5 Ways on How to Heal Your Emotional Pain & Past Wounds Feat. Les Brown

So grief, loss, betrayal, that level of pain, when that happens, you have spent so much of your life giving inspiration, energy, encouragement, belief to others, or at least doing your best to transfer that. When it happens to you, what do you do?

I'm glad you asked that question. The model that you have here is what I do. I believe in order for us to make it, we're going through, we're watching and witnessing the throes of a dying beast. When my mother, I've never seen anybody die before, but my mother was feeling her arms, you know, mama, you've done your best by us. Let go, Mama, let go. But our arms everywhere, we wanted her to stop moving arms like that. When humans die, sometimes people fight it, or like animals, you know, fight it. But there was a point where she stopped and we saw her looking in the distance. And I see death as a transformation, that we've, we've finished the course. And my goal is to die young, at an old age. You know, at 78, I realized that life is like a roll of toilet tissue. The closer you get to the head, the faster it runs out. And so I don't fear death. And because my goal is my brother, who he's a Vietnam veteran, he wanted to be in the room with us today, but he was a paratrooper. He was in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. He did two tours and he jumped out planes 176 times. And he's experiencing a lot of pain. Anybody that has something that's non addictive that can help alleviate that pain, I really appreciate it. But he asked me last night, leslie, when are you going to retire? And I brought him with me because his wife of 50 years and 6 months, we just buried her this past weekend. And I brought him with me during the break. I went back to the room, I saw how fragile he was. We were just five minutes apart. He went out first. I heard a slap and he started crying. And I said, what's going on? And they pulled me out, you know. But when I saw him, I realized how much of himself that he lost during the years he's been taking care of his wife as a caregiver. And I'm so glad I brought him. I wanted him to come here and meet people and be in a different environment rather than being in a house by himself. When you've been with somebody 50 years and six months, that snatches something out of him. And I went back during the lunch break and he turned to walk away with a friend of mine, with me. HB took him lunch from here. Thank you for that. I realized it's amazing how life is. Edward Alvey had a play called the Zoo Story, and he said, sometimes you have to go a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance, correctly. My brother And I, at 18, we were separated. He went to Vietnam. They wouldn't take me because we were twins, and I was the only oldest to take care. Mom adopted seven kids altogether. So I was there to take care of other brothers and sisters. That's the first time we've been separated, and here we are back together. I said, wesley, it's been four days. I come and knock on your door, and when you come to the door, I said, this is my brother. I said, we're back together again. I said, I don't want you to worry with it. People die within six months when they lose someone that they've been. Many caregivers die before the people they take care of. And he said to me, I'm going to be all right, Leslie. We're going to finish strong together. And so when I look at the work that you're doing, people have to have mental resiliency. They have to upgrade their skill set, and they have to create communities like the Genius Network of Collaborative Achievement Driven, supportive relationships. A lot of people intimidated by artificial intelligence. Well, I come from the era of rhythm and blues. Marvin Gaye and Tommy Terrell, and they had a song called Ain't Nothing like the Real Thing. Baby. Artificial intelligence has nothing on you because it doesn't have a heart. It doesn't have your experience. It doesn't have your ability to look at a situation and be able to allow a person to get a vision of themselves on the other side of whatever they are experiencing. You are irreplaceable. Why y' all looking at me like that?

Yeah, I think that's. That is very, very profound.

Yeah. And this work here, I'm meeting some very beautiful people. Any question anymore? You got. Do you all have any questions?

Who's got a question?

Don't everybody raise your hands at the same time.

I've got a few of them, so make sure he has a mic. Thank you.

Never seen a mic like that. Y' all gonna get sued up in here.

Once we do the fitness thing, we're gonna start adding bricks to them just for. They're gonna be like medicine balls and stuff. Hey, Les, thank you so much for sharing that.

I struggle with using humor when I speak. How did you get good at it.

And what advice would you give?

Don't struggle with that, laughter is a lubricant that allows us to handle and navigate our way through life. Don't struggle with that. I don't tell jokes, but people say that I'm funny. So you find things that you can use that will trigger laughter, and particularly if you're a presenter, because when you are, when you use humor strategically. Case in point, you know, ladies and gentlemen, how many of you know, people say money won't make you happy, but everybody want to find out for themselves. And I remember a time in my life I was so broke, I'd walk past the bank and tripped the alarm. And then I had a moment. I got a call. Leslie, my sister, Margaret Ann, are you sitting down? What's wrong with Mama? Margaret Ann, Mama's got breast cancer. She's got breast cancer? Yes, I'll be there tomorrow. Leslie, you don't have to do that. You just got elected for the third time. Listen to me. I promise her, if anything happened to her, I will be there. How many of you have somebody that you love that is anything ever happened to them that you would be there for them? Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to write this down. Earn, walk away money that I had a job in LA. I was making over $220,000 for two hours on a radio station, on CBS radio station. And I walked away. I left. They said, are you crazy?

Mm.

I said, my mama needs me and I'm gonna be there for her. But you notice the laughter before and how I came to that place. Write this down. Never make a point without a story and never tell a story without a point. So rather than doing the stuff like our friend, friends that we know in the industry that's pushing, getting planes and boats and making a lot of money, I said, you know, you want to be in a position if something happens to someone you love, that you can be there for them, that you can do more than just pray for them. Does that make sense? When I asked that question to the audience, and James is right about the power of questions, now I've created an opening in the presentation so that they now are participant in the story and the presentation that I'm creating because we're orchestrating an experience in this audience now, there are audiences inside of each audience, people who are going through some stuff. Some people need humor, some people need content. Some people need passion and energy. And so when we are talking to people who, separated by education, by the things they've gone through, that as presenters, we have to create a presentation that will allow us to make that audience, those audiences inside of the audience, one audience, by listening to the listening of the audience and then using your stories strategically so that your story becomes their story and you create an experience where you take them to a place in themselves where they can't go by themselves. That's what I'm doing now at this stage of my life, because there's no success without successors training speakers on how to take their life, their story, their skills, their hunger to make a difference, to make their mark, to live a life that will outlive them and be able to make a difference in people's lives, to promote themselves and knowledge in their companies.

You know, to speak to, you could probably articulate this, which you're already doing pretty well, is that my version of this is somewhere along the way I was reading so many books and trying to figure out how to learn more effectively. Like how does one accelerate learning? And so for years I would share with you, you know, my service business clients. Early on when I went from dead broke carpet cleaner to learning how to make that business work, then taking, wow, I figured out a bunch of things that work and now how do I share them with other people? And I'm definitely afraid of speaking, so I don't want to go speak, you know, and then I would like force myself to be in situations where I had to present, although I was a nervous wreck. And then I started going to Toastmasters and that was incredibly beneficial. And then it dawned on me, like, wow, I'm learning this stuff so much quicker because I'm now putting myself in a position to have to teach other people. So I would then, you know, later share three ways to learn something. You learn through the school of hard knocks. You just don't ask for directions. You know, before gps, you know, that whole, there was that whole stereotype of men never ask for direction sort of thing. You know, you just bumble your way through life, you figure it out, you'll learn stuff, but you're going to fail a lot. It's going to be painful. So that's one way to learn. Second way to learn is you learn through the experiences of other people. You read the books, go to their seminars, buy their courses, learn, get educated. Not education in school, but education out of school.

Right?

The real life education. And that's a more effective way to learn. That's why I read a lot of books. That's why I've gone to a lot of seminars. That's why I'VE hired a lot of people. So then the third way to learn, which is the most, you know, accelerated, fastest way, is you put yourself, you start teaching other people because then you have to integrate it at a whole nother level. Yeah, totally. Well, you know, thank you. Several people have commented on the recycle pain. You know, recycle pain is a good phrase. Curious, what's the definition of recycle pain, which I'll ask you to maybe go elaborate a little bit more on that. Brenny wrote recycle pain trigger that takes you to a dark place time and time again. I want to just speak to the part about pain because I look at many things through the lens of addiction and I believe addiction is a solution to pain. A war on drugs is like a war on addicts. It's the wrong war. Drugs are actually the solution to the pain. Not a good solution. It's a solution that could kill you. It could cause a lot of wreckage. But when I was a drug addict, when I was dealing with sexual addiction, which is really an intimacy disorder, when I use the term sex addiction, that immediately conjures up all kinds of perspective. If anyone wants, I interviewed the top sex addiction doctor in the world a decade ago, Pat Carnes. You can type in my name and sex addiction in the YouTube. You can watch the hour and 45 minute video if you want a deep dive on that. But it's all about pain. And so people will eat the pain away, gamble the pain away. Look at the Internet. Fuck the pain away. There's all kinds of different ways that people deal with pain. And when you go through a breakup, you can really feel some deep wounding. And it's amazing where your mind can take you. And of course, I only can speak for where my mind has taken me. And my friend Guy Wench, he actually did a great talk on TED on breakups. And he talked about as do you, where we can. It's almost like you start experiencing very similar signs that someone that's going through withdrawals of addiction go through. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So can you speak to recycled pain and maybe define what that is? Because when you're in it, and I know Some people here are. They're in the middle of their own experience of pain. And sometimes it feels like it's never going to go away and you become suicidal or you become just very depressed and you can't eat. So speak to that and let's look at this. What is this pain? And then we'll go into dealing with it.

Yeah, so that's a great question. Recycled pain, in the context that I'm using it is after a breakup, you might think that it is this person or the infidelity or the rejection, and the pain is so big or the suffering is so big. But when you actually, when I look at the people who I've worked with at breakup boot camp, and we peel back the layers, we see that it's not just about the ex. Sure, there is the missing. There's a relationship that fell apart. There's that. But then there's all the pain that compounded from all the heartbreaks before. Right. Like, for myself, mine was recycled pain. Because my first heartbreak was the one I had with my father of never feeling like I was enough, of always trying to earn his love, of trying to be like, pick me, prioritize me, you know, instead of work and me kind of developing this addiction towards the emotional experience of chasing unavailability. Right. And so it's important that we understand what is the root of the pain. What is that recycled pain that's repeating? Because it's only then we can actually start to shift the patterns. I talk about this in my book. And why do we choose people who can wound us in a very similar way? Right. Because it can be confusing. When you're dating relationships, it could look like you're dating very different people. But I really encourage people. If you're not happy with the relationship outcomes you have, just take a inventory of the last three people you had a romantic connection with and write down what are the five top feelings that you felt in this? And they could be, you know, from joyful to anxious. And then look at what is a pattern, because there's likely an emotional experience that's repeating, although the person looks very different on the outside. So why is this? And I talk about the chemistry compass because people after a breakup or feeling rejected, they have a tendency to think that they are broken. I hear this all the time. The rug has been ripped out from underneath me. I feel like I'm broken. And when we look at it, you're not broken. Your chemistry compass might be broken. And your chemistry compass is your internal GPS that is pointing you into the direction of who you're drawn to and who you're repulsed by. And this is determined at a very young age. There's something called attractions of deprivation. It's also in the psychology world called repetition compulsion. And this is a human being's tendency to choose people on a subconscious level. That can wound us in a very similar way to how we're wounded as children. Our psyche tries to recreate the scenario of the crime in an attempt to change its ending. And so we don't know this. And I know for myself, right? You know, in my early 20s, I only dated DJs and club owners. In my 30s, I then started dating just tech CEOs. And I was like, oh, no, no. Totally different. There's no pattern here. But if I looked at the emotional experience, climbing for their time, hot and cold, sometimes they'd give me a little breadcrumb of attention, sometimes they didn't. The emotional experience with my dad, the dj, the tech CEO, exactly the same anxiety. Always trying to prove my worthiness, trying to be enough, trying to edit myself. And so until I was able to recognize that I didn't have a starting point to actually creating change in myself, that would actually set up a different future for myself.

Yeah, that's so good. And the way you describe it in the book about. So who were more fun, the tech CEOs or the DJs? If you just had to go back.

Tech CEO is probably better because DJs. I was just always trying to buy them a shot so they would pick me, right?

Exactly, exactly.

All right, so I am Nick Janicki. This is Lyle Maxon. Our Brangelina name is Lick Jannison. If you look at our Instagram, it's not a real thing. Don't try to look it up. But how virtual reality will change the world is our talk. We're very passionate about this subject. And as Joe said, it's very much like stepping into the movie. And this is thrilling. There are actually Emmy award winning VR movies now, and there's one called Wolves in the Walls. And this is an audio, visual and kinesthetic experience with full immersion. And what you're doing is you're basically looking through a little girl's eyes as her imaginary friend. So you're looking at her fears, her tribulations, and how she overcomes these via her heroes Journey. There you go. Oh, still me. So this is a good slide to take a picture of. This is a whole nother 10 minute talk, which is the science of what's happening in VR. But the key point I want to get across here is learners are three to four times more focused, more emotionally connected, they train faster, and they are more confident to apply their skills.

So we believe that VR is the greatest evolution of storytelling since the written word. And with this comes the responsibility to uphold this technology ethically for the experience creation machines that it is. So really the big focus of this talk is to move you from fear to inspiration. And, you know, ultimately we look at society and where technology is going and we see the overconsumption, we see the, the privacy infringements, we see the escapism and the addiction, but ultimately, and, you know, eventually leading to what we see as the AI overlord takeover.

Right.

We're buying new phones every single year. What is this all leading to? And we think that this could actually improve human life and access places within our highest selves. Yep.

So what is the backbone of this virtual revolution? So this really started in the 1970s. You had Pong, Pac man, penny arcades. I'm old enough to remember, certainly 12 teenagers packed into a room doing quarter arcades. But it has progressed significantly in the last 50 years. Yeah.

And now it's become one of the world's largest phenomenas. So a great example is 100 million viewers of a single esports tournament. And for those of you who do not know, esports is electronic sports. It's professional video game players. So we're seeing these. And, oh, a good thing to mention too is that this year in 2020, the Super bowl had 98 million viewers. So there's actually a single esports tournament that had more viewers in the Super Bowl. So we're seeing packed stadiums, sold out, fans screaming and cheering for their favorite computer game players. Just so you know too, this is one game of probably 20 games that have these massive tournaments competing for millions of dollars in cash prizes and a giant World cup trophy.

Mr. Lyle, there's a lot of hormones in that room for sure. How does gaming compare to all the other entertainment industries? 2020 annual revenue, music industry was 23 billion. All of US sports combined, $75 billion for all US sports. You had 81 billion for movies. And drumroll, please. Video game industry blows them away at $175 billion.

So clearly. So the big thing is this isn't just about video games. What was classically defined as a video game, an arcade, a console, a PC game, is now any immersive interactive experience. So what we saw during the pandemic was this explosion of virtual concerts where popular games like Fortnite and Roblox were actually featuring celebrities like Ariana Grande, who actually transformed into a virtual avatar of herself to perform in front of millions of fans. And specifically for her, this concert that she did recently in Fortnite broke the world record with 78 million viewers of her virtual concert. Another great example is what we're all talking about. NFTs and the virtual land purchase, similar to the Cleater phenomena. And we're seeing people like Snoop Dogg literally transfer his entire mansion and his actual property into a virtual world to host talks, conferences and concerts.

I think Joe, Jason and Jennifer were inspired by Snoop Dogg. So I'm waiting until they're all up here on stage with Blunts. We'll just see how this progresses. But what's going on here? Right, so Microsoft bought Activision in January 2022 for a shocking $68.7 billion. That's their biggest historical purchase. And if you're not familiar, Activision is the largest gaming company in the world. Facebook announced Meta and pledges 10 billion a year towards immersive technologies. They're onboarding 10,000 employees worldwide. So there's a race, a sprint to create the Metaverse. So the Metaverse is basically a promise of a VR space in which players can connect with computer generated environments and other players across multiple platforms. So that definition is broadening, but you can kind of see a picture there. You can take your sneakers into the next Metaverse.

Yeah. And the medium to do this, right now people are doing it on PCs and consoles. Fortnite, for instance, is a Metaverse style game. But the next medium is of course a virtual reality headset. Here is the quest 2, which is the most popular, cheapest and best headset around. So really we wanted to just highlight what are some positive examples of how this technology is being used. What I like to call benevolent technology. So I wanted to start with Akili. Akili Interactive made history by actually having the first FDA approved video game. So what this means is that kids were able to get off of their Adderall and Ritalin and transfer to a cell phone game that they play twice a week to create new neuro synapses and actually increase their focus. It's amazing that we're talking about ADHD and everything fits so in line. And then this opened up the floodgates to applied VR. This happened a few months ago and it is an FDA approved VR experience specific to pain management. So you actually use the head tracking of the app and you focus on different parts of the environment and it relieves you of your pain, takes you away from your pain body and is now a prescribable experience. What was mentioned in the intro, this is an experience that I'm responsible for producing and publishing called Soundself. It actually uses vocal intonations and so as you're vocalizing into the headset, it creates a biofeedback loop that actually creates theta and gamma brainwaves. So you basically become an Expert Meditator in 10 minutes. Another great example is for training and enterprise. What I love to talk about is this incredible use case where surgeons are actually training with VR headsets and and have a 230% increase in effectiveness versus their standard surgeon training.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

That's right. And this is all about, for me, empathy generation. So the ability to fully step into someone else's shoes. And to Joe's point, in 2014 I created something called the Art of Courage Museum, which was a physical museum in Tempe. And it's part of one of the many nonprofits I'm a part of. This was a physical learning center and featured 30 paintings by spiritual practitioners of Falun Dafa whom are currently being persecuted by the ccp. And basically we would take kids there, we'd educate them, they learn how to meditate, they'd learn about principles like truthfulness, compassion, forbearance or Jin Shanren in Chinese. And I created this beautiful thing with one developer which was this entire recreation of a Tang style village. And you would literally go into this and walk into the paintings and experience each painting in full immersion. So what we're finding is this is a great way to share causes. VR is an amazing way to really get people empathetic about a cause we believe. Well, Joel said don't. No one cares what you believe. So what we see is happening is gamification. And full immersion is coming to all industries and will absolutely affect every single aspect of our daily lives. This industry is moving very, very fast and this can be overwhelming. And so what we're here to do is we want to rewrite our relationship with technology and create a positive relationship with ourselves and humanity at large. So now that we've gone through this you know that there's options for adhd, there's options for chronic pain, there's options for education. It's just about how we consciously apply the solution. So we think you should get a VR headset. You should start experiencing the vast benefits of immersion. And what will you create in VR to uplift the human spirit?

I turned around and looked back here because I have one of them somewhere.

That I don't even know if it's.

On this wall behind me. I have one of these images from Gaping boy that says looking for love in all the wrong places, which is what I think addiction is. You know, people are looking for love, but they're looking for it in ways that are self destructive and hurtful and things like that. And that's one of my concerns right now with the pandemic is that when you have I mentioned this earlier today, when there's stress or there's recessions or any sort of crisis, wars, anything that causes a global stress or a community stress or a family stress, vices increase, people drink, they do drugs, they look for escapism. And in a lot of ways, you know, my friend Gabor Mate says, you know, with addicts the question is not why the addiction but why the pain. And the more pain people are going through, there's ways that they can choose to cope with it that could heal that pain or, you know, reduce it or eliminate it, and others that just not only can massively increase it for them, but they can, you know, take that and start, you know, impacting hurting others. How do you deal with emotional pain and stress and angst? Well, that's a great question. For me, it's really trying to change my thinking. So when I start to have negative thoughts, what I try to do is reverse those thoughts and try to make them positive and focus on love as a way to, you know, get away from my ego, get as close to humility as possible and gratitude and also being thankful for what I have. And so that kind of helps me to repurpose my feelings. Because your feelings are a result of your thinking and your thoughts. And then after you can control your thoughts and control your feelings and then you can basically control your actions and then, you know, you don't do something stupid or say something stupid. Yeah. So basically it's understanding that as a way to, you know, control my own way of living and control my own way of doing things, I start with the thinking first and then try to control my thoughts and as a result my feelings as a result of the consequences. Let Me ask you about just using the word control. I mean, being in the prison system and just a lot of the people that you've worked with, you've been in so many situations where you see the consequences of people that have lost control and start making really bad decisions that have gotten themselves in a lot of trouble and hurt other people, in many cases killed other people. So have you. There are times where you've, like, completely lost control or, you know, you're getting close to it. And what do you actually do when you reach out for help versus if it feels like it's beyond your capabilities? The reason I asked that question is that when things get really scary for some people, they feel like this is so beyond me, I don't know what to do. And I think there's, you know, a whole planet dealing with that right now. I wanted to just ask you about, how do you reach out for help? Yeah, I think that. I tell you, the thing that's changed my life that's helped me so much is reading.

Reading and learning.

And Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that caused it.

Right.

So your ability to be able to change your thinking in a very conscious state, there's the consciousness and there's the unconsciousness. And so we are repeating bad habits based on unconscious behavior and unconscious thinking. In order to be able to change that, you have to be conscious of that, or you have to have a new program, design a new program for yourself that allows you to think differently. And so it's. It really is about. It really is about awareness and about being conscious of what negativity does and anger does. You know, anger and negativity destroys. Whatever you put out comes back. You know, that's the natural law. So if you understand that and you're aware of that now, you have at least some ability to be able to replace that with something that's positive or something that's spiritual or focusing on, again, looking at the glass half full as opposed to half empty. Yeah, yeah. Very good.

Very good.

So let's talk about your journey of what you needed to discover early on when you were having the most challenges. Talk about to whatever degree you'd like to, because I'd love to know what was the. You said a book. So you read a book, right? And I often refer to dominoes in my life. You know, who are the first dominoes? It could be a. It could be a person, it could be an experience. It could be something that changed the trajectory of your life in a positive or negative Way, I mean, when I was raped and molested as a kid and then paid money not to say anything, that was a domino, but it was very negative domino. And it caused me to internalize tremendous shame. And I went down a path which ultimately addiction was one of my many coping mechanisms to try to deal with the shame and the embarrassment and all the different ways that my young brain interpreted that. And then there's very positive dominoes that have completely pulled me out of these holes and these traps that I would get myself into in life. So I'd love to hear what are the biggest things that were challenging you, how you went through them. And then how did you end up turning this into a very successful big business that you have now that is teaching other people to do this? I mean, you found formula, you're a convert of your own system, and then you started selling that system others, which actually is kind of what I did when I was like a dead broke carpet cleaner. I figured out how to make that business work. Then I taught thousands of service businesses. That was my early days in teaching and helping people, which I never, in my worst states, I never thought I'd do interviews, write books, do speeches. I mean, I was a shy, introverted, scared human just trying to bumble my way through life. I still bumble my way through life. I just do maybe a little bit more strategically once in a while, you know what I mean? But I honestly do think most humans, no matter how successful they are, status, fame, teams, celebrity, everyday people, most humans wake up and just bumble their way through life. And some do it better than others.

Yeah, I agree. I think I went through similar experience, experience when I was a young child. And I think when you experience trauma as a young child, you learn how not to feel and you learn how to escape your emotions. And so that's what I was doing with food and then later with men when I was dating. And when I read that book and it really explained like that I was just trying to escape who I was and trying to escape my own self. It kind of put me on this trajectory of like, why, why do I want to escape who I am? Like, what is it? And I, what I uncovered is that I just had so much self loathing, like because of the experiences that I'd had as a child and what I had made that mean in my own mind. And what I realized as I kind of read all these books and did all the studying and even some of the therapy that I did helped me understand like that I could decide and I Know, it seems so obvious now, but I could decide how to think and feel about my, myself. And nobody who had abused me or no circumstance could deny me that power. And I think that's the most powerful thing we have as humans is the decision to decide what to think and most specifically what to think about our own selves. And so when I started, you know, with the weight loss, what it was really was I learned to experience an emotion instead of eating, which sounds so basic, but people don't. A lot of the clients that come to me that eat emotionally, I tell them, I'm like, you don't have an overeating problem, you have an under feeling problem. And it's same with addiction because I later went through it with alcohol, right? I would look at a glass of alcohol and I would say to myself, you can either drink that and escape what's real, or you can experience what's real in this moment. And what I realized, this was so profound with the, the drinking that I realized I'm like, if I don't let myself feel what's real about my life right now, what's true in terms of my emotional life, I'm never going to change because I'm never going to know how bad it is because I'm always drinking, covering it up. And it was like this momentary thing where I just decided, I'm going to live my own truth now. And so I started just experiencing what it was like to be me. And it was terrible. And instead of drinking, I decided to stop, solve for that. And that's when I really dove into like understanding what it was the alcohol was doing to my brain, why I wanted it so much, what, what was going on with me emotionally. And I started asking myself the question, like, what would my life have to be like so I would never be tempted to escape it. And that's exactly what happened. I got to the point where I didn't ever want to drink because I didn't want to miss out on my life.

I love that frame.

That's really good.

And when you said, because you just moment ago you said, I looked at my life and it was terrible. You weren't in a state where you're just like, this is. I don't like any of this.

Yes, but.

And that's why I'm trying to numb with food or alcohol or whatever, which I think is so much of human existence. And what you said earlier about self loathing, there's three experiences that a human could have. You're either communicating with someone where you're just talking.

Right.

You're connecting with them. You're on the same wavelength. You're dancing together and you're enjoying it or you're trying to escape. And those are the three experiences that I see people go through. And here's what I've thought a lot.

Communicating, connecting or escaping.

Exactly, exactly. But here's the thing. It's not just doing that with other people, it's with yourself. So you're either just talking in your own head, you're feeling connected to life, you're feeling engaged. You know, the greatest form would be what's called, you know, flow.

Yeah.

And then. Or you're just trying to escape. And so trying to escape could be through addictive behaviors, you know, porn, Internet work, eating, social media.

Yeah, yeah.

Gaming. Exactly, exactly. And so when you're self, when you're in a state of self loathing, you're trying to escape your own yourself 100%.

Because you hate you.

Exactly, yeah. And how, how hard is it to have a relationship with anyone if you can't even have one with yourself? Or you don't like the vessel.

Oh my gosh. I deal with it all day with my clients. All day. They will start talking to themselves in front of me. I'm so stupid. I can't do anything right. I'm terrible person. I'm not worthy. They don't even know. They start saying it out loud and I repeat it back to them and they don't even recognize it's such rhetoric that's just been playing in their brain. They don't even even realize that's what they're telling themselves. I'm like, I would want to escape that too. Right. And that was me for sure.

So, okay, so then let's go to what was the domino? What was the big thing that made the difference? It was the book.

But then, and like really understanding there was a big domino where I understood that I could feel instead of act out my feelings. That was like profound. And. And that really changed my whole life. Being able to be present with myself.

Yeah.

And it sounds so basic, but it's everything. Being present with what's real. And like for me it was like right now I feel shame and that's just what I feel right now. And just being able to not escape it, not run away from it, but just be present with that emotion was and is, I think one of the most powerful things any human can learn. Because here's how that translated into my success too is what I realized is that emotions are really actually Harmless if you don't act them out, right? And I was like trying to think, like, what is the most terrible emotion I could experience? And I was thinking it's probably either terror or humiliation, right? Those got to be some of the worst emotions that you can experience. But if you recognize that there isn't any emotion that you can't feel that you can like actually experience, then maybe nothing that you try to do is that scary. Because the worst that could happen if you set a huge goal and you don't achieve it or you fail is an emotion, right? And so that moment in time, it made me realize, like, I am going to have the biggest, most amazing life because I'm not afraid to feel. And that has been true for me because. Because I'm willing to experience anything.

That's great.

That's great.

Well, I mean, so it's one thing to talk about it that you're experiencing feelings on an intellectual level, there's another. And believe me, one of my biggest challenges has been to be able to not be in my head to actually feel feelings. And when you are put in a situation as a young kid, and I learned this from my friend Dr. Gaborn, if you're in a situation where you can't fight back, you can't run away, or you can't ask for help, then you repress, you suppress 100%. And when you suppress emotions, what he says either turn into a disease, like cancer, in some cases, autoimmune conditions or an addiction. And that's what people do to deal with those sort of situations. Because he had shared with me, what would you do in a situation? I was at a restaurant with him. He said, if I poured water on your head and started yelling at you right now, what would you do? And I said, well, I'd probably. He's like, what are some of the ways you could react or respond to this? I said, well, I could walk away. He goes, yeah, you could run away. He goes, what else could you do? I said, tell you to F off. And he's like, yeah, you can fight back. He goes, what else could you do? And I was like searching my brain for options. And here I was in a busy restaurant with this 70 year old Hungarian doctor. Not a huge guy, not threatening physically. I said, well, I guess just sit here while you pour water on my head and yell at me. He goes, well, no, you could ask for help. And it didn't even occur to me that you could ask for help. And I think a lot of humans are stuck in the Place where there's help available and resources, but for some reason they can't resource themselves. And so when people are really in dark places, there's something in their psyche. You know, it's, it's the, it's almost.

Like we were taught. Right. That there is no help. Right, right. That's how I felt for a long time. And I think that's when I finally did get some help, that I started becoming obsessed with getting help.

Yeah. And I think you're really, really good about that because a lot of, I think that's, I think ego's the biggest killer of all for people. How do you deal with pain? And the reason I bring this up is I went to SpaceX earlier in the year and we had a meeting with Elon Musk and he's a pretty amazing entrepreneur and he said someone asked him, how did you. You're running three different companies, Tesla and SolarCity and SpaceX. He said, I have a very high pain tolerance. And all entrepreneurs that are doing anything big, they endure such a suffering and most people are not aware of the depths of that emotional suffering, mental, you know, the public wants to attack you. You can simultaneously helping people while they're also trying to steal from you. I mean, how. What are your recommendations on enduring the parts that are endurable to get to the parts that are great? You know, I think the biggest thing is that what is the end of the day goal? Is it the, you know, the. That I know that I made the best efforts and I don't judge people per se for what they do wrong. You know, I don't know if your daddy or mommy locked you in the closet for 30 years or whatever the case is and they whipped you. Whatever the case is, that's not my problem. I try to find the best in everybody that I work with. I also, you know, it's a lesson learned every time that I have to endure the pain on how to make myself better. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to have to deal with this sooner or later. What can I learn from the lesson of what just happened? And then I also, it really makes me check my three criteria when I either work with a business or an individual. Number one, did I have enough knowledge for the subject matter or on the person or on the business? Did I have enough knowledge? Number two, did I surround the business or the, you know, the investment or whatever the case is with enough quality people? And number three, did I do it because I really wanted to be part of this? And do I love It. Because, you know, we can fail 10 times in something we love, and we're gonna work it out the 11th time. But you fail one time with something, you adjust. You didn't have your heart into it, you're gone.

Right.

And I keep going back to that checklist, and it prioritizes, you know, my next effort. How do you get out of success traps? Because for entrepreneurs, success traps are harder to get out of than failure traps. When things are good, but they're not great, or they have so. Because in your world right now, you are thrown deals continuously and you have to say, no, yes, but. Or getting yourself into a situation where it's like, you know, this is good, but it's not great. How do you cut it? It's purely time management, and it really is. You know, you gotta. You know, I look at it once a week or once a quarter or once a month, depends on what the topic is with my team. And I go, what is generating, you know, more cash and with the least amount of effort and time, and what are we having more fun at? Bottom line, that's it. And, you know, and then, you know, and then sometimes I look at things and I. It's kind of like the buyer's remorse or shopping. If I go and see something, I don't necessarily buy it right away. I leave. If I can't get that thing out of my mind, whether it's a car or whether it's a belt, I'll go back for it. But nine times out of 10, I forget all about it. Gotcha. You know, that's a good practice, too. It really is. Saves you from probably owning a bunch of stuff and spending money. It's kind of like going to the grocery store hungry. You don't want to do that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very bad at it.

Don't panic. No reason to get too concerned. No matter what you've heard here. I'm not Jesus. I mean, I just don't have his powers. He could turn water into wine, and the best I could do is turn it into pee. Plus, I've just made mistakes Jesus never made. I had two kids. Yeah. And one's now a teenager. But I know the moment he became an adolescent because we always play this game. Would you rather. And he was like, hey, dad, it used to be, would you rather, you know, be Batman or Spider Man? And I'm like, well, Batman's Ben Affleck. I think I'll just be Spider man at this point. But the other day he said, would you rather look at a girl's butt or her boobs. That tells me two things. Number one, he's becoming a man. And number two, I don't think he's discovered the vagina yet. Belongs way up there.

Yeah.

I mean, the conversations have changed. The other night, he's like, hey, dad, you have sex with mom every night. I was like, well, son, I certainly try. I didn't want to disappoint him. Yeah. But he has gone from like a sleep and romance terrorist to my very best wingman. Like, we'll go upstairs and he'll shut the door to my room. I don't know if that's what I'm about to do to his mom or if it's because of what he might be doing in his room that nobody wants to see.

Right.

I kind of miss the days of him being in middle school, though, because the first day he came home, he's like, hey, dad, the kids are swearing at school, and they're not even 18. I'm like, well, son, that's more of, like, a house rule than a universal law. He's like, well, I kind of need something. Can I have. And he pulls me aside, shuts the door, and says, h e double hockey sticks. I'm like, yeah, you say just like that. I think you'll be fine, buddy. But then the next day, he's like, hey, dad, that's just not enough. I need more. Can I say the dam word? I'm like, don't add an n to the end of it. And I think we're totally cool, bud. Right? But it was the third day that was really alarming when he came home, and he's like, hey, dad, what's a stupid cunt? And I was like, oh, I guess you never met mom's roommate from school, Bree, did you? But then I remembered Steve Simson said, oh, you can say it in London. It's totally cool. There's, you know. So I have another son who's just super confused about religion. And why wouldn't he be? He was born in Utah, so he's not sure if he's Mormon, goes to the Jewish school, and his dad looks like Jesus. I mean, every time I go to the school, people get really concerned. And I had to go the other day for parent teacher conferences where they said he's been misbehaving, and they thought it would be a good idea for me to spend more time with him. Turns out it was a horrible idea, and I'm a terrible influence.

Yeah.

I came home the other day, and he's like, hey, dad, are you hungry? And I'm like, oh, see, this is already working. Yeah, of course, yeah. What? He's like, oh, would you like a bowl of cream of some young guy? Now, he doesn't know that means a bowl of semen. He just knows it's funny. So I decide, well, I better find some appropriate kid jokes. But I go to the wrong place Google, because this is the only joke he remembers. Why did the chicken cross the basketball court? Because he heard the ref was blowing fouls.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

That means sucking. Okay, you guys don't get it, but most people do, so don't worry about it. It's good, it's good. I ask these kids inappropriate questions all the time, like, who do you love more, me or mom? And they're super diplomatic about it, like, we could never choose. I'm like, well, if I'm going to leave her ass, who are you going to live with? I found out this is definitely not me. Right? Say mom. Way too quickly. When I got married, my wife was like, hey, here's the deal. Like, we're not gonna spank our kids. I'm like, well, all growing up, I got my ass beat. And she's like, exactly. I was like, oh, touche. Yeah. So one day the kids are just misbehaving and she's like, you need to take care of your kids. Amazing that they're my kids when they're acting like assholes. They're her kids when they're doing something great, right? So I sit them down, I'm like, look, guys, mom says I can't spank you. So if you keep acting like this, I'm gonna have to beat your mother. She didn't even care. She was like, just chop me right here in the throat if we'll have him. Shut up. You know? Yeah. My son, he's just 14, and he's asking for help that I don't know how to help him with. Like, he says, hey, dad, will you help me text a girl? I'm like, I don't know what to text a 14 year old. But then in my head I thought, damn, I actually have friends that do. So I Had to make a rule. I had to make a rule. If I can take the girl's age and combine it with the guys and it sounds like a time of war, we can't be friends anymore. 1836? I don't think so. 1942, please. 1776. Their ass is going to jail. But I decided, you know, I've been married for 17 years and 15 very happy years of my life. So I'm like, you know what? I gotta be hip. I gotta start doing some of these things. So I decided I'm sext my wife. So, I mean, I'm a writer. So I'm like spending some real time on this. Talking about nibbling and caressing and pulling. Well, I'm like, maybe I'll pull that statement back. But after about 20 minutes, I finally hit send. I get a little bit nervous. I'm like, oh, I wonder what's going to happen. Is she going to send me a video? I'm like, nah, please, that ain't going to happen. Maybe a picture. That'd be awesome. But maybe she'll just say something that blows my mind. And I get a little nervous. But finally those three magical dots start to appear, like, oh, this is great. What's it gonna be? Spent a couple minutes, it's gonna be something good. Finally it comes through. K. No, that's it, just K. But hell, I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist. So I'm like, that's fine. I'll just drive home and I'll deliver the O if she can't type it in. But when I get there, she's like, kind of pissed off. And I'm like, oh, maybe this is role play. She's waiting for me at the door. I'm like, what's up? She's like, sometimes your sons have my phone, So you might as well go upstairs and get changed because they think we're all eating out tonight. Look, thanks for letting me share a little bit this with you. The reason why comedy is important to me is because of connection. From the time I was a little kid, my grandparents on my mom's side would gather the whole family around and I'd tell jokes. And I just saw that, the pleasure that that brought to them. They weren't worried about their problems in the past. They weren't concerned about what's going to happen in the future. In that moment, we were laughing about imperfection. The world suffers from perfectionism all the time feeling like we've got to be perfect, otherwise we're Unworthy or unlovable, and that's where so much pain is caused. And all of a sudden, I saw that release. And then my dad's side of the family, they would do the same thing. And it was the only common thread I had about both sides of my family. So I chose to start doing comedy because in the world of money, there's tons of guilt, there's tons of shame, and there's not enough courage for people to face their fears and their finances. So I figured if I could start bringing a little bit of comedy, maybe there'd be some healing, maybe we could have some advancement, because there's millions of people online getting educated, but there's billions getting entertained. What if we could kind of sneak in, create some laughter, build some connection, and make a big difference?

And there may be some value in pain in and of itself. I'm reading a book by a science writer who is a masochist, and she's going really deep in dopamine signaling and saying, look, endurance athletes pain, belly dancers pain. People who do cold therapy pain, people who do CrossFit pain.

She's like, it's doing something to allow.

Us to experience pleasure. Do you think that's part of this whole thing? Dopamine? Absolutely, for sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, what dopamine but pain? Like, we need to feel pain to reset our dopamine or something like that? I think so. I write about this in the book. I have a friend who was a dominatrix that actually helped in addiction recovery to get out of that sort of place. And if you knew her life, she was raped and abused. And one of the things that I, you know, I had a conversation with her recently about people that will, you know, want pain afflicted in a sexual. First off, their arousal template, which causes them to be attracted to whatever they're into sexually, can usually be traced to one of their first early sexual experiences. And if there was pain or roughness attached to it, but it was arousing, then the dopamine is caused by that. Some people, the only way they feel like cutters. One of my first jobs, when I went to college and I got sober from being a drug addict because my history with drug addiction, when I was 18 years old, in my worst state, I weighed 105 pounds from freebasing cocaine. And when you're 18 years old, you're 5 10, and you're male, 105 pounds is thin as rail. I mean, I got to a point where I was nearly my average weight around that time was £120. But there was one week where I ate hardly anything. And so I literally got as low as 105 pounds. And so, you know, I was a total mess. And I ended up moving out of Arizona to remove myself from even having access to where I could get the drugs, or I never would have been able to get sober. I would have killed myself. And so I lived in a trailer for a couple of years, a mobile home with my father, and I got some sober in the first six months. I was taking Advil and Tylenol every day just to deal with the freaking headaches of withdrawals because I didn't have the money to go to treatment. And then ended up getting a job at a health club, and I started selling health club memberships. That was my first introduction to really, like, learning how to do sales as an adult, even though I sold newspaper subscriptions as a kid. And I was a pretty good drug dealer when I was a drug addict. How does it go to cutting, though? I'm not getting well. So while I was working at this gym, this guy that ran a mental hospital, he actually offered me a job. And this was in New Mexico as a mental health tech at this mental. And so I would go there, and there was the adult ward, and there was the adolescent ward, and there were cutters that would go to this facility, and I would talk with them. And, like, it was the only way that they could feel. Like they were so numb that the pain, you know. And I believe this is biochemical. It's dopamine.

Right.

But, like, not feeling anything is a terrible place to be in. And even, like, if you talk to people that are. They'll say, I'm addicted to getting tattoos. Is it you're addicted because you want tattoos on you, or is it the process of getting. I mean, and there's many different reasons people do this on. I'm not trying to pigeonhole anyone into. Do you have any tattoos?

No. Okay.

No.

So.

But the thing is cutters, though, it's. It's like part of it is they hating the vessel that. That they're living in, and they. You know, I'm not an expert on cutters. I can only speak to. You know, I've had lots of conversations with people that cutting has been one of their. One of the. The things they did. But a lot of it is just a feel. It's just a feel. So someone that's, you know, into rough sex or into, you know, if you like. Like, women that I've spoken with that have Been in abusive relationships, physical abuse, mental abuse. If you go, if you go back into their childhood. And I'm not saying you should, like, you only have these sort of conversations with someone that you really have deep rapport with and stuff. I'm not saying you go and start asking people about their sexual life. It's only, that's, you know, it's their comfort level, not yours. So the thing is, I've had numerous conversations where they describe what happened to them early on. And you'll see a lot of this arousal stems from abuse. And so with connection in the world, we live in a very disconnected world. I mean, we are more connected electronically than ever in human history, but we're more disconnected as tribal human creatures. And so part of the connection and to go to your, you know, question about, you develop your spidey senses, you start paying attention. I think if you've been, if you have put yourself in a situation where you've been betrayed, if you were to sit and think like, what were the early warning signs? What were the, you know, the metal detector, that's what I'm working on identifying. And I'll tell you, I write about this in the book. If you are a giver, you will be taken advantage of you. Are you becoming the more famous and wealthy you are, the more you'll be targeted, right? Oh yeah, you're a target for takers. I mean, they look for you, but at the same time, is that a reason not to be a giver? Is that a reason to put up walls and don't let anyone in? So it's about better boundarying yourself and it's also learning how to deal with intimidation. So you got to tell me in like three sentences, what do you do to have better boundaries? Part of it is don't walk into landmines. There are knowing land mines before you. You do anything business wise with someone, do a little research on them. Diligence. Yeah, I mean that was my fault for not doing enough. I should have called the people who weren't references. Yeah, I mean I could have found like I talk about Harvey McKay's, you know, 66, and this is before the Internet existed. He has all of these things. And I write about it in book, the book where it's all these things that you can collect and learn about a person in that process. I mean, when you're going out and just meeting people and saying hello and I mean like, look, it's, it's just part part of life. But when you're, if you're Going to get into a love relationship with someone, if you're going to get into a business relationship, if you're going to hire somebody, if you're going to get hired. I mean, research the person that if they don't have good references for the entrepreneurs that are out there. That whole saying, hire slow and fire fast. I mean, there's a lot to be said about that. The adrenal reset diet. What does that even mean? What does adrenal mean? What is that? Because I don't think the average person understands that.

Yeah, our body has little glands that control whether we're burning or storing, you know, quite simply. And a lot of our strategies to make us lose weight are strategies that make us more apt to store weight.

Right.

So I talk about how you can go out from storing and towards burning. And so it's a big global catastrophe that we're facing.

Yeah. Okay, so I've got a whole list of questions here that I'd like. I mean, we could talk for a week, but. So the rates of obesity are growing, like, dramatically. What are some of the latest projections of kind of where we're at?

You know, it's pretty terrifying stuff. One stat that I read recently showed that in the next little over a decade, we're looking at 2/3, 67% of people on the globe being overweight, obese, or morbidly obese. So globally, the numbers of deaths we're projecting. So go back to like 1800, all the wars all around the world since 1800. So World War I, World War II, to Vietnam, Korea, and not just our wars, but all the others. So all those casualties together, we're talking about more than that in the coming decade from complications of obesity. And we're talking about roughly ten times the cost of all those wars since 1800.

Why?

That's it. So the old model is people are lazy and they eat too much. That's what we're being taught and told. And it's so disconnected from reality, you know, to see the rates go up stratospherically in the course of a decade. So one thing we see is that animals, so chimps, when their food is controlled, they're getting obese, even on controlled diets. So it's not behavior and lifestyle. There's a collective number of factors that push us into this storage state. And our body is getting geared up for famine. You know, we have these mechanisms that allowed us to survive famine in the past, and now a whole lot of things push those buttons and we're storing all of our Food as fat.

Yeah, and you get right into it immediately. In the beginning of your book where you talk about stress, you talk about toxins, you talk about all of these other factors that I never really quite considered had that much of an impact on people's weight. I have a friend, I won't name his name, where he. And I've known him for probably 15 years and without changing his diet, when this guy would go through a breakup of a relationship or go through stressful situations, he would literally just gain weight and whenever things would. And he's like kind of a roller coaster sort of lifestyle, you know, I mean he would have lots of ups and downs and it was amazing. And I'm not talking just like 5 or 10 pounds. I mean he would literally fluctuate 30, 40 pounds and then things, he would start meditating and he would lose £20 and he would swear that he could not figure it out. But then he identified a few years ago that it was totally based on stress level. And so now one of his maintenance things is keeping himself not freaking, getting completely stressed out because if you're not sleeping, all these sort of things.

Way back when, stress meant danger and danger meant predators and predators would go after us when they had fewer food options. So that meant food scarcity. So stress equals famine to our bodies and famine means we prepare, we hold onto it. So his body was not under physical danger, but the mental emotional stress, which can be part of that for sure, that triggered the same thing that danger would. And his body went into a storage mode because of it.

And I'm not even sure where I first read this, but it's like people would make the analogy, well, we're so much safer and we got all these luxuries that we never had before. The difference though is it's just non stop, the interconnectivity. Whereas if you're chased by a lion hundreds of years ago, when you're done.

If you survive, you're bored for a while, you're safe.

Right, exactly. Whereas in modern society, if you have anxiety going on, it could, could just be constant from the moment you wake up to your inability to sleep and all these sort of things. So let me, without going too deep into that, how much do genes control our body weight and what is a gene? I mean, I'm going to ask you some very basic sort of things because I want people to, you know, you hear about all these things, but like what does it actually mean?

You know, you know, many who have struggled have been told that it's Genetic. That their weight is genetic. Genes to our body are what a blueprint is, is to a building. So a gene is a set of instructions that tells us how we're going to grow. So you see a set of identical twins. They share the same genes. They've got the same eye color and a lot of the same health habits. They've been studied. So if twins are raised separately, their body weight has no relationship whatsoever. There's like, no correlation. And they've shown that the difference in weight from one twin to another is predictable based upon the adrenal hormones. So the more one twin has adrenal hormone stress, the more that twin will gain weight. So we're often told that weight gain is genetic. And it is true that there is susceptibility among certain family members we see. But now we know it's not because of the genes. And the positive side of that is that means it's not inevitable, that it can change and it can improve.

Okay, so if I see some, like, let's have. I have a lot of female friends, and some, like, just don't eat. And I know skinny fat. I mean, so there's some people that are not healthy, but they look good, and there's others that just exercise and work out, and they still have trouble losing weight. And so the best of my layman's understanding is, oh, it's genetics. You know, this person just has sort of this thing, and this person does not. To what degree are some people just born a certain way where they can eat whatever they want and they maintain a certain level of thinness and other people do not? What is that all about?

Well, they're a vanishing species. Current stats tell us that you brought up skinny fat, which is a good concept. There are those to where their scale weight may be good, but they do not have enough muscle tissue. So they're okay weight, but just not lean enough. Not enough lean mass. So if you take them out and you take out those who are overweight or obese, the remaining percent of the population is about 11%. So about 11% of the people right now have good body composition. So there's not many. And they are dwindling very rapidly.

Wow. Okay, so now one of the things you talk about is why do you argue that calories do not explain weight gain? Because there's been this for years. You know, calories in, calories out that explain what is a calorie. And then how does that relate to weight gain or weight loss or whatever?

You know, it makes me nuts. And that Is one of the biggest public policy statements is that it's just eat this, not that, move more. Change the calorie equation. So a calorie is a unit of fuel. So you've got like a gallon of gas as a unit of fuel. So a calorie is how much metabolic energy food would release if you burned it in a test tube. Now, they've argued at the level of public health that weight gain is from people consuming more calories. And then the solution based on that is eat fewer calories. And I think about that. Well, let's go like to football. So I'm not a big sports expert. I'll put that out there.

Same with.

Okay, good.

So I don't have to be embarrassed. So let's say that we're doing a post game analysis and the Cowboys just crushed it. They won the Super Bowl. And someone wants to know from the big commentator, well, why did the Cowboys win? Oh, here we go.

The Cowboys win.

Won the game because they scored 30 more points than their opponents. Like, well, duh. So there's a description, but that's not an explanation. And that wouldn't be a strategy. You couldn't say, hey guys, next year let's score more points. We could win that way. So at best, that's all the calorie model is. It's just describing events.

It doesn't explain.

It doesn't explain it at all. And not only that, but it doesn't work.

So can you explain it?

Sure. It's the storage response. The body goes into a storage mode. And you mentioned about the very real, powerful mental, emotional stress. And that's big. But a lot of the other factors that are invisible do the same thing. So we could breathe in plastic residues and the same thing like your friend when he would go through a breakup or a crisis and how his health would change from that. The same stuff can happen to you from breathing in by products from plastic. The same things that would happen under a crisis. Or you can spend more time around electromagnetic fields. You know, we're carrying our devices all the time. That's just like the breakup and the crisis. Or we can have the fact that a third more people than ever before do shift work. You know, they're not sleeping at regular times. That's just like the stress. That's just like the crisis.

Did you say a third more actually do that?

Starting in 1980 went up by about a third.

Really? In the US or is this worldwide?

Globally.

Wow.

The global economy. We're working on each other's schedules yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. Because I mean sleep. Well, let's talk about something like sleep. I mean, I'll throw that in here. I guess I can zig and zag.

Here a little bit.

But how much does sleep affect things?

That's a factor. And somewhere around 1980, 1990, things shifted that cause radical weight gain. And we've seen that sleep can be a stronger predictor of weight than diet or exercise can. So the old model of it being behavior, habit, calories, sleep, doesn't make sense on that. If you sleep more, you're actually burning fewer calories. But the data's strong that good, deep sleep rhythms are helpful and they help because they reset the adrenal response and move us out of that storage state. Yep.

Okay.

So, you know, one of the questions I have here is that experts say that weight gain is a result of poor habits. How does habits relate to this? Because I'm of the mindset that much of any sort of indulgence is addiction, and the brain gets hijacked. And I know a lot about behavioral addiction. Addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction, food addiction. And when I say a lot, I mean I've done quite a few interviews with people on behavioral addictions versus chemical and drug addictions. And I used to be a drug addict. I won't go into my whole story here, but I've talked about that. When I was 18 years old, I used to free base cocaine. I was a drug addict. And I'm a big admirer of 12 step groups and recovery and all that. That being said, there's a difference between. Between habits and just flat out addiction habits. I think everyone has good habits, even if the consequences of their habits are very poor. If someone wakes up every day and eats an egg McMuffin and doesn't exercise and smokes a cigarette, they've developed really good habits of waking up and eating poorly and doing that. But that's used to shame people and guilt people. What's your take on it?

Well, yeah, it shames. It guilts. It raises the stress load, and it's not a rational solution. So habits imply willpower, and they imply intent. They imply that we've got a choice to eat this or that or move or not move. There's some conscious intent behind that. This model, this idea totally breaks down when we look at the fact that infants and toddlers are getting obese and morbidly obese at unprecedented rates.

And you even talk about animals.

And animals. So from 1990 to 2000, about 20,000 separate animals were tracked, representing dozens of different Species and many different habitats. Every single animal tracked was found to have unprecedented weight gain over that time frame. Now, some people say, oh, well, people feed their pets too much. Well, okay, we'll dismiss that. And some could say, well, wild animals eat scraps from humans. We could dismiss that too. But many examples were animals on controlled diets. So their food was measured, their food was unchanged, their activity was monitored, their activity was controlled. Chimps, between that time frame, our second closest genetic relative, they gained roughly 30% body weight per decade, two decades back to back on controlled environments. So once you see that, the whole idea about willpower, habit indulgence, no, it just doesn't fit anymore.

Right? So what is causing that?

There's a collective higher number of factors that push our bodies to the storage state and make us hold on to things. There's actually a clock. So this is crazy, but belly fat, the stuff around our organs, is very different than the subcutaneous fat below our skin. And every part of your body has a clock. There's rhythms, there's timing to it, like you're asleep versus awake. It's obviously very different. So you can pull out someone's belly fat and you can keep it alive in a dish. Provided you've got the right ingredients, it'll survive for a little while.

That's exciting.

And you can watch its clock. You can measure the activity of its biological rhythm. The more visceral fat someone's carrying, the greater degree that their clock is out of rhythm with their body central clock, which the adrenal glands control. So when this regulation is off, the body is storing and holding onto things. And it's not a matter of starving it, it's a matter of resetting it and recalibrating its timing.

What was the pain in your life? What is that pain that so many people have? If there's a way that you could even put words to it, what was it for you?

I didn't think that God would approve of me being Alice Cooper. And he probably didn't, except for the fact that when I, when I got sober and I went back to what I really believed, it worked twice as well. My, my Jewish manager says, I told him why. I said, I'm Christian now. And he says, well, kiss the career goodbye. You know, he said, kids are going to hate you because you're Christian. I said, well, I said, you know, he says, what's. He took out a checkbook. He said, what's it going to cost, right? And I said, nothing and everything. And it was certainly not a Gamble, because if I had a choice, I would have taken my faith rather than the career. But it just so happened that all of a sudden I got bigger. And the more I talked about it, people were fascinated by the fact that what I was, I used to be. You know, this. My pastor said. I told him, I said, I think I've got to quit being Alice Cooper. And he says, why does God make mistakes? And I said, no. And he said, well, look where he put you. He says, he put you in the camp of the Philistines. You weren't just there. You were the leader of these guys. You know, the Hollywood Vampires was a real dream drinking club. And I was the president, and that was, you know, Keith Moon and John Lennon, all those guys. So when I got sober, everybody kind of went, wow, what happened? You know, I said, oh, no, I'm sober now. I'm Christian. And it didn't affect anything. And, you know, it was one of those things where they said, well, I guess they sat back and said, let's see how this works now. One of the reasons that I became Christian was when I was in the hospital. I was the classic alcoholic classic. And I came out of the hospital, went right to a bar and sat down and had a Coca Cola waiting for the craving. I said, I better face never came, right? And I said, okay, tomorrow morning is going to be hell. Because I used to wake up in the morning and I had an ice bucket full of beer. I would take a drink before I opened my eyes. And next morning never came. And it never came for 35 years. So I would go to the doctor, and he says, so AA meeting said, no sponsor, no. He says, hiding bottles around the house.

No.

He said, what happened? I said, it's gone. It was taken away. I said, it's a miracle. And they checked and they went, you know what? It's a miracle because you. You should be. You should be the classic NAA every day to stay sober. And I said, well, I said, you could put anything in front of me right now, and I have no willpower. I mean, I have willpower, but I don't have the willpower. Certainly I wouldn't have become an addiction if I had willpower. So this was beyond any of that. And the doctors had to agree. They said, chalk it up to a miracle.

You know, this guy wrote a book called Willpower Doesn't Work.

Yeah, yeah. The more you try to have willpower, the harder it is. So I just let God be God in my life. And. And it worked. You know, I Can't tell people how AA was because I've never been to an AA meeting. You know, I can't tell people. I know one thing that people call me all the time and they say, can you talk to my brother? He's an alcoholic and he's a drug addict. And I go, no. I said, because I'm just another guy doing this. I said, he's going to bite my finger off. When somebody would come to me and say, you've got to stop drinking because you don't. That was the enemy. If he calls me, he's halfway home because he's going, I have a problem with drugs and alcohol. And a lot of guys that you guys all know would call me at 2 in the morning and say, where do I go? I'm in trouble. And I would say, okay, I'll keep it on the down low. But this is where you go, these are the people. Da da da da, that. And I said, and you're halfway home. But you can't go in as an adjutant. You can't go in with this attitude because now you just become the enemy again. Any. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict and anybody that told me that I couldn't do that stuff, I was immediately I would go get high just to spite them. As soon as I decided that I was in trouble, it was a different thing.

Gotcha. Almost all the time they don't say, how's your relationships, how's your sleep, how's your kids, how's your career, how's your job? They immediately give you a structural diagnosis. Now most of them are trying to do all they know. They're not trying to purposely keep people in pain. They just don't understand the mechanism what causes this. Even the people that are trained in this for years. Let me introduce my friend, Steve Ozanich. So Steve Ozanich, spelled O Z A N I C H. Steve Ozanich is a Mind Body healing health consultant, teacher of presence, spiritual researcher and author of five books. His first book, the Great Pain Deception, became an international bestseller. His second book, Dr. John Sarno's Top 10 Healing Discoveries was written as a homage to the late Dr. John E. Sarno, who forever transformed the medical industry with his discovery discovery of tms, the Mind Body syndrome. Steve's third book, Back Pain, Permanent Healing, Understanding the Myths, Lies and Confusion, was an Amazon number one best seller. Over the past 23 years, he's helped to teach thousands of sufferers how to heal themselves through his lectures, books, articles, videos and interviews. So welcome Steve. We're going to hand this mic back and forth. This is not something that I've ever seen you done. Get in front of a group of people and talk. And so, because he lives here in Ohio, I insisted that he get his ass down here in person and talk to people. He talks to lots of people, but usually not in groups. And he's been interviewed by some pretty prominent individuals. And this guy really knows his stuff. He's a wonderful human. He's been through his own journey of hell. And through that process, figured out something that most people that are in the pain business don't understand at all. And I cannot tell you how many really brilliant doctors that are usually the most resistant to it, including chiropractors, including physical therapists, including surgeons that have struggled and suffered with pain that could not get out of pain. And I've introduced them to Steve and the ones that listen and many don't. And I'll say, do a call with this guy, do a session with this guy, read his book. If they do and they believe the pain in many cases doesn't just minimize, it goes away. I could go on and on. I could spend half an hour just telling stories. And I have a tendency to want to do that right now. But I want to just ask you, tell us who you are, what you do.

Sure. Thanks, by the way, for the beautiful invitation. Has anybody heard of that phrase TMS that he just mentioned? Looks like the people that know me. It's a very important phrase and could save your lives someday, actually. And it has saved many lives. I guess my story is a good place to start. I was in severe pain for 30 years. Started in the low back, and of course I did the normal routes. You know, I tried everything. Acupuncture, physical conditioning, physical therapy, core strengthening. Hanging upside down like a bat. I always tell people I did that, you know, inversion tables, they're called. But I never tried to suck the blood out of anyone's neck. Of course. Hundreds of chiropractic adjustments. I think I bought some houses for chiropractors. And everything works. For a little while, everything. But nothing was working permanently. But in the late 1990s, my. My pain got so bad that I was crippled. I was crawling around on my hands and knees, and my left leg was paralyzed. I had the quadricep and the knee on there, but I lost the hamstring and the calf and the foot on that side. The deep tendon reflexes were gone. No sensation. I drug it around for a year, and of course I was putting off the Inevitable. You know, surgery was coming. It was obvious. So I think I had. I think I was two weeks out from the last surgical consult when a friend of mine showed me an article. He said, this reminds me of you. So I looked at it. It was by some doctor named John E. Sarno from the New York University Medical Center. So I went home and I got Sarno's book and I started to read it and I saw his implications and I threw the book against the wall. The very book that was going to save my life. I rejected it. And as Joe knows, 90% of the people do reject it. What I'm going to tell you works every time, but only 10% of the people can see it, which is okay because there's different levels of consciousness. It's all about consciousness. Certain people can see it and go, that's me now. I didn't see it at first. Actually, maybe I did see it. That's why I threw the book.

Right.

And so I got worse, of course, and I quit eating. My family was freaking out because I was down like £50. I've been a trainer my whole life. I was down 50 pounds. And so I went back and I looked at that book of Dr. Sarn. It was called Healing Back Pain. And it connected. Tears were flowing, it was, it was powerful. But this beautiful man had given me the answer. So I started doing what he said. And it didn't happen as easily as it happened for most people. There was no one like me to come to. But I healed eventually by following the advice. And I ended up writing that book, the Great Pain Deception. And getting his endorsement was tougher than healing. Dr. Sarno, he didn't endorse things at all. He was just a medical doctor. But it's done well out there. Many, many tens of thousands of people healed from it. And I wrote a couple follow up books. One was an homage, like you said, to him. And the third one was called Back Pain Permanent Healing. I had more to say. After a 400 page book, there was some more I still wanted to say. So his discovery was something he called tms, which originally stood for Tension Myositis Syndrome. He was very frustrated and upset with his results. He was actually a physiatrist at the New York University Medical Center. He was so frustrated with the results of his work that surgery wasn't working permanently and therapy wasn't working, and on and on and on. So he did something unique in modern medicine. He went and looked deeper and he took the files out of this back pain patients and he noticed, oh, they've got other health problems too. They've got allergies. They've got, you know, sleep problems. They've got skin problems, they've got stomach problems. So he did something even more unique today. He began to talk to them, which is very rare. I have people say to me, my doctor never looked at me, came into the room, looked at the chart, scribbled something out and walked right out. But he was an old man, so he was old school. And he started to notice tendencies in these people. Personalities. It's a personality problem. He's a paragon. He noticed these people tend to be perfectionistic, goodest strivers. They push, push, push, push, push themselves to win, to succeed, to learn to know, to understand, keep everybody happy. But what they didn't know was that they were furious inside about all that.

We.

We despise every minute of that. As Carl Jung said, there's another within us whom we do not know. There's two people here. There's the one that we show the world, which Freud called a superego, Jung called a Persona. This outer face that we show everybody is to please people, mainly the parents and then by extrapolation, everybody else in the world. And so these people who tend to have this personality type, we call it type T person, which stands for tension, they had all kinds of health problems. They were magnets for anger, tension. But they didn't know it because the process is all unconscious, which means you don't know it. It's outside of your awareness, outside of your consciousness. And so that's probably the main reason people don't believe it, because they can't feel anger in these things. Yes, they feel stressed out sometimes, but they don't understand the magnitude of it. And so he discovered when he started telling his patients, you know what? I don't think there's anything wrong with your back. I don't care about that disc herniation or that stenosis or that spondylola c system. It's spondylolysis or the spondylitis or the quad equina syndrome or the prolapse disc or the sequester disc, whatever the label they want to give it. I think this is your brain diverting your attention to your physical body and away from this rage. And he said he was astounded when he told his patients that they began to heal. He couldn't understand it. He said, I was mystified. I was the word he used, that the knowledge of what's going on was the healing mechanism. We don't have to do anything else. Now it makes sense because what the brain is trying to do is divert your attention to the physical, whether it's feet, knees, hands, shoulders, doesn't matter. And away from the emotional, which once again is outside of the awareness of the individual. So it makes sense why we would reject it because it's helping us. He said it's a favor your brain is doing for you. It's trying to help you cope through your daily life so you don't have to deal with all this crap that you're putting on yourself. And so if it's trying to help you, why would anybody want to get rid of it? So you can look at pain or disease as an emotional crutch that helping you walk each day. And people don't want their crutches kicked out from underneath them.

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