you've never stopped on. You didn't ever give up on it. The trajectory was consistent. And the last one is, what do you spontaneously want to feed your mind study, read, learn, and watch on YouTube. Everybody, when they— if you look at their YouTube channels, there's a certain pattern of what they keep looking at.

Yeah.

There's some objective there. If you look at what the common thread is, it's pointing you in a direction, and it again reiterates. So if I go and I take 3 answers for each of those questions, and I have 39 answers, and I go to the very top one, and then anywhere where I see that same answer or synonym, I count them and cross them out and put the total and go to the next one. And anywhere I see a synonym, total them up and cancel them out as they go out and go through until all are accounted for. You'll have somewhere between 3, 4, or 5 values that their life is demonstrating. And I assure you, the top one, if it's done as I instruct, the top one will be their ontological identity. Their life revolves around it. Their area of expertise will be there and their purpose, the feeling of a calling there where they spontaneously want to do that and be of service to people philanthropically is there. If we find that out, now the next step is how do we structure the highest priority actions to start making that become real and do the most important thing and stay to the most important thing? And if we do that and Delegate lower priority things gradually and liberate ourselves from things that we can delegate and find other people who are inspired to do it, to give them the possibility of doing what they love so we can do what we love. We liberate ourselves and start building incremental momentum towards something profound.

I love that. It's like a masterclass in value elicitation and hierarchy. Goodness. I want to unpack that, but I also have other questions. Um, so, uh, when, when we're coaching in Limitless, we talk, we talk about motivation, right? And then, uh, tapping into values and purpose. Without a reason, you won't get the reward or the result, and it keeps people going, creates drive. Um, but also it's their mindset, right? You— it's, uh, and I'm curious about Actually, let me back up. I think if this conversation is about accelerated learning, one of the things that keeps people from learning is they know it already, right? You know, the idea that your mind is like a parachute, only works when it's open. But one of the cognitive biases out there is people are looking not necessarily always to learn something new because it takes effort, right? You have to change this whole cognitive pattern and, you know, Neural web, if you will. So people like more like to look for evidence or validate what they already know as opposed to learning something new. When you encounter a concept that challenges a deeply held belief, right? This whole idea like a maybe a deep conviction loosely held. How do you remain fluid and open to new information, new data? You know, how do you avoid that defensive bias and remain open? Or maybe if not you, what's your suggestion for someone listening that they think like they know it already and they're looking just to validate that idea as opposed to keeping an open mind and holding 2 opposing views?

Wilhelm Wundt in 1897 wrote a beautiful book. He was a father of experimental psychology on the law of contrast. Heraclitus talked about the unity of opposites, 6th century BC. Hegel talked about the dialectic. Many philosophers through the ages have used it. The dialectic was you take a proposition, you get an opposite proposition, you share those propositions, each learn from the other something new, and they come to a synthesis eventually A hybrid of the two. When you're in your amygdala, you're interested in debate because your addiction to being proud and right and to the fantasy that other people are supposed to listen to that stop you from learning, because now you have a biased side to the dialectic of knowledge. And you'll run into an opposition by what is called the law of heuristic escalation. Anybody with an ideology, an ideologue with an idea, will automatically magnetize a person with an equal and opposite idea, like a pro-gun and anti-gun, pro-life, anti-life, pro-Trump, anti-Trump kind of game. And they'll find each other and they'll fight with each other to be right in a debate. They want to go debate. Transcending the debate and going through the cingulate gyrus from the amygdala up into the cortex, you move towards the dialectic, where instead of you being right and thinking you know and being resistant to taking in new information and accommodating to new information, You'll only hear things with a confirmation bias. It's assimilative, not accommodative. So maximum learning occurs at the border of assimilation and accommodation. You oscillate between the two in the dialectic. So if all of a sudden you can find out how what they have to offer helps you fulfill your highest values, you open up.

Yeah.

But when I'm reading and I'm studying, when I see a bias in literature, I purposely look for the equal and opposite value system that opposes it. And what's interesting is they're usually at the same time, not even distant in location. Like the theory of evolution by Darwin around 1859 simultaneously occurred in the same city with the theory of thermodynamics. One was life physics, negentropy, and one was death physics, entropy. And these pairs of opposites are born like a unity of opposites. And so if you're wanting to learn, if you get trapped in a bias, you become defensive, you become right, you're stuck in the amygdala, where you lose your learning capacity. If you're in the dialectic, you're inviting the opposite side, the pairs of opposites is the logical conflicts, in order to find a more greater synthesis of truth. Somewhere between the unity of opposites is where the truth is. The objective truth is not the 2 biased perceptions that are subjectively interpreted by a survival response. So it's asking whatever I believe as a, that I'm strongly devout on, what exactly is the opposite? What's the benefit of the opposite? And what's the drawback of my own? If you can't ask that, I have a whole system that's a check and balance system on learning for people. That I use for companies and I use for people that want to learn in companies to neutralize the bias so they're more receptive to applying not just assimilation, but accommodation. Now, if you try to go to too much accommodation, you'll burn out. If you go too much assimilation, you'll get bored. You have to have a balance of assimilation and accommodation to maximize the learning process, to maximize the input.

Mm-hmm.

So it's a series of questions to help you see the benefit of the opposite view, To strengthen your communication with that person in opposition. So you have a dialectic, not a debate. Debates are futile. Neither one people walk out any more enriched. They just want to be right and prove that they're right. But a dialectic makes people have to both sides.

Yeah.

There's a professor from Yale who lives on the ship I live on. That's a very bright guy. They just honored him at Yale, given him part of the location. They've named it after him. Very bright guy. And we started out in dialogue, oscillating between debates and then dialectic, and we went all over the place. And sometimes he'd want to win our argument, sometimes I'd defend my argument, and then sometimes we'd come and we'd learn from each other. And then we would go back and then we would look up everything that the person said and came back. And both of us got humbled and learned from each other this way.

Yeah.

So that was the debate to the dialectic to eventually dialogue. See, you have alternating monologues when you have debate. Well, I'm speaking, you're not listening. You're speaking, I'm not listening. Then you have a dialogue when you go through the dialectic. When you finally get it, you get to silence and you embrace each other and say, thank you. And then you realize you really knew nothing.

Do you have too much to read but too little time? Are your shelves full of books that you haven't read yet and become shelf help, not self-help. And that's why I created the Kwik Reading Course. 15 minutes a day, 21 days will absolutely transform your life. Just go to kwikbrain.com/reading, use the code PODCAST15, and you'll get instant access. I was at a meal recently where there was a spirited debate between 2 friends and, uh, And that was just after a while. I just didn't want to— they were going into, you know, just reinforcing their own beliefs. And I, I just had this simple question, asked one of them if they could argue that person's point of view, because they were, they were there, they were very into it. But it—

Well, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and his brother is really the best example I've seen out there. He's an atheist, his brother's a theist. They both are highly intelligent, very articulate. And having them go into debate, you don't get anywhere, but watching them debate is entertaining because of their skills of finding all the weaknesses in the other person without ever getting any awareness in the process. But then when you see somebody that's really a master of the dialogue and master of communicating their values in terms of the other person's values, so this person opens up. And then they both learn from each other. It's inspiring to watch because you see wisdom unfolding in the pursuit of the unity of opposites.

And if a lot of behavior is belief-driven, what's your mindset? What are some of the lead domino, just as we do the values hierarchy, what are those top beliefs or those core beliefs that affect all of these sub-beliefs that That allows you to— like, I have a belief that it's rare to find somebody that could be— that's 100% right or 100% wrong. So I could learn from everybody, right? So I'm always staying curious and seeing what I'm missing. And I'm asking these kind of questions that direct my reticular activating system to be able to focus on the things that give me more clarity because that's high value for me. Do you have beliefs that you hold strongly, um, that allow you to have this, um, you know, these frames of mind that, um, like, if somebody— if you, if you could install one or two core beliefs to our listeners around learning, um, because like, what are the myths that they believe that probably might not be the most useful, but, but, but having that change in that core belief or adopting it, adapting it I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to see Osho, Rajneesh, being interviewed by a challenging journalist.

And it was about, do you believe in God? And he said, no. And they said, so you don't believe in God? And he says, I don't use belief. I only go with knowing. It's really interesting. He says, you can believe in something that's unknown, but if you know something, there's no need for belief. If it's knowledge, it's gnosis. And he was trying to differentiate belief versus gnosis. Belief is sometimes an opinion that's accumulated by subjective biases over time that you can defend because you're not certain. When you have certainty, there's no defense and there's a knowing.

Hmm.

You don't have a belief in gravity. You have knowledge that gravity is something that's kind of unviolatable laws. I always say that there's a— the universal laws are unviolatable, but the human laws are unlivable. And the human laws are where all the beliefs are. And the faiths. And there's false faith and true faith. And true faith is, though unseen, can lead to a state of certainty. And that's the synthesis of pairs of opposites. So if you assume that there's somebody that's always right or always wrong, it's not possible. That's like a monopole trying to find a positive pole in a magnet or a negative pole in the magnet by itself. The laws of the universe don't allow it. So that's not, it comes to maybe a belief, but it's actually knowing that that's not even possible. You have the knowledge of the principles of the Maxwell's equations knows that the oscillation of the electromagnetic waves, that the electric and magnetic components won't allow one-sidedness. There's no pole. The conservation laws won't allow it. The charge parity laws won't allow it. The conservation of information won't allow it. The more knowledge you have of knowing laws that are kind of unviolatable, then what looks like a belief is simply knowing. But you may not know you know it and think it's still a belief. So I always say the more true knowledge you have, a foundation, One of the reasons I went to study the 300 disciplines and the 30,000, 31,000 books is I wanted to have a basis of knowledge that I could rely on. So when I built a body of knowledge, it was something that was repeated on the subatomic to the astronomic and anywhere in between. So if I find a principle that applies in every discipline that I study, then I have a higher probability of that being a principle that will stand. And so the knowledge is stronger, but the belief in that principle becomes more profound. And it's not a defense uncertainty, Heisenberg's uncertainty, it's a knowing. And that gnosis is a very poised state. It's not a defensive state. That's why debates are 2 people that don't know the whole picture.

Right.

You know, they're both right, defense mechanisms. The wise person would sit I love Plato's writing of Socrates when he's having a dialogue with something, with a guy. The guy says, you know, this thing is just terrible. This terrible thing has happened. And Socrates says, oh, are you certain? Yeah. And he goes on and he justifies why this is a terrible event. And then he says, if you say so. And then he said, but what about under this circumstance? What about this situation? He asked him a question. And then within minutes the guy's thinking, well, maybe I'm not so certain about it. And he gets him to believe in the complete opposite. So he's basically making him see the complete opposite of what he was perceiving. And then once he's convinced that the other is true, then Socrates goes and goes, but what under this situation? And then he goes and reverses it and puts it over in another direction. And then the more that they did that, the more the guy felt ignorant and the more they thought he was wise because he could see beyond the polarities of the beliefs and the biases that people are at and just kind of played with them and let them go through the dance. You know, it was really quite interesting. And then he had a funny thing when this merchant comes up to him and he says, you know, how you— why do you do this, Socrates? Why do you keep teaching this youth these abstract metaphysical things that's not practical for their daily life. And he says, ah, you're so wise, I'm so foolish. If you ever see me do that again, please feel that I'm unworthy of your comment.

So John, I just have a few more questions if you have time. In today's hyperpolarized world that, you know, that you were referring to, what would be your approach or your strategy for facilitating meaningful dialogue between opposing value systems? How would you approach that?

May I share a story? Do I have time for a story?

We have as much time as you like, yes.

So I'm in South Africa and I have a TV show there, I did up until COVID, that was called Joburg Today, and Leading Opinion, it was called. And as a result of that, I did a thing on imperialism, and I did a thing on conflict resolution and bias and things and prejudice and things. And so I got asked by a journalist if I could mediate a conflict between 3 Palestinian leaders and 2 Israeli— no, 3 Israeli leaders and 2 Palestinian leaders. I said, I'd love to. So they organized it at the Michelangelo Hotel, and they put 3 on one side of a table and 2 on another side. Now, when you walked in the room, if you put a knife in the room, it was pretty thick because these are arch enemies that hate each other, want to kind of kill each other. So when I walk in the room and I greet everybody, It's kind of quiet. And this one Israeli leader, a woman, said, Dr. Demartini, do you believe in absolute evil? And I said, no, that's an absolutist position in a contextual situational ethics relative state of mind. And no. And she said, well, I do. And so I came back and I said, I've been told that you've been trying to negotiate a truce for 14 years. Is it possible that that may be one of the reasons why it hasn't been achieved? I kind of got back at her.

Idiot.

And she quieted. And then she said, well, I believe in absolute evil. And I said, do you mind if I ask you what you mean by absolute evil? And she said, intolerance. Now she couldn't see that the finger she was pointing was actually pointing back at her. She couldn't see she was intolerant because she was blinded by being right by the amygdala. And intolerance. And so I said, pull out a sheet of paper that is in front of you, the Demartini Method, which is a method on conflict resolution that I've shared around the world. And so, Pull that out and turn to column 8. And at the top of the page, put the individual that you think is intolerant that you dislike. Put the name. Then I said, over under column 8, I want you at the top of line 1, I want you to write intolerant, unwilling to reason and listen to alternative views. Great. I said, now go to column 9 on this exercise. Go to a moment where and when you perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating the same specific trait, action, or inaction that you despise, dislike, or hate most, intolerance. And she immediately goes, I pride myself on not being intolerant. Everyone knows I'm, I'm the most open-minded person. I would never be intolerant. And she goes on and on and on and on as a defense mechanism. And I realized that she was not receptive to reflecting. She was very much deflective. So I figured since I'm the teacher, I might have some authority figure energy. So I said, well, I am certainly intolerant. And I started listing, I'm intolerant sometimes at a restaurant if it takes more than 15 minutes to get my food. I'm intolerant at a at an airport if I have to wait in line, and I started listing twenty or thirty of my intolerances to give her a possible reference to think of her intolerances. And then she started coming up with some. She said, "Well, in that case, okay, I'm sometimes intolerant with my kids. I'm intolerant sometimes with people that don't get jobs done the way I want." Da da da. And I made her list. 39 examples of intolerance over an hour, 39 moments where she's been intolerant until she got a tear come out of her eye, until she could acknowledge that what she perceived in others was her. You know, in Romans 2:1, it says, beware of what you judge and see in other people, for it is you, you do the same thing. So I made her go and reflect and looked at where she was intolerant to the degree that she saw in him. And then she realized that part of the intolerance she projected was hearsay, not even factual perceived, just assumption that people generalize when they're angry. And then once she owned it, I said, so can you now see that you have moments of intolerance in your life? She goes, yes. And she started humbling down her pride a bit. Because when you have reflective awareness and you're not too proud to admit what you see in others inside you, you It's easier to have dialogue than it is to have, you know, you go from debate to now dialogue. Then I asked her, now let's go to column 10 in the exercise. Go to a moment where and when you have actually perceived this individual who is sitting across the table demonstrating intolerance. And she goes, okay, I'm there. Great. You there? It's something you perceived live?

Yep.

What's the benefit to you of that? Well, how could there be a benefit to that? I didn't ask that. How did it benefit you? I can't see any. You answered that within half a second, which means you didn't really try to look. Let's go looking.

I don't know.

Again, you answered it within a second, which means you're defending it to try to make sure you don't find the answer to this. Let's look again. And she goes, I can't think of any. And I said, When did you first meet this person who was intolerant? He says, a number of years ago. I said, and what did it catalyze in you? Well, it made me an activist. Okay. And what did that initiate? How did that help you intellectually? I went back to school and got my doctorate degree to try to understand this conflict.

Great.

And what else happened socially? Well, I started rising in power and leadership. And how did it help you in finances? Well, I sold— I wrote a book and sold books, and now I'm paid to be a leader. And we started going around the wheel of life: spiritual, mental, career, financial, family, social, and physical. She explored in more depth her own faith, right?

Hmm.

And then also some of their faith so that she was learning about it. So she grew in all these areas. And as I was coming up with that, I said, so you gained these insights, these drives, these experiences as a result of his action? She goes, well, in spite of it. I said, you sure it's not also because of it? If it had never happened, what would you be doing? I'd be a mother with kids and never would have done that. I said, okay, now are you a real leader? Were you really leading somebody towards a resolution or are you just a leader of people that are angry and you've got a following around it and you're really not intending to dissolve it? Because then you annihilated your own reason for existence. Are you really a leader of resolution or are you a leader just of people upset and being an ideologue promoting an ideal and using a condemnation to keep a business going? I made her really stop and reflect on that. And she looked at that and she goes, I mean, you wouldn't have your career, you wouldn't have your life, you wouldn't have your position, you wouldn't have your wealth, you wouldn't have these things if it wasn't for this man's intolerance. So what's your real intention here? And she really got humbled by that. And she stopped and she said, that's a great question. And right now, that's really Something I'm having to soul search on. I said, because if you really had an intention to get a resolution, you'd be having resolution. But if you're intending to build your following and be known and get famous for being, supporting a particular ideology that's polarized and upset and angry, then you're accomplishing that because that's what the evidence is showing. And she stopped. I said, it sounds like you found something to give yourself notoriety and prestige and, Acknowledgement and income. You've done an amazing job. Congratulate you. I'm not judging you if that's the case, but you want to be honest about what your motive is. And she soul searched and then she started crying. And then she realized she would've been a mother with kids in an average life if it wasn't for the man that was intolerant. And then I said, are you sure that's absolute evil? Are you sure it's not a gift to your life and to your family's life and to millions of people? I mean, sometimes the very opposition is what, you know, as Rumi says, we know something by its opposite. You sure that we didn't become empowered because of that dynamic? It's the challenges that empower us, not the support. The supportive people make us juveniley dependent. The challenging people make us precocious independent. You became precociously independent as a result of this. She did. She started crying. She went to the bathroom to do her makeup over. When she went to the bathroom, the whole room was in a different state. And the guy that she was talking about came up to me and he says to me, he said, Dr. Demartini, that was really an extraordinary morning. I learned unbelievable amount from that conversation, and I could swear you were talking to me the whole time. And I could swear that that lady was talking about me. I said, she was. You were the one she thought was absolutely evil. She says, well, I thought she was absolutely evil, but right now I don't feel that way. She's a human being, and you helped navigate through her personas and masks and got her down to her core. And there she was, this M&M there without the shell. And I felt the same way, and that my defenses went down, her defenses went down while we were doing this dialogue. She came back and they had a dialogue and a conversation that was really quite profound. And she realized that this absolute evil was an absolute moral positioning as a result of the amygdala's defense mechanism of incomplete information. And it was an entropic thing that was decaying their objective that they were claiming. And when she got through, that dynamic changed that day. The next time I came to Joburg, she has a big radio show throughout Israel and all over the place. I went there to meet with her. It was a security system because they come sometimes and bomb the place, etc. And I went in and did a show, and this lady demonstrated the most amazing authenticity, integrity, and openness about what she discovered about herself. And she said that, I had to have the courage to lose the followers to fulfill my aim, because I was more trying to please and not undermine what people were angry about and support their thing and justify their anger instead of actually resolve the issue. And she openly, on a major network, shared her humbling experience. Experience of what she thought was absolute evil and how important it was to be able to walk in the moccasins of another individual and own what you see in them if you want to have a dialogue and start dialogue and making a transformation from a debate to a dialectic to eventually a love. What was interesting is the very gentleman that she was condemning, she didn't know, was Israeli. And he was in the tank division and he was driving a tank and his superior officer told him to run over a family, so he had to squash a family of Palestinians. When he did, he defected, got out of the tank, walked away and defected and didn't mind court-martialing and didn't care. He just said, I'm not doing this. This is not humane. And then he went over to the other side and defended it. And they found out that they came from similar locations in Israel. So there was more common than they first thought. Really quite interesting.

I'm curious, and maybe like 60 seconds, which is definitely not enough time to— if you were going to look at all of that and always thought through the lens of values, where does it come into play?

When you're willing to walk a path of authenticity and live congruently with your own highest values, you don't subordinate to outer authorities' injected values of moralities of hypocrisy. You give yourself permission to be an unborrowed visionary, walking with objective reason as a guide instead of a subjective bias as a force. And it's prioritizing your life. People that live by priority are more grateful for life, more inspired by life, are able to see both sides of life simultaneously. That's been proven. It's been written about for over a century. And it works. Prioritize your life.

That's a wonderful way. That's such a great bow to put on this episode. Um, 2, 2 quick questions. If we're to do a mental experiment, um, like a little thought experiment, if you could go back to that 18-year-old John Demartini and maybe in your current state, time and space, send a 30-second voice memo to maybe even on the day you set sail, you know, as a global teacher. Um, I'm curious. I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot. What would, what would be included?

I would just say you're on track. You're following— just keep following your mission, man.

I love it. Um, one of my favorite questions— I'm not a big small talk, uh, person. Um, You know, when I'm talking to people, I always want to know what's their passions, what's their projects, you know, what's lighting them up. And this podcast really came out of love of learning and our listeners, that's— they just love to learn. The question I always ask guests at the end is a simple one. What is one thing that you're currently learning that's lighting you up? that you're studying that you have that has you particularly excited? Because I know there's a whole—

There's more than one.

Maybe you could just share one.

The one that there is in the brain, there is glutamate and GABA as the 2 primary neurotransmitters. One's a facilitative, one's an inhibitive. One depolarizes, one hyperpolarizes. the neurolemma or the membranes of the nerves. And the excitation and inhibition or facilitation inhibition ratios always strive for homeostasis and balance. And whenever there's an imbalance in those, we have psychological disturbances and bipolar conditions, schizophrenia, dissociative, all kinds of labels. Whenever those are brought into balance, we have stability. So I have been devouring the neurochemistry, the neurophysics, the neurophysiology, the electronics, the entanglement, the photonics, anything that might expedite the process of intuitive homeostasis, the negative feedback systems in the brain. That's what I'm working on right now. How do I maximize the efficiency of maintaining homeostasis inside the brain? Using neurology at its, at its cutting edge.

I love it. Yeah, goosebumps. I call them some truth bumps. Actually, for the parents, uh, I— we have 2 little ones, but, uh, is— does it— any advice for parents who are listening to the— this episode on maybe an idea or an insight that they could take and apply with their With their children, or if they're not a parent, maybe the children in their life.

Do I have time for a quick story?

Quick story, yes.

I was in Brisbane, Australia. I was doing a program on attention deficit, an evening program for 2 hours. And a man comes up to me and he said, Dr. Demartini, I've got a real problem. And he pulls out a letter from his 14-year-old son's school saying that your son is not worthy of being in this school, we're letting him go. He cannot learn from this school anymore. He's just not engaged and we don't want to have to— the amount of work that's involved in engaging him is too high. And so he's feeling like a failure because of the injected values of what society thinks. He's feeling like, what's best for his child? I want him to learn and I want him to be intelligent. I don't want him to be a drug addict on the streets. He had all these phobias coming up for his mind about being a bad father and what would happen to his son. So I turned to his son. I said, what do you do every single day that nobody has to remind you to do, that you absolutely love doing, that you can't wait to do, and you get up in the morning and spontaneously act on it, that you love learning? He said, cars. I said, you know a lot about cars? He said, I do. I said, you could rattle off A name of almost any car? He says, yep. You know the engines?

Yep.

You know when they were built?

Yep.

I said, and I went through the Value Determination, if I walked into your room, would I see some sort of reference to cars? He says, I got model cars, posters of cars, magazines of cars, books on cars, and car parts sitting in my room. And do you spend most of your day doing that? Every minute I have a chance. And his father said, that's all he does. I can't get him to do his homework. I can't get him to fit into being a drone in society in the average school. And so he spends his time there. He fills his space there. What energizes him is cars. Whenever he gets money, he buys something to do with cars.

Mm-hmm.

What's organized is all the car things. Everything's organized and clean in his room. Where is discipline? Cars. And I went through the Value Determination and it was absolutely clean and clear on cars. And I said, the greatest thing that's happening in your son's life is they're kicking him out of school because he's not destined for that path. And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, do you live in a country or in the city or suburbs? He says, well, I live Close enough to a city. Is there any great car dealers? What's the finest car dealer, the most advanced car dealership that's there? That's the fancy, most exotic, amazing cars. And the kids like going, yes, somebody understands me. And he says, well, I don't know. And the kid rattled it off. Dun-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. I said, go and see if you can go to that and tell them about your son's absolute dream about Being in the car industry. Let them ask him questions about cars. Let him blow your son's mind, blow their mind of what he knows, and see if you can't get a job, no matter how small it is, cleaning, sweeping, or whatever in a car dealership. And I'll be willing to bet he's selling cars within a short period of time. I'll bet you that he actually has ownership of that car dealership before you know it, and he's gonna be a millionaire. And 5 years later, that's what, that's what was happening. 19.

Beautiful story.

Because he found his gift, as Marilyn Wilhelm said, and he found what he spontaneously loves to feed his mind. And so often, if we don't link our topics in school to that, they're disengaged and they're going to go drink, party, drugs, sex, whatever it is that the amygdala does to do to survive that. But if they can see the relationship between what they must learn to what they love learning, they'll be engaged. But in this case, I recommended just going and doing it and not being sidetracked by the typical school system, because you're going to be a drone when you get out through instead of being a master.

Dr. John Demartini, thank you so much for being on our show. This was the longest episode we've done in almost 500 episodes. It was a real Thank you for your time and talent. How can people go deeper in your work? How can they stay connected? How can they learn more?

They can simply go to drdemartini.com and go do the Value Determination process on there. They can read the book you mentioned, The Values Factor, and take advantage of what's there. I do programs on training people on how to do that, on how to access it so they can enhance the potential that we all have that's dormant in most people. Because instead of being second at being somebody else, it's time to be first at being you. You don't need to live in the shadows of anyone. You can stand on the shoulders of giants.

Absolutely. Um, we'll put all the links, uh, to Dr. Demartini's, uh, that he mentioned on the notes, uh, jimkwik.com/notes. And just remember, quick brain, listen, like, just take a pause first for yourself and, and feel this. The distance between who you are and who you can be could be also measured in the speed at which you could learn and you could apply. And, Dr. Demartini was very generous and just handed you a master key of values, aligned learning to be able to collapse decades into a matter of days. And, if today's episode sparked an insight for you, please share. Don't let it fade. Teach it to someone within the next 24 hours. The act of sharing, as we talked about, helps wire it deeper in your brain and ripples wisdom more into the world. And that can never be a bad thing. You can find more insights like this on our YouTube channel. Join our 1.8 million subscribers there. If you want, take a screenshot where you're consuming this and tag both of us on social media and share with a friend who's ready to accelerate. And remember, reminder that knowledge alone is not power. Applied knowledge is power. That there's a version of yourself that's patiently waiting. And the goal is we show up every single day until we're introduced. So until next time, keep learning faster, keep growing smarter, and keep being brilliant.