NEUROSCIENTIST Reveals How To FOCUS Your Mind & NEVER Be Lazy Again! | Andrew Huberman

Dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. The key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is-.

How do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time?

Yeah, great question. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation.

The molecule of motivation.

Absolutely. I mean, for years and years, people thought dopamine was about pleasure. pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive.

Okay.

There's a simple experiment that illustrates that, but I would be remiss if I didn't first mention two excellent resources for people that want to learn a lot about dopamine. These would be perhaps interesting people for you to talk to directly. The first is a book called the Molecule of More, which is all about dopamine. The author is Lieberman. I don't know him personally, but I love the book. I wish I had written it. The second is Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And the author there is Anna Lembke, L-E-M-K-E. She's a medical doctor and psychiatrist and runs the Dual Diagnosis Addiction Clinic at Stanford School of Medicine. She's a colleague. I consider her a friend and she is world-class, second to none in all things dopamine as it relates to addiction. So wonderful reads. And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is kind of paraphrasing elements from their books. So I want to be clear.

Clear.

So here's the experiment. Take two rats, you give them a lever, they can press, and they can get food out of that lever, they can get heat if their cage is cold, they can get all sorts of things that are great for a rat, including a mate to mate with if they press this lever. Both rats press the lever just fine. Now you take away dopamine, from one of those rats. You can actually do that by using a toxin that can kill off all the dopamine neurons. There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these dopamine neurons, much in the same way that Parkinson's destroys dopamine neurons. What you find is that both rats or both people still experience pleasure from food, from sex, from warmth when they're cold, from cool when they're too warm, et cetera. However, if you take that rat, both rats, and you move them one rat length away from the lever, so they have to just do a little bit of work, a little bit of work in order to press the lever, or you take a human who has no dopamine neurons or very little dopamine, and you make the pleasureful thing a little bit more challenging to get to, the ones with no dopamine do not pursue pleasure at all. That's just one example of what now are hundreds of examples in the neuroscience literature showing that dopamine is the molecule of pursuit, craving, motivation, drive. Pick your favorite word.

Dopamine is a good thing in motivation.

Provided it's in proper levels.

Yes.

That's right. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. Now, there's a double-edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned, accurately trigger dopamine release. seeing positive comment, a compliment, food, the more palatable a food, a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's baked but doesn't have anything on it, one truly releases more dopamine than the other. I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine. Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%.

Gives you more dopamine.

More dopamine is released. You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain. one related to movement, one related to reward. Broadly speaking, there are others, but broadly speaking, the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names, but we'll just confuse people. But see, you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement. So nicotine, about a 50% increase. Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling. Methamphetamine, 1,000 or even 1,000 fold increase.

Holy cow.

So huge increase in dopamine.

That's why it's so addictive.

So addictive, but what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before. How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before.

That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things.

That's right. Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore. Now, eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge. Let me give an example. This is a true story example. Out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name, but in talking about dopamine, someone I know has a child. The kid is in his 20s. He was a decent student, excellent athlete, really charming, nice kid. I've known him since he was little. He reached a point where his friends had graduated high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that. He wasn't into that. You know, this resonated with my earlier story. He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working. And he was convinced he had ADHD and he was depressed, and he started taking off down the path of medication, which, by the way, have helped many, many people. Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, are drugs that increase dopamine. because dopamine increases focus, it increases motivation, and it increases drive, essentially. The willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that have dopamine pursue, the ones that have depleted dopamine do not. So this guy who is a real story was struggling in a major way. So about three months ago, he was watching a lot of videos online. He was texting a lot. He was mainly playing video games. video games, video games, video games. But he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore. And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something. Why? Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus. He heard about the dopamine system and Anna's work and I talked to him and he decided to do what some people call dopamine fast. But for him that meant no video games and he did two weeks of no screens. which at first I think was agonizing for him.

Oh my gosh.

It's now three months later. It's a little less than three months later. I actually talked to his parent today. Working full time off all ADHD meds. Has a girlfriend. I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive feature as opposed to someone who's spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive feature. regardless of, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. He's very focused on his work, he's excited by things, and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games and he enjoys them again like never before. There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset. When you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus in order to excite you. So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated, unstimulated, most of the time it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down, down, down. Now there are a few hacks that can actually help, and Ana talks about some of these in her book. The main thing is too, if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great, but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively.

Like, what are some examples?

Texting, Instagram. I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot. I'm a grown adult and I spend two hours on it. But I do a lot of work there, right? I'm trying to put out content that's educational. But sometimes I think to myself, I'm a grown man. I'm sitting two hours a day on Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time now. But if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that you're scrolling, you're not even sure what you're looking for.

Like, what am I doing? Exactly.

I just wasted this time. Exactly. And what you're looking for is something to jolt that baseline. So you want to limit those behaviors or in some cases, if it gets really severe like it was for this.

Individual, you want to eliminate.

Completely for 30, 60 days. Ideally, it's 30 days. this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera. But some of those drugs, of course, have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic. These days, I'm not a pot smoker. I've never liked drugs or alcohol. I kind of lucked out that way. And I'm not trying to demonize, I'm not passing judgment, but cannabis, for instance, is pretty prominent in prominent use and a lot. A lot of people, the idea of 30 days without that is, I think they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. And I'm not here to tell people what to do, right? Then there's about drugs, alcohol, or anything. But the idea is 30 days of no interaction with that thing, person, behavior, I mean, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things. I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. and if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. All of that hinges on this dopamine system. So, you have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure or else they will soon not deliver pleasure and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with. So, the way to think about this is just to set up constraints and as I'm stealing Anna's words left and right, forgive me Anna, she has many more important things to say and she says them much more eloquently than I, but she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake for breakfast. But we sort of understand that dessert comes at a certain time of day and after completing certain things. But we, for some reason, we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media. Because social media isn't just comments. You and me say, oh, like Lewis put something up. There's that. That stuff's great. But then there's also a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff. There's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival. And so you need to restrict the amount of time. And especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the social media, and I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything. Anything that you enjoy. Food, for instance. You don't want to overindulge in highly palatable foods. which is bad for us. We know this for a number of reasons. So, the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting.

What do you mean?

This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym. And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be just work out, including while I'm running. Why? Because these days we are layering in dopamine. We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking. Okay, big increase in dopamine. I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase. And some of them have l-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor. Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulate dopamine receptors. So you're getting it from the energy drink. Plus, it's the video game you're playing. Plus, you're with your friends. It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great, except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under stimulating and you're gonna think, I can't focus on this. So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class because the Canelo fight was that awesome. It was insane. It was amazing. Yeah, he's amazing. He's amazing. I am a boxing fan. It was crazy. If you had to like build a boxer, you'd build him like that. Just his head, his shape, the right hook.

And it was just like the roar of the crowd and just the energy, it was amazing.

Yeah, that's great. There's a beautiful story unfolding there with him.

Yes.

So that could be it too. You know, there's a kind of a letdown. And so I think it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration, It's real. That's real. And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset. You don't necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tale of joy, but then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.

So true, man.

And if you're going to sit down and try and do work and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work. So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the the period right before it's a little boring. Frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate, it sounds like a pretty boring life, right? It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up. But, I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work out, and I think that's a functional dopamine increase. And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop. Now, there's some other hacks that Ana's talked about, and again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof. Other people have done this, although this was happening long before WIM, there's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water, so this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use, for anywhere from three to six minutes creates a 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine, increases alertness, feelings of well-being. They did blood draws in this study, so these are real data. It wasn't conjecture. They really know this. And, there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts or people who are struggling with ADHD who start doing regular cold water exposure three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time. Discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase.

To me, Essentialism was about rethinking prioritization, what really matters, and figuring out what is essential. Effortless is a cousin to that, and that's about rethinking simplification, which is that sometimes we just make getting great results, breaking through to the next level, harder than it needs to be. So it's not saying, hey, you should never work and you should never work hard and you should never put in effort. I believe that you're supposed to put in effort. The point is, if you can't work any harder, you've got to find an easier path. And yet, in a grind culture, sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder rather than think different, think smarter, find an alternative route.

Rather than take pause, reflect, have a better strategy, it's more just go hard, hard, hard, spend more time, more hours thing as opposed to reevaluate simplification.

Yeah, that's what it is.

How can we do it more effortlessly in a simplified version, not just hard push, push, push?

One of the things I think we can do is just, well, the book structure, the model is to have an effortless state, like three concentric circles, effortless state, effortless action, and effortless results. Right. And that's sort of like three books in one, each of them can make your life and the results you get easier to get. You want to first remove all the complexity in your mind, in your heart that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be. I was just talking with Tim Ferriss and I asked him a question about this. I said, look, how much of your mental and emotional energy have you given on stuff that, you know, holding grudges, being angry, stuff that just got in the way of your success? And he said, look, from age 15 to 30, he said probably 60 to 70% of my energy was spent on that.

On more than a man. Angry?

Angry.

At what? Himself, other people, the world, anything.

And awful things that happened to him that he was angry about from when he was young. He's talked about this publicly now, of abuse that he'd been through and so on. But either way, he's making, his life is more burdened than it needs to be because he's spending so much of his cycles on this stuff that isn't actually propelling him forward or helping him achieve.

His thought process is energy on those things, right? Yeah, spending a lot of time.

That's right. Just your mind, what you're processing, how you're feeling is just burdened.

Burdened energy.

Burning energy instead of getting you going forward. And so, simplifying your state, I think, is a huge return on investment. If you can let go of a grudge, If you can let go of something that you keep on draining you, then there's just more of you on offer. And that's not through grinding effort, that's through just removing burdens. You don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all. Number two area is effortless action.

That's effortless state, the first one.

Effortless state. So you're simplifying all of your basically all of that Clutter that's in your mind. So it makes it easier to focus on what matters.

Before we get to the second ring, how do people learn to let go of grudges? How do they let go of resentment, anger, frustration about others and about the things they've done? That's really hard to do. You seem like, it's a sip of that doesn't let go. Just get clear minds. But people have been trying to figure that out for a long time. So how do we, how did you learn how to do that?

Well, one of the things that I've learned is that specifically on grudges is that we need to learn, like we have to ask an unusual question about grudges. That is, what did we hire the grudge to do? That's Clayton Christensen says with any product or service that you have, you don't, no one wants a six inch drill bit. what they want is a six inch hole, right?

Yes.

There's a reason that you're hiring that product or service. Well, you can do the same with grudges. Every grudge we hold, we hold for a reason. We've hired the grudge to do something for us. Maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful. See, I am one up. I'm above that person. See, they did this bad thing. I'm holding on to that. See, I'll show that I'm superior. We hold on to it for a sense of of superiority. Or maybe we hold on it because we like that we get to tell a story of being a victim. And people go, oh, yes, we get sympathy for doing it. Well, we hire grudges to do certain jobs. And what I think is that if we simply evaluate grudges, like we say, how are you doing in your job performance for me? Are you actually protecting me? Are you actually making me powerful? Are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me? Or if you evaluate them, and in the book, there's a section specifically, one by one, you can do this, where you say, well, you actually find, well, actually, it's not making me powerful, it makes me more vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable with everyone because I'm carrying this wound still. I'm not letting it heal. Is it helping me to build relationships?

No.

If you pay attention, you notice that when you tell these stories, You kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it.

Right.

And so, you're not building deeper trust relationships. You're actually kind of wearing them out along the way. And you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee. We have grudges like, you've hired them to do this. They aren't doing any of those things. They're using you. Grudges use you. They burn you up. They waste you out. They make you weaker. And so just through this process, you start to find like, I'm ready to fire my grudges, ready to be free of it so that I can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is, 60 to 70% with Tim, maybe it's different for other people, get all of that back. And we can start putting that into the stuff we really wanted to do in the first place.

Yeah, can you imagine? There's been different stages of my life where I felt like, 10 out of 10 of positivity, of freedom of my thoughts from holding grudges or resentments or angers, and you feel like you're flying. And there have been many years in my life, many years, too many years, where I've held on to resentment, anger, frustration, a lack of forgiving other people, right, where you feel like you're at a six or a seven, maybe you get to an eight for a moment, but then something triggers you and you're back into anger frustration mode. And that really pulls me back into feeling tired, exhausted, drained and burnt out. Typically, not from the effort I put into my craft, but in the effort I put into my mind thinking about the things I don't like.

Yeah, you've basically made the case for why Effortless State is the first part of the Effortless Model.

That's it exactly.

You take the language you used. you feel like you're flying. Is that not just another metaphor for effortless? I mean, what would be more effortless than I'm flying? That's the idea. That's why even though you would never think of forgiveness as a productivity hack, maybe no one's ever written that. The productivity hacks you need is to forgive people in your life. And yet what else can you call it? If you could get back that much energy, that much of your own light and ability and capability, it's the best rebate available. There's a story that I came across in the research that I love of a man who was productive in his community and one day he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground and it was a piece of string.

He gets it.

He's like, oh, I can put that to use. He puts it in his pocket. On that same day in the marketplace, someone else had lost a wallet and lost some money and they thought that they had seen him pick up the.

Wallet and take it.

Accused him of it publicly. There was no way for him to prove his innocence. And so the word went out, this person has acted dishonestly, dishonorably, and so on. Now, at this point in the story, he has a choice. He can't prove his innocence, but he could have in this moment let go of the accusation of the harsh judgment, and he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back onto, well, what can I do something about? How can I serve? How can I make a contribution? How can I be successful again? But he doesn't. He gets fixated on it. Everywhere he goes, he talks about it. He nurses the grudge. He explains, it's a piece of string. Don't you see it was wrong? A piece of string. A piece of string. People started laughing about this guy. All he ever wants to talk about is a piece of string. And it makes him ill on his deathbed. Final words of the story. You know, a little piece of string, a little piece of string. And this is how the story goes. Now, that is a fictionalized account, but it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies? If we put them on grudges, if we put them on things that have happened, we wish they hadn't happened, or even on our own mistakes where we go, I wish I'd been different, and we're beating ourselves up for past mistakes, we're just putting tons of effort onto things that will exhaust us and burn us out instead of moving forward. to the things that really matter.

So would you say that the things in our minds will hold us back from an effortless state and getting the actions and the results we want is the things in our mind first?

Yes, definitely. There's a little story about that where I was staring at myself dressed head to toe in a stormtrooper costume. And I mean, I'm in a store of Halloween. This is like a, this is an expensive suit. It's like a movie. quality Stormtrooper outfit. And as I'm staring back at myself in the mirror, like, should I buy this? I'm like, how am I even here? Like, what?

What?

Why?

For 30 years without realizing it, I'd had this goal of buying a Stormtrooper costume.

Yeah.

So when I reflect on it, it goes back to, like, when Return of the Jedi comes out, and my older brother says, oh, wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit? You know, wouldn't that be great? And I'm like this, you know, whatever, 10 year old kid just amazed by this. Like, yes, that would be cool. Forget about it entirely. But here we are 30 years later, still pursuing that goal. It's still a part of me has been working on achieving this. Well, no part of me wanted that costume. I'm like, why am I even. What am I even doing here? Let's get out of this. I don't want this costume. And it became like a shorthand. My wife will say to me now, like, if I'm pursuing something that she's like, I don't know. It has a certain vibe about it. She'll be like, is this a stormtrooper? I think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you, but also for grudges that no longer serve you. It could be relationships that no longer serve you. It could be any mental clutter, any assumptions that are simply like they were true to a point, but they don't serve you now.

And.

One of those storm troopers, I think, is the idea that any problem can be solved by working harder. That alone is a really limiting idea. It'll get you only to here. It won't get you to there. So it's a good principle as far as it goes, but then we need to invert that question. Instead of say, how can I work harder? We say, look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? And so as you read your mind of this old paradigm, you open yourself up to a new option, a new question, and suddenly, I mean, I almost think it's almost like magic. There's so many cool options. once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult.

Yeah. What was the thought process that stuck in your mind the longest, that was the hardest to let go of? That when you let go of it, life became more effortless. Whether it be in your relationships or your career or whatever it might be.

Yeah, I mean, one answer to that question is, well, I'll give you one answer though, which is that the work at what's essential needs to kind of be hard, the trudgery, and then you've got separate to that play and fun, and that those two things are just two different categories. Yes. They don't have to be. but we often divide them up. And so we just have the fun and the play separate. But what if the essential things can be the fun things? What if you can make the things that used to seem like drudgery into fun rituals?

Yeah, how do you make cleaning your laundry or mopping the floor or cleaning the toilet a fun and enjoyable experience?

Or, which is a specific example in my family, cleaning up after dinner. So we have pretty good rituals around the actual meal time. We actually eat together. I've got four kids and my wife and I, we will do like, you know, we'll do toasts for each other at the end of each day, like, what's gone right today? And we have some good rituals around this, but as soon as the dinner is over, my kids are just, like, gone. They're like, See ya on the phone, other phone.

They disappeared.

Like, they're like ninjas, man. They're just gone. It's, like, so silent. And, like, where do they all go? Then I have the unenviable task of, like, come back and pulling them all back. Where did you all go? And, oh, no, I've got homework on. It's hard to argue with that. Go to the bathroom. Okay, that's hard to argue. And it's just this cat and mouse game to get them back in. So I'm like, okay, how do we make it effortless? And so we divide up the chores so everyone's got a certain part of it, right? Many hands make light work, and we trained them on each piece. And I'm like, okay, we're gonna set this up. We wrote it all down on a piece of paper where everyone can see it. Okay, ready to start. What happens? Nothing. Chaos. It is back to the same. They're gone. The next day they are gone like ninjas again. and it wasn't until my eldest daughter, Grace, added just a particular kind of music to the occasion that it became like karaoke. There was like classic Disney tracks. It was, I mean, she's a teenager, she's just turned 18 now, but it's just like sing along stuff that you can't not sing to, all kinds of music. And it turned it into just like a little party. And even now we'll start to do it, we'll have the same problems as soon as someone puts on the right music. You all do it, you play and it's like that now. In fact, I didn't think people would believe me, but the other day I wasn't even helping them, music got put on, everyone's doing it. I grabbed like five seconds of video and put it on Instagram just to prove, it really is like that now. So the idea is, one of the ideas that's hard to let go of is that essential stuff has to be the drudgery, the important stuff is just hard work. Some things are just hard. And then there's fun stuff and that's play over here, but what if you make it What if you combine those? What if you make essential stuff enjoyable? Well, then it becomes relatively speaking, effortless.

And I would add into that and say if you don't make the essential stuff enjoyable, then you will be burnt out.

Yeah.

Even if it starts out as like fun, like practice and sports for me, there are many different sports that I played growing up and some of them I burnt out on because it came, it started to become a job where it was only like you got to show up to practice, you got to work hard. This is a business mentality now and it of lost the idea of having fun. Yeah. When we're playing a game, but it's like the business of the game.

Right.

And right. You almost have to. So what could start out as really fun, right, turn into drudgery.

Right.

And what could be like this thing that I don't like could be this incredibly fun experience.

Yeah.

Based on the parameters you create for yourself. I was a truck driver for many months. I got paid $250 a week.

Right.

As a truck driver when I was about 22, 23 years old. And I remember being like, this is miserable. This was not fun. This was not, you know, it was essential to just pay like for food for the week. It was not like the path of my life.

Right.

But it was a season of my life. And I remember saying, okay, I have an opportunity here. Like this is gonna be happening for many months. I can either be in misery and pain for six hours a day driving a truck.

Right.

Or I can make the most of it. And I downloaded CD with salsa songs and I started visualizing myself while watching the road, but visualizing myself salsa dancing because I was learning how to salsa dance at that time. So I would imagine myself doing the moves and the dance and the steps and everything and it made the time fly and it made it more enjoyable. I would also sing songs as well and just see like, okay, how can I make this fun? even if people are looking at me like I'm crazy, singing along to myself. But that made it more enjoyable, where it wasn't like, oh, I have to go to work and do this thing, but I had a great time and time flew.

I love what you're saying, and it really is a lot of what I mean when I say effortless state. There's nothing so hard that complaining and whining about it won't make it harder. So some things in life, once you decide I'm gonna do this, I'm dealing with this. This is a responsibility that's important to me. I'm taking on. Now you just have to decide, do I want to do it the hard.

Way or the easier way? Yeah, exactly. What happens when we complain and why.

Do we complain so much? You know, I searched at one point when I was doing this research for like just what are the easiest things to do in the world? Like just off the cuff, like what are the answers? And I remember that one of the first answers that people really agreed on was complaining is the easiest thing to do. Wow. So I thought that was very interesting and I took on a little exercise myself with this and I was like, okay, well that's not a great state to be in. A complaining state is going to limit my creativity, it's going to make it harder for me to achieve, it's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it. So I said, okay, every time I complain, I'm going to say something I'm grateful for.

I read this in the book, I like this strategy.

Here's a really good strategy.

Well, I liked that you like it.

What I noticed about it was that it didn't work.

Well, what I noticed is not that it didn't work.

I realized that I complained a lot.

More than I realized.

Right.

I read that, too. Is this, this.

How much were you complaining a day when you started that strategy? I don't know if it says a number for it, but I just found I would walk into a room and I'd be complaining. I'd see my wife and, oh, how you doing? Well, you know, this thing was a bit of a drag. That meeting took longer than I thought, but. and I'm like, why are you saying this? It's not even how you feel about your life. There's so many good things happening, but for some reason, I was in a habit of just starting with a complaint. You see your kids, there's always something to complain about. Well, why are you on that? Why aren't you doing this? Why haven't you cleared this thing up? There's an endless variety of complaints. And what I noticed was that the more I complained, the more there was to complain about. And as soon as I introduced this new habit, what I was surprised by is how fast the state changed, because you can't be grateful and complaining in the same moment. You can't be fearful and grateful in the same moment. You can't be angry and grateful in the same moment. I mean, it is a dynamic, powerful, catalytic thing. It's not just, for too long, we think of gratitude as being like, well, that's a nice, mindful moment. Be mindful and grateful over there. But when you've got to go real stuff, that's not the real stuff. Gratitude is the real stuff. this is the way to be able to accelerate success in any area of your life and it's instantly effective. So I found that as soon as I would say I was grateful, I could see people's eyes light up, just even my kids, my wife, it just brought a more positive feeling. So then we carry on with our kids and I'm like, okay, my son Jack one time, I'm like, he complained and I'm like, okay, give me three things you're thankful for. He says this, I am so thankful that my dad wants to play this dumb game after I say something I'm complaining about, right? It says it just like that. We all laugh. It works even though he did it with the worst attitude ever. And by the time he's doing two and three, he's laughing and he's saying stuff and it didn't matter. Gratitude is that powerful. And so I think it's like the fastest way to get ourselves back into an effortless state.

How do we train our minds and our body to be motivated towards a goal? and not stay lazy.

Yeah.

Well, at first it's know thyself because we're all different. So, one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discipline. And what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self-discipline. What's the difference? Okay, well the difference is that self-discipline is internally focused. Self-discipline is about managing oneself and it has very little to do with external requirements. So, you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self-discipline is about managing the internal. Discipline, the way I talk about in the book, is about achieving that long-term goal. These are those long-term goals that are going to take a while to achieve, and the external world has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy SEAL, right? The external world has, starting a podcast, right? The external world has a say in whether or not you do that, and that's, and the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes, and not get crushed by the failures, and then continue to move towards that goal. And what I found was, because I'm a very unself-disciplined person, I don't have a lot.

Right?

And so what I, so I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I say, what's the difference? Well, the difference is if you are overly, so those with very high self-discipline sometimes, this is not exclusive, but sometimes have trouble achieving long-term goals because the achievement of long-term goals often takes an ability and by necessity to march into the unknown, into uncertainty. which is going to throw you off routine and throw you out of certainty. The self-disciplined person, the very self-disciplined likes routine, likes certainty. That's how it's structure. I mean, that's what it is. And so moving towards a goal like that takes oftentimes being able to adapt out of structure and say, well, I can't do that. I have to just go in, I have to go in unknowing. Now, the best, the most successful people, those who have both self-discipline and discipline, right? In terms of staying motivated for a goal, the way I would do it by knowing myself is I would, understanding I'm not a very self-disciplined person, I would simply try to chunk a goal into smaller pieces, right? So if I want to lose weight, you know, then I can say, well, that's why cheat days are actually good for me, right? Because I can say, I'm going to take this piece of it and move. So I chunk my reward system in a different way, but I think I think the way one stays motivated towards a goal is highly subjective, but it would, in my kind of through my thought process and my experience, involve one to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that.

So, creating a reward system first.

For.

The goal in order to help you stay motivated.

Not just saying, yeah, depending on how you show up.

Not just saying, like, okay, I'm going to, My goal is to achieve this thing. It's going to take me three years to accomplish it. And that's the only reward I'm going to get in those three years. But how can I reward myself every day for an action I take every month, for a milestone every year, for getting closer? So focusing on the reward system.

And this is neurobiological because dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is you get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many ways you get dopamine, but one of the ways is when you achieve things. So if you're able to effectively create a reward system that means something to you, it can't be kind of inert, right? So if I want to run, if I want to run a marathon and I can barely run to my mailbox, right, then maybe buying some running shoes and putting them on one morning is enough of a reward system to get a dopamine hit. As someone who runs somewhat frequently, and you probably identify with this, Just putting on our shoes one morning is probably not going to give us that dopamine hit. We got to extend that task a.

Little bit so that-- you-'ve already accomplished a lot of something.

So that you have to push beyond it. You have to push beyond it to.

Get that reward system. So it becomes subjective. What would you say, 20 years as a Navy SEAL at different levels, and you were deployed how many different times?

Are you allowed to talk about that? Well, I mean, 13 and some change.

Deployments between, what, six months and over a year?

Yeah, I never did year-long, but anywhere between, three months to six months usually.

This is Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the most part.

And other places, maybe not a lot to talk about. What would you say of the 20-year experience was the most challenging experience for you? Was it something within a mission? Was it learning how to develop as a leader? Was it having a relationship with your wife during that time? What was the most challenging point for you?

Yeah.

The most challenging thing ironically wasn't the job. because we were all so prepared for the job and we were around just the best people in the world. So the trust and the camaraderie was to this day, and I look back on it very fondly, right?

So not the day-to-day job.

No.

You mean even just like the missions you went out on?

Yeah, that wasn't challenging. I think if I were to say, you know, the first and foremost was probably having to leave the family. When you have to say goodbye to your family, for a stint, whether it's three months or six months or some folks are deploying for a year. That is a rough deal that not many people can capture. Not many people with families can capture that. When you have to say goodbye to your kids and your wife for that. Okay, well, see you in however. And then to add on to that, understanding their stress, or at least my kids were a little bit smaller, but understanding my wife's stress, knowing that I was going someplace and she It was dangerous. It was contact. Yeah, well, luckily with today's technology, contact was fairly easy, but we found, again, ironically, we found that daily contact was never a good idea because what happens is you establish a routine.

You get comfortable.

You get comfortable. So something happens, I'm working, I'm overseeing something, I have a mission that goes along or whatever, and I don't get to call her that day, well, suddenly she's worried. And it also makes time actually seem slower. Interesting. Yeah, so we decided we were only going to talk Usually once a week, my son who had real trouble, he was young. I mean, he was born in '05, so by the time he was two, he was having trouble with me deploying. And every time I went, it was rough on him. And we actually, for him, we actually almost had to, well, we literally had to just decide not to, I was not going to talk to him on the phone. It was too hard for him. He had to basically kind of forget me.

Oh my gosh. So he had to compartmentalize as a.

Child in order to-- We had to help him compartmentalize.

Survive and not go depressed or be stressed because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization. How do you do that if you're an emotional human being that's you have these deep connections to your family and friends? How do you just detach in a sense and become more machine-like for a period of time and then allow yourself to feel deeply in other moments?

Well, it never goes away. I think the attributes, the way I talk about compartmentalization and the attribute is more is more kind of surrounded by the way our brain functions and processes information versus I'm going to block something out so I don't have to think about it. However, I think most team guys, SEALs, Spec Ops guys have a very high ability to compartmentalize away from things, block out things that are painful. I know that about me and I know that about my buddies. because you have to, because war sucks, you know? And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished, you know? So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there. These movies that show these extended scenes of people, you know, mourning when their buddy goes down or whatever, like, oh my God, yeah.

It doesn't happen.

No, you don't have that time. You know, you have to win the gunfight, right? Because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home, right? So you have to, and I think the training allows you to do that. The training is so intense and so effective that it requires you to compartmentalize. Training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that can be a detriment in a relationship. So I think those of us who were able to recognize that actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a a frenetic thing. It just happens without us having control over it.

What was the moment that was the scariest for you when you were deployed? Where you thought like, I may not make it. Or our team may not make it, or this is a really bad, I guess you're training for bad situations all the time. But was there ever a moment you were like, I don't know if we're gonna get out of this?

No, I was fortunate not to have that moment. I say that. with immense gratitude because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that, that can't say that. They had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position and my team was always in a position that we had prepared, planned and executed in a way that was highly effective so that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had complete, you know, or near complete control or we understood the pathways we needed to to go throughout of it. But I say that also, this comes back to compartmentalization. One of the things that you have to be able to do when goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up. The focus is not, oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get out of this. The focus is how do I get out of this. So the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability. So that's how information is coming in, how we're processing it and prioritizing, how we're switching between the necessary tasks and then how we're learning from our decisions. So I talk about the parachute malfunction in the context of that. But ultimately comes to even be able to do that in the first place, it requires a forebrain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over into a fight-flight response and you're able to think through stress, challenge and uncertainty in the sense of say, okay, what can I control right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in because now I have a team. I can say this with great pride and gratitude. I can remember literally walking in areas when we were overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area.

Sketchy.

This is sketchy and having complete and utter faith. Because I was around because I was with my teammates, right? I was around people who just, I trusted. I knew that if something went wrong, we'd be able to handle it, you know? And so I think that's a necessity when you do this type of stuff.

When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong on how to get out of that situation, or is it planning for here's exactly how we would like it to go right, But let's also have an exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong. What do.

You plan the mission as you'd like it to go and then inside of that planning you put together, you build contingencies within each factor.

So when this doesn't go as planned, what are the three ways to get out?

Yeah, so you know, just like any athlete would understand, so a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall back on depending on how this line shapes up, right? You have the same thing, you know, this is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay, well, as we're coming in on insertion, you know, there's a few things that could go wrong. So if this, then that, if this, then that. And you kind of do that throughout a phase, throughout the phase planning. But then there's what we call the 80-20. rule. And that is you get to 80% of certainty and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control. And that's where confidence comes. You say, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure it out. Figure it out. Because we're not going to figure out everything. And it's, you know, Murphy's Law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of. So you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty.

How do you train your mind to deal with chaos in the moment? so that you don't freak out and freeze up, but you actually turn on a level of focus and attention towards achieving that goal.

Yeah, so I think we're predisposed, each one of us, to what I call Huberman and I both have called this, is the autonomic set point. At what point do we start flipping into an autonomic response, into fight-flight, where our where our system starts taking over and our forebrain starts coming offline. If you and I use boiling point as the average, most of us might be average. There are those who start really freaking out at like 190. So 212 is the average at 190 degrees, they're starting to freak out. There are people who it takes till like 230.

To boil.

To boil, right? I think that the guys who make it through that training are predisposed to have a higher set point. first of all. In other words, we tend to, when bad things start to happen, we tend to slow down and start thinking through it versus get all hyped up. It's funny, it's funny, you know, I live in a neighborhood and in my neighborhood there's four other Navy SEALs in the neighborhood. There's, you know, one across the street, one down the road. Must be nice. Well, it is nice, you know, A, because they're great dudes and it's great, they're great neighbors. But I remember my wife once saying, you know, she said, Hey, I'm so glad these, guys are here in the neighborhood. I was like, why? She said, because if something went wrong, I know I could go to them and they'd act like you act. And I said, well, tell me. I said, because if something happens, they would immediately calm down and they'd start working the problem. So I think we show up predisposed. Training to it is difficult. And I think so here we are actually working on some stuff to help teach people to do that. But it comes down to understanding your own neurology and it comes down to understanding that Here's how you have to think through situations under stress and then it's going to be about putting yourself into deliberate stress to practice that. You can't practice this type of thinking if you're not in stress. You need to put yourself in that. You need to put yourself in that.

What are some things civilians could do to practice stressful moments on a daily basis where it doesn't hurt them but it's actually preparing them? I talk about every day I think you should be experiencing some type of pain, something that's uncomfortable, seeking discomfort. whether it be through a 10-minute workout, whether it be through a longer run, it doesn't matter what it is, an uncomfortable conversation. We should be doing this every day in a structured environment that allows us to grow. What do you think are some ways we could do this that's not putting us in harm's way or physically hurting ourselves?

I can't answer that because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas and you just gave some. I mean, some people are very social people. So starting a conversation with a stranger is a piece of cake, right? For me, that would be hard.

Right?

Starting a conversation with a stranger would be hard. So that might be something I do. Giving a presentation, public speaking for people is tough. So volunteering to give that presentation is a great way for a lot of people because, you know, you know, they... that makes them anxious, you know? So working out for some is like... for some people, they've developed a system where that pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy. Right? So they're not practicing it, you know? So... So someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves what fright, well, in fear, again, it doesn't have to go all the way to fear. Fear is interesting because it's actually a combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety. You can have each one of those and not have fear. So if you are anxious but not uncertain, that would be, I have to give this presentation on Monday. I hope it's going, I'm nervous about it. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's Monday, it's a 2 o'clock, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm just nervous about it. Uncertainty without anxiety, well that's every kid on Christmas Eve, okay? But it's when you combine the two that you start to generate fear. Well, the idea is if you have fear, if you have uncertainty plus anxiety and it starts to manifest in fear, the key is to understanding which of those two factors can you buy down, okay? Anxiety- Buy down? Buy down, which means decrease. Anxiety can be decreased internally. It's an internal response. So things like some of the tools Hubert talks about, visual tools, breathing tools, you can begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic, come off of the autonomic response system. So that's how you can start kind of buying down anxiety. Uncertainty is largely external. That means something around you outside of you, you don't understand. There's unknown. The way, the best way to do that and the way we do it in Spec Ops is we control what we can control. So some people refer to it kind of control your three-foot world, right? But it doesn't have to extend, it's not a three-foot thing. It's what in this moment can I control and then take control of that, right? Because then you are grabbing onto certainty. You're taking what is uncertain, you're grabbing onto something certain. As soon as you've controlled that, as soon as you move through that, then you have to make another decision. What's the next thing? This is basically kind of stepping through, right? Stepping through this challenge, right? So you can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by kind of understanding both of those pieces.

What do you think is the greatest lesson you learned throughout the 20 years for yourself that has helped you not only during that but also after being with the SEALs?

I think it's not fearing the unknown. It's the idea that when you go through something like that, you understand that, hey, I could pretty much do whatever I'd like to do. And I know that even though I don't know how I'm gonna do it, I know I can figure it out. If there's enough interest, if there's enough passion, right? I'm not gonna, I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player, so that's off my list, right? But I was interested in writing a book, and that was a whole new process for me. When I left the Navy, I started public speaking. I did not like public speaking at all, right? I did not like it. But I knew it was an edge that I wanted to conquer and say, okay, well, let me work through the things to conquer this edge. It's kind of like your philosophy. I think it's not only a deep one, but it's profound because if we are consistently deciding what our edges are, moving towards our edge and then getting there, then we are growing. Because guess what we're doing at that point? We're looking for the next edge. And that's the growth process, is continuing to move to our edges. and then finding the next edge.

I mean, you say you don't like public speaking, but don't you have to speak to your teams and guys?

Yeah, but that's not public. That's like, you know, that's the guys. So it's not the same. It's different, yeah. It's different. There's a lot more, you know, when you're, you know, 'cause you're, and when you're in the military, there's no expectation of, you know, kind of great articulation or humor or, you know, what's effective? What's effective?

Here's the word.

All right, go. And that's what you appreciate too. There's no one wants you to sit there and pontificate. It's like hey guys, this is what's going on. So there's a directness that's appreciated and required, you know, so but that's not.

You know, folks speak. What do you think was the hardest lesson you had to learn three or 20 years? Something that you were struggling with or challenged with or you kept repeating until.

You finally learned the lesson? Yeah, I think the hardest lessons, the hardest lesson, maybe not one, the hardest lessons were just around leadership. what it takes, what leadership takes, what it takes to be a leader. Because again, being a leader and being in charge are often conflated. They're not the same thing, okay?

What's the difference?

Well, anybody could be in charge. As an officer, you know, in the military, I was pretty much in charge of something all the time. It didn't make me a leader. You don't get to call yourself a leader. It's like calling yourself funny or calling yourself handsome. Okay? Someone else makes that decision. You can't designate yourself that way. Someone else decides whether or not you are a leader, okay? And that's done through the way you behave in that position. So if you are in charge and you're behaving in a way that causes someone to make a decision, okay, this is the person I would lead. I mean, if we think about the leaders in our lives, the people who we consider leaders in our lives, it's not because they were just in charge of us. In fact, we could probably think of people who we would follow into hell and back and they have no place in the hierarchy of our lives, right? someone who just they've behaved that way in a way that's made us kind of endeared to them. So the attributes I talk about in the book in terms of leadership attributes are all attributes that actually cause behaviors that typically cause people to look at others as leaders.

What are the behaviors that most human beings admire the most that we want to follow that person or be inspired to be led by something that they're sharing or involved in, a community, a movement, whatever it may be, What are the three or four main behaviors that.

They have and we should be developing.

If we want to be better leaders? Yeah, well, I talk about five in.

The book, into these adverbs. The first is empathy, okay? And again, I would say this, there's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide, because there are people who will live- Subjective, right? It's a subjective thing, you know? Again, it's someone's choice as to whether or not they think. So empathy is one, selflessness is another, and this is not just So let's just back up here. Empathy, not just I know how you feel, I feel how you feel. I can put myself into your shoes and that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about, it shows that you care about another human being.

What is the best way to show that? Give me an example. As opposed to saying I know how you feel, how do you empathize showing you feel how they feel?

Well, first deep listening. So listening to another person but but true, like deep, full-on listening. Like I am hanging on every word listening. Oftentimes we listen to people and we're two things, one of two things is happening. Either we're thinking about what we're going to say next, right? Or we're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, okay, you're talking about football. I'm thinking, okay, wait a second, you know, did I play football in eighth grade? Maybe I could talk about that. Yeah, we relate. But what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you anymore. you know, I'm making what you're saying about me, you know? So, so what's, what deep empathetic listening is, I'm, I've, I have like a whiteboard in my mind, okay? And as I'm listening to you speak, if something pops onto the whiteboard, I erase it and I move on, I just keep on listening, you know? That is, if you do, if you, if you empathetically listen, like look into someone's eyes, attentive behavior, facing each other, you are going, they are going to feel cared for because you're exchanging, now there's an exchange going on, there's serotonin, being released, there's oxytocin being exchanged, or at least released, and all these kind of these bonding chemicals, right? So that type of listening shows someone you care about them. Empathy is a little bit tougher for some. Some people are just wired, we know. Some people are wired to be, my wife is extraordinarily empathetic. I mean, she really feels other people. I mean, I am not. I've had to really try to develop empathy. It's something that she's taught me.

You rewind the tape 10 years ago, you know, information was the thing that stimulated thought, stimulated new ideas. And as we learn new things, we make new connections in our brains. So as we begin to add new stitches into that three-dimensional tapestry in our mind, we're beginning to cause our mind to function in new ways. But the key then is to apply it, to personalize it, to do something with it. And 10 years ago, when I went and got in front of an audience and talked about the application, Nobody wanted to step outside that philosophical, theoretical, intellectual realm, right? Because when doing something means you're going to have to change something about yourself.

Painful.

Yeah, you're going to get uncomfortable, right? And I think we're in an age of information, and in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. And because of technology, we have access to so much content, and information creates awareness. And awareness is consciousness and you can't have consciousness without energy. They work together. So there's an energetic change I think that's taking place in the world right now where people are so informed that old models, old paradigms are beginning to break down. Whether it's the medical model, the religious model, the education model, journalism, the economy, politics, it's all beginning to come to the surface because something else has to come out. And I think that one of the things that people are realizing is that you don't have to be a Buddhist monk to do this or a nun with 40 years of devotion. You just got to understand the formula. And just like any skill or anything you learn, you got to go from thinking to doing to being. You got to take knowledge, you create the experience and if you keep doing it over and over again, you start getting a skill or you start getting wise about how to do it. and you know that you know how to do it. Well, in the last 10 years, we have assembled a scientific team and let's see if you can really make significant brain changes. I don't want those changes to just be in your mind. I want them to be in your brain. I want to be able to see before and after pictures to say that person has a significant change after a traumatic brain injury or anxiety or depression or a cyclic mood disorder or a stroke. We want to see that there's been significant change. At the same time, let's measure your brain in real time and let's look to see what that transformation process looks like. And in the discovery, Louis, of that process, we gained so much knowledge about what that transformational process looks like. In other words, I can tell you without a doubt that if you're analyzing your life right now within some disturbing emotion, that 100% of the time you're going to make your brain worse.

Think about your life.

If you're stuck in an emotion, like you're frustrated, you're angry, you're fearful, resentful, and you're thinking within that emotional state. In other words, you can't think greater than how you feel. That means then you were thinking in the past because those emotions are a record or residue of the past. So we see people in the process of change that are analyzing in duality or polarity. That kind of drives the brain into higher states of arousal and further away from true change.

So.

We'Ve done thousands and thousands and thousands of brain scans and we now know that there's a formula to create greater brain coherence, greater brain efficiency to make your brain work better. And when your brain works better, you work better. At the same time, it requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion to begin to change your energy and to change your life. And nobody changes until they change their energy.

Right?

So then how do you get a person out of resentment, frustration into joy and freedom? If why would they feel grateful or joyful or free if the experience hasn't happened. So most people are spending the majority of their life waiting for something out there to take away their emptiness or pain or the resentment in here. Well, if they're waiting their whole life in separation or lack, then and we create reality, then the lack is driving certain thoughts which is creating more separation and more lack. So teaching people then to begin to condition their body emotionally before the evidence takes place in their life is breaking a significant habit. So instead of living by cause and effect, now we're beginning to cause and effect. The moment you start feeling whole and grateful, we now know your healing will begin at that moment. The moment you start feeling worthy and abundant, your wealth is coming. You're generating a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of wealth.

How does someone feel worthy though if they they've always been told they're not worth it. Yeah.

Well, so let me... Or that's the.

Story they tell themselves.

Yeah.

Like, I'm not worth it because she didn't say yes when I asked her on a date. Because he broke up with me because I got fired because my parents left me. How am I worth it when there's so much evidence or story around a negative thing?

Well, let's stop telling the story of your past and let's start telling the story of your future. And people who aren't defined by a vision future, for the most part are left with memories of the past. Your brain is a record of the past. It's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment. So most people wake up in the morning and they start thinking about their problems. And those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain that are associated to certain people and things at certain times and places. So the moment the person wakes up clean slate, they start thinking about their problems. They're thinking in the past. if you believe your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, well, there's a possibility that your past is going to be your future. Every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it. So then the moment you start recalling the problem, you start feeling unhappy. Now your body's in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And how you think and how you feel creates a state of being. So people reaffirm their identity. based on the past, right? And it turns out that the redundancy of doing that, conditioning only requires an image and an emotion. Most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past, into the known. So now if you're in the familiar past and in the known, you're going to crave the predictable future, right? That's the known as well. There's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the eternal present moment. That's the sweet spot of the generous present moment. So you've got to labor to get that person beyond the emotions that keep them tacked or anchored to the past. And yes, it takes an effort to do that, but if you keep working with the formula, you'll reach that elegant moment where there's a liberation of energy. And now your body, as the unconscious mind, the objective mind is not believing it's living in the same past experience. 24 hours a day because you're liberating the body from that emotional state. So you ask the person, why are you so unhappy? Why are you so frustrated? Why are you so resentful? The moment you ask that, their brain is going to associate that emotion to a past event.

To a memory.

To a memory. That's because they have nothing to look forward to in their future. So if you're not being defined by a vision of the future, it just means to me that you're more in love with your or past than you are with the future. So how do you teach people to believe in a future that they can't see or experience with their senses yet, but they've thought about enough times in their mind that their brain is literally changed to look like the event has already occurred. The latest research in neuroscience says that's absolutely possible. We know that. And how do you teach a person to select a new possibility in their future and begin to emotionally embrace that future before it's made manifest to such a degree that their body is their unconscious mind is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes and new ways ahead of the environment. Now to their body begins to change to look like the event has already occurred. We've proven that that's possible. Now think about this.

So the more you think about your desired future, the joy, the gratitude, to the feelings you want to have that are more positive. The more you think about it as a future thing happening, the more your body shifts now.

Exactly. So your body is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment. Now think about this. From some condition in your life, the more altered you feel inside of you, the more you narrow your focus on the cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot. and that memory now is embossed in the brain. It's branded in there. So then people think neurologically within the circuits of those past experiences and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And the stronger the betrayal, the stronger the trauma, the more the body's living in the past, right? So then, so how do you reverse that? So now, if you truly got passionate about a future, we've all done this, you get a wild idea in your mind, and you start holding on to that vision and you're preoccupied with it, all of a sudden the thought in your mind becomes the experience and you start feeling the energy of the future. Now, the stronger the emotion you feel from that vision, the more you're gonna pay attention to the picture in your mind and now you're remembering your future.

And vice versa, the stronger you pay attention to the feeling of the past pain, you're gonna create the pain in this moment.

Exactly. So then, so it requires a coherent brain, And we now know that there's a formula for that and we've got beautiful research to show that people can do it. They just have to practice. And it requires a coherent heart because resentment, frustration, impatience creates a very incoherent heart. And when that heart becomes incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. There's no energy there. You stop trusting in your future. So then if there's physical evidence in your brain and body, physical evidence to look like the event has already occurred. It's quite possible you'll be thinking neurologically within the circuits of your future and you'll begin to feel chemically within the boundaries of that emotion of your future and how you think and how you feel as your state of being. And now your state of being is living in the future instead of the past. Now, the moment you disconnect from the emotion of your future because of traffic or some co-worker or your ex or whatever people come up with. Now you're back to the energy of your past and now you're going to start looking for it, analyzing why hasn't it happened? Well, if you're feeling the emotion of your future, why would you look for it? Because you would feel like it already happened and that is the place where the magic happens. So then you can't just do this, get up and then return back to your old state of being. You got to maintain that modified state of mind.

When that happens.

Well, let me finish.

If I punch you in the face right now, how do you maintain?

Well, of course, of course. I mean, we all take blows in our lives and we all react emotionally. But the question is, how long are you gonna react?

Right, right.

So then, if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions, and those emotions linger for days, that's a mood. And then months, tears personality trait. So then the person's personality is literally based on the past, but they don't know that because they're doing it over and over again. It becomes a subconscious program. So now if requires a coherent brain and a coherent heart, then we have to train people how to self-regulate. So we've done thousands and thousands of measurements. We've partnered with the HeartMath Institute. to teach people how to create and sustain heart coherence.

How do we do it? Well, besides going to your workshop, what's the simplified version? I'm sure it takes more time than...

Well, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. It just requires getting still, closing your eyes, putting your attention on your heart, changing your breath so that you move into the present moment. And when you slow your breathing down, you slow your brain waves down. you slow your brain waves down, now you're accessing your autonomic nervous system. So then you train a person how to open their heart and feel an elevated emotion and it takes a little practice. And just like a flower that takes time to bloom, it takes a little bit of time. But if you work in trading the resentment, the frustration or the impatience for gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness and you keep at it, there'll come a moment where that system switches on and now you're feeling grateful for no reason at all. That's not a bad thing because gratitude, the emotional signature of gratitude means something's happening to you, something has happened to you, you're receiving something or you just received something. So your body then, when you're feeling gratitude, is in the perfect state of receiving. So then that means then you'll accept, believe, and surrender to the thoughts equal to the emotional state of gratitude. If you're living in resentment, you're living in fear, you're living in impatience, you could say I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, and with all you want, and that thought's gonna stop right at the brainstem and never make its way to the body because the body is not feeling or because why? Because you're feeling resentment and that thought isn't that thought is not consistent with the emotion of resentment. Resentment has a different set of thoughts, right? In other words, once you start opening your heart, it begins to move into coherence. It begins to produce a measurable magnetic field up to three meters wide. Now that's frequency, that's energy. And all that energy, that frequency carries information, carries an intent. So then when you're feeling gratitude and your heart is open, you're broadcasting energy into the field. A frequency. You lay the intent of the thought of your health or your wealth. That frequency can carry the thought of your wealth. It can carry the thought of your health. If you're suffering, you can't... Suffering does not carry... that energy does not carry the thought of your wealth. It carries a different set of thoughts. So then we're teaching people how to self-regulate. Because if you're going to believe in that future that you're imagining with all of your heart, it better be open and activated. And you better know how to self-regulate and you have to know the moment you disconnect from the energy of your future because of some circumstance in your life and you lose that feeling. If you're practicing it on a daily basis with your eyes closed, then the next level is to be able to open your eyes and do it right in the moment and be able to self-regulate and change the frustration from some experience in your life back to the energy of your future. Now, that requires great awareness and great effort. But if you have a community of people that are practicing this on a daily basis and they're connected to their future because that's where their mind is, they begin to want the future more than the emotions of the past. So we've done enough measurements now, Louis, to know that we can teach people how to do that and we have evidence that people can sustain it for 45 minutes to an hour. It's a skill now. They know that they know how to do it. So now they have brain coherence and heart coherence. Well, once the heart begins to become orderly and coherent, it acts as an amplifier and it drives energy to the brain. So now the brain is getting more once the heart is open and then you're thinking different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that and here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell.

The biggest reason that people quit any of those things we just I just talked about is because they look at the whole they're looking at the big picture man. so like with seal training there's no single evolution that's that difficult. Really, I mean it's four mile runs and you know two mile swims and it's nothing that you couldn't get up from this table and go do right now. But guys, the guys that quit, they couldn't break it down like into digestible pieces.

One hour at a time, one moment at a time, one day at a time, one step at a time, one breath at a time. It seems so overwhelming. You're like, if I can't do this right now, if I'm struggling this moment, how am I going to take on all of this? Six months, four months, three months. And so we become overwhelmed and in fear as opposed to just one step at a time.

That's it, bro. I remember an evolution during Hell Week. All it was was a one mile repeat. The instructors just got everybody together and said, all you got to do is run one mile over and over again until we tell you to stop. There's no time standards. There's no- you- could walk. You could walk. I mean, you had to look like you were running, but you could walk. So I'm out here like, heck yeah, dude. All I gotta do is run one mile at my own pace on a sunny beach on Coronado Island. Like, This is amazing. not tirring me vaation, Yeah, yeah, man. But that was the single evolution during Hell Week where we lost the most guys. And it was because of what we just talked about. They could not certain people just can't could not focus on that mile, dude. They all they could think about was all the miles in front of them, which they didn't know if this was the last one or not. So they looked at it as a big picture and they just couldn't handle it. And really it was the easiest evolution that we did in all of Hell Week.

Do you remember how many miles you actually ran?

Dude, I have no clue. And what the instructors do, they just keep it going until enough people quit.

And then they go, okay.

And then they call it.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

And just to be like, okay, we're gonna do 10 miles, 15, 20 miles, whatever, and tell me people quit.

That's right.

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah.

So that's the biggest thing, dude, about, and I take that now into, like, ultra running and, and even three of seven, you know, the business model for three of seven and all that we have going on with that. It's just like, you know, conquer what's, like, right in front of you. And if you can, if you can stay in that mindset, you know, on an ultra race when I'm 95 miles deep into a race and I've got to climb a 2,000-foot mountain, how do you think I do it, bro?

One step at a time.

Yeah. I mean, I pick a tree 20 yards ahead of me and I get to that tree and then I pick another tree and then eventually I'm at the summit, you know?

How do you manage your mind and the thoughts of, man, I've got five more miles or however many more miles to go, how many more hours to go, days to go. And this is freaking hard. How do you manage the mind that wants to tell you to stop when it seems like there's so much ahead of you, but you're just going 10 feet at a time? How do you do that? When you're tired, when you're hurting, when you're exhausted, or you just don't get tired.

No, no. That's a mantra we use, right? Yeah, we can talk about that later. But for me, bro, it's like if you will push yourself hard, if you will push yourself hard enough, you reach this place, I call it the steady state, and it's where it's not gonna hurt any worse. And it's not gonna get any harder. It's the steady state, man.

It's gonna stay hard.

It's gonna just stay just like that. That's exactly right. And it's almost like a, for me, it's almost like a primal feeling. Like everything else is stripped away and all I have to deal with is this pain, physical pain that I'm feeling. And it's a beauty, for me, it's a beautiful thing, man.

So I don't- To feel the pain?

Well, to reach that steady state to where everything's just boiled down and it's just so simple, dude.

You're not stressing about who's calling you, what's happening at home, friends, or... That's it.

Yeah.

You're not stressed about that stuff. You're focused on one thing.

Yeah, and so how, I guess one way that I managed that, I like getting to that point in the first place. But some way that I guess you could say that I manage that pain is I stop fighting against it. I literally just tell myself, I accept this. And I almost just like in my mind's eye, I see it passing through me.

The pain.

The pain. And you can use this with all different types of things that are uncomfortable.

Like cold.

If you stop, we'll stop fighting against it, it diminishes its power. But as long as you're fighting against the pain or you're using your energy to fight against the cold, it's going to continue to gain traction and power over your mind. So it's just forcing yourself to let go and stop fighting against that discomfort and just rock and roll, man.

So for the everyday human being who is does a five mile run, or maybe there's someone going extreme into an ice tub for two minutes and they feel pain after a few miles or that first minute in the ice tub, how would you process that mentally or in your mind's eye when you're entering the ice, when you're going to that five mile run where it starts to hurt, you get the cramps, you get the heartaches, sweating, what would you do in that moment? Obviously for you that's like 50 to 100 miles, but for the everyday human, how would you approach that mentally? Like a process we could understand. I understand of like surrendering and letting go through you, but what is it, what's a strategy we could implement you think?

Well, I mean, I think a strategy to implement that particular particular thing about not fighting against it, I think, is that you could speak it out loud. I talk to myself all the time, and that's something I'm so adamant about is the spoken word. So, you know, if you.

So, it's starting to feel painful. I'm on my third mile. I feel like wanting to slow down. What would I say to myself?

Well, I mean, you can, you can counter punch that with, with any number of statements or mantras, whatever works. what's best for you. You know what I mean? Of course, I have some that I use on my own, but that's for me, that that would be the number one tool to kind of. To kind of manage that pain.

A spoken Mantra out loud.

Yeah. The spoken word.

Not an internal Mantra or a whisper, but actually saying it, you think?

Yeah, totally, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has to be said out loud.

Okay, what's the. Were you gonna say something else?

No, I'm good, bro.

What's the killer of getting through hard challenges in your mind? What's the thing that kills most individuals once it starts to get hard and they stop?

Negativity, man.

Yeah.

The thought process, the words.

It's not necessarily the negative thought because we can't control our obviously all the time. We're gonna have thoughts in our head that pop up that we don't want to be there. But it's when you give those thoughts power through the things that you say. So I give you an example. One of my best friends going through SEAL training. He came to me one morning and he said he had been think... I could tell he had been in a bad place mentally. but he was doing fine, progressing through training. But he came to me one morning and he said out loud for the first time, I don't think I'm good enough to make it through this training anymore. Which was a lie. He was completely physically capable of doing every single thing that we had to do that day and every other day. But when he came and said that, it gave those thoughts that he had that what do you call it? Like lack of confidence or you know those thoughts that he was having that he wasn't good enough. They didn't have enough traction to stop him until he came and told me that out loud.

Spoke it into existence.

He spoke it out loud. Yeah.

So you might be thinking, am I good enough to do this? Can I make it through? Maybe I'm not as strong as these guys. These guys are more talented. But once you start saying it to someone else out loud, that's when your body starts to believe it even stronger and it gets harder and harder to go back into a confident place, I'm assuming.

That's it, brother. Yeah, so like when he told me that, it was just like seconds later he was going to ring the bell.

Really?

Yeah.

And there was nothing that I could do to stop him.

It's like he finally believed it 100% and he was out.

Yeah, yeah.

Just don't say it and you're half the way there, right? If you like just don't say it, you have a chance.

That's it, brother. That's it. And so your tongue, your tongue is the thing. I compare it to a rudder. A rudder is the main control surface that steers a ship, steers the direction of a ship. Your tongue is your rudder. It's going to steer the direction of your life and the outcomes of your situations 98% of the time.

So.

What you say is pretty important.

Yeah, it's paramount to me, bro. I mean that's like, I take this to such an extreme that I don't curse. I'm a Christian, but I don't, not cursing is not a Christian thing. It's because none of those words in and of themselves have a positive meaning. So why am I gonna use them? So for me it is paramount, dude. The things that we say, yes.

Did you ever come to a place where you started saying negative things to yourself during BUDS training or as a SEAL where you had to catch yourself or have you always been clear with your words to yourself?

I have not always been clear with my words to myself. I became more conscious about the power of my words throughout life and doing really, really hard stuff to where, you know, I've put myself in enough situations with other people around me to see the power of the spoken word actually work, not only in my own situations, but in the men around me or women around me in racing, you know?

Yeah.

So as every time I see it work, I'm like, holy smokes, this is powerful. This is powerful. Well, then finally I started going on some podcasts and telling people that it works. And then I now get hundreds of messages a month. of people saying, oh my gosh, this works.

What are the words we should never say to ourselves? And what should we say to ourselves every day?

You know, I think that's really, I think that's really individualized, man. I mean, as far as the words that you should never say to yourself, it's going to be dependent on the situation you're in, you know what I mean? And then the things that saying to yourself, you know, a big one for me is I will not die in the chair. That's a huge mantra, you know, that I use. I won't die in the chair, and that has a whole meaning and story behind it.

What's the brief meaning?

So that was born out of that last man standing race that I did a few months, well, no, it was back in May, where I was running, you know, we had to run 4.16 miles every hour on the hour, each one of those hours, I would dedicate to a fallen brother in the SEAL teams.

And their actual names?

Yeah, I had a wrist coach that I was wearing and I would have their, you know, index card with their face name, their family's names, their date of sacrifice.

And so, holy cow, that probably gave you a lot more power and strength.

It did, man. But it gave me a lot more pressure too, dude, because each of these laps was for this guy and some of those guys were guys that I had spent a lot of time with, you know what I mean? So the way that race worked, there was no definitive finish line. You just kept running until only one runner was left standing. So I could not promise my brothers that I would win. I couldn't promise them victory because I didn't know if my body would break, or, you know, I was, I didn't know. I didn't know where the race was going to end. So, but, but I could promise them that if I died in death, meaning death within a situation, not physical death, but death in this scenario would be of my race, if that time came, I would die out on the race course battling for every step that I took.

Sit on the chair.

I won't die in the chair. That's exactly right.

Sit around waiting.

Yeah, so at the end of each one of these laps, there was a chair. So if I came in off the lap in 55 minutes, I could sit down for five minutes. And it was hard. A lot of people died in the chair that day.

They were like, I'm done. I'm done.

Because it was hard to rise back up, man. For sure.

Did you win the race?

No, I was the I think I was the third man standing around 116.5 miles. And my last lap, dude, was actually for. My last lap was for a good friend of mine named Blake Marston. And we lost Blake in a skydiving accident not long ago. And, dude, I remember looking down at. I I went out on that lap, and so. It was muddy. I had tied my shoes too tight and so my shoelaces were sawing through that large tendon in the front of my ankles.

That's painful.

Yeah, so it got to the point that I could no longer flex my toes toward my shin anymore. So every step was like I was dragging my feet like lead weights. So I went out on that lap and I pretty much, I was broken, dude.

Yeah, your whole body.

But I wasn't gonna die in a chair, dude.

You were on the lap though.

I was out.

You fell on the lap or you didn't make take it back in time?

Yeah, I got out there, dude, and I remember looking down at Blake and, dude, I just started crying because I knew at a certain point that I could not make it back in time.

Oh my gosh.

And I thought, you know, what does Blake think of me right now? And then I just had the sense of peace come over me, dude, and I could see his face in my mind's eye laughing at me. my poor physical state because we always find, I mean, team guys do, we always find humor in adversity. I mean, no matter how miserable it got, we would be joking and laughing at each other. So, I saw him laughing at me, you know, and then I found a stick on the ground and hobbled my way back to the finish line.

Yeah, so you made it through. It wasn't in the time allotted. It was after the time.

It was after the of the time. That's right.

So 116 miles. Wow.

Yeah.

But you know, you can apply, I apply that now that don't die in the chair to all aspects of my life, man, whether it's business or personal relationships or marriages or you name it, dude.

So you have a mantra and you'll say this mantra out loud or internally every day when you feel it gets tough. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's used as a counter punch, dude, to those negative thoughts.

You know what's funny? Mantras are are talked about a lot in kind of the spiritual meditation communities. But you're this hardcore Navy SEAL guy who's saying the power of the spoken word, the power of a mantra, a positive mantra, is what gets you through adversity.

That's it, bro.

And that's the secret.

That's your router, man.

What are the keys to building confidence when you feel insecure, afraid or scared of being embarrassed, whether it be dating someone or career or anything, what's the keys to building confidence so that you're attracting what you want?

Look, I read some of your biographical history before we talked today and you tell a story about being picked last and then you compensated for that.

Yes.

Now, there's Alfred Adler, by the way, the psychoanalyst, Associate of Freud built his whole theory around compensation of that sort. Inferiority complex plus compensation. But it's adaptive, right? Like you got picked last, it embarrassed the hell out of you. So what did you do? You decided that is not going to be me.

Never again.

Right.

Never again.

Okay, now you did say, you know, that you adopted a maybe too, what, inflexible model of what it meant to be masculine as a consequence. But when I read that, I thought, Yeah, but still you, fair enough, it wasn't the new you that you adopted wasn't optimal in all possible manners, but it was definitely improvement over the previous you.

Exactly, I wasn't big last again, that's for sure.

Right, well exactly, okay, so the first thing I would say is that if you feel insecure and less and ashamed and all of that, that you have to take stock. And look, I have an exercise online at selfauthoring.com, there's three exercises there, one helps you write about the past, one about the present and one about the future. The present authoring program helps you assess your faults and your virtues. Okay, well, if you have some faults and you feel insecure and inferior because of that, well, you should. Now, it shouldn't be so much that you're crippled by it and unable to take action. You shouldn't be beating yourself into the ground because you're not everything you could be because no one is. And If you beat yourself into the ground, then you can't get up and improve. But you have to differentiate. It's like, okay, to what degree am I being hard on myself? Counterproductively critical, hearing the voice of my too harsh and angry father in my head, adopting inappropriate stereotypical representations of masculine competence. How much of my self-criticism is ill-advised? Fair enough. And you want to deal with yourself with a certain amount of care. But then along with that, there's the, well, fix your weaknesses. You know, if you're ashamed of being ignorant, you're shown up at a party because, you know, you claim to knowledge that you don't have and someone exposes you. Well, you can be angry at them and you probably will, but they've actually done you a favor. They pointed out an inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down, right? A recognized inadequacy is as soon it's such a gift in some sense, if it's accurate. I'm in it because you think, well, what should I do? What should I do with my life? That's a real complicated question. Oh, here's an inadequacy. Excellent. You have a goal now. Rectify it. Now you still have to think strategically and figure out how to rectify it and do it step by step. And, but Carl Rogers, the psychotherapist, pointed out that the person for therapy to be successful, the person has to want to change. So they have to have recognized that they have a problem. If someone is mandated by the court to attend therapy, It's very difficult for the therapist to convince them that they have a problem. Once you're convinced you have a problem, it's like away you go. You know, I know it's still technically difficult. It requires discipline and all of that. There's no magic solution. But if you're plagued by feelings of inferiority, you should rectify the most obvious inferiorities.

Right.

Focus on those first over optimizing strengths, would you say?

No, not necessarily. Not, not necessarily.

I'm.

And you don't have to redress every, like, I can't. I'm a terrible jazz musician, you know? It's not, it's not a thing where.

You hold shame around or, like, well.

It'S not an impediment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say that you have to rectify an inadequacy when it's clearly an impediment to your goal, or you have to shift goals. But if you're shifting goals because of an. inadequacy related impediment, then you have to ask yourself, is your desire to shift the goal reliable or are you just taking the easy way out? You can protect yourself by picking a different goal that's more difficult. That's a good mental hygiene practice because sometimes you should switch goals rather than rectifying inadequacies. But you can fool yourself then and that's not good.

And if someone is goalless, lazy, unmotivated, not sure what they want to do, what would be a few key steps to get started to turn their life around or to find the motivation for something greater than where they're at?

Well, I think a fair bit of that's probably to be found in, you can find it in shame, you can find it in guilt, you can find it in conscience, you can find it in anger, you can find it in.

Interest.

And engagement and beauty. There's lots of pathways. If you're angry about something in the world, well, you know, that's an indication that that's in some sense your problem, right? It's speaking to you in a moral sense. This shouldn't be that way. Well, maybe you're the person who should do something about it in some manner. Maybe it'll take your whole life to figure out how to do that. But it's bothering you for a reason.

So.

That the negative emotions can be a pathway to transformation. I'm not trying to romanticize them. They can crush you completely and leave you with nothing.

Yeah, right.

For sure. And they can go badly astray.

But.

Shame, that's a good one. What am I ashamed of? Well, can you fix any of that? Because you might ask yourself, let's say you're so ashamed and so crushed that you're nihilistic and you can't see any hope for life, you're just done. You might think, well, what if I was less ashamed? Like, I'm not gonna jump off the bridge today. I'm gonna wait a year. I'm gonna not, I'm gonna work on these things that I'm ashamed of. And just see, like, does my life improve enough so that I'm not so bitter about it now or I'm not so hopeless about it now? and my experience has generally been that that works. It works. And then some of, some of its practical knowledge, too. It's like you can get a really long way with very small changes, incremental changes.

Yeah.

Micro habit changes. So aim low.

Don't have big, big goals or big transformation.

Well, you can, but, but the problem with a big goal is that it's. daunting enough so that it might paralyze you and there's a high probability of failure. And so imagine that you're your own child. Okay, now imagine you love this child and you would like him, we'll say him because it's you and I talking, to succeed. Now you have an ideal for this child. You would like him to grow up to be the best he can be, better than you, the best man he can be. that's what you want for your son. If the good part of you is talking.

Yeah.

You definitely want him to be better than you are, but you want him to be the best he could be if your vision is unclouded. Okay, but then you offer him a goal. It's like, well, do this. Well, can he do it? Well, if he can do it without a second's thought, there's no challenge in it. There's no developmental impetus. It's not in the zone of proximal development. you want a goal that you can do, but that requires some improvement on your part. Because you want to attain the goal that's satisfying, but then you want to make yourself into the thing that can attain goals. And so you want to push yourself.

Yeah.

You want to push yourself a bit far.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

And, and, and there, there's an ample psychological literature that suggests that that's where maximal motivation is to be found.

Interesting.

So you're, you're pursuing a goal, but you're also pursuing the goal of transforming yourself at the same time. You're doing both of those at the same time.

Do you need to know that you're transforming yourself in order to attain the goal? Or do most people just think, I got to take these steps to make it happen, but they don't realize they're becoming better human beings?

They, it depends on what you mean by realize. They, they They have the sense of satisfaction and confidence that would indicate that, although they might not be able to make what that means explicit. But I would say it would be better to make it explicit. It adds one other dimension of possible motivation.

How do you think people lose confidence? We've talked about gaining it, but how does someone, how could someone like yourself, who's accomplished so much, who's got millions of followers, who, you know, is financially successful, has a great marriage. How could someone lose confidence once they've built it?

Illness. That'll do it. That's one way. Death of someone. Loss. I mean, there's lots of ways of having The rug pulled out from underneath you. Moral error. As the stakes get higher, as we already discussed, the consequences get larger. Ingratitude, that's a big one. You can succumb to the temptation to believe your own egotism. That's a big mistake. There's lots of ways that things can go sideways, that's for sure.

So it sounds like, you know, we start off with a lack of confidence when we're pointed at, you're inadequate in this thing. And we go down a journey of, you know, building ourselves and overcoming the challenges and diving into the fear to have these small wins to build confidence. And then the more successful we become, The more we succumb to losing that confidence again, when a lot of people-.

No, no, I wouldn't say necessarily that you become more susceptible to that. But you asked, how can that happen? How can that loss occur? I think, I still believe that genuine accomplishment, but it's always ethical accomplishment. I believe that to be the case. Genuine ethical accomplishment is the best source of security, but it's not unerring.

When you mean ethical accomplishment, do you.

Mean doing something good, right?

Whether people know about it or not, just good and right for yourself, is that what I'm hearing you say? Or does someone else need to acknowledge that this was good and right?

I think if you've done it for yourself, that's good, but if you do it and other people are in on it and along for the ride, right, that's also good. And sometimes that's better to bring people along. If it's just a matter of them acknowledging it, well, there's value in that, too. I mean, you know, you. People say, well, you shouldn't care what people think of you. It's like, well, of course you should. Psychopaths don't care what people think of them. Now, you shouldn't care so much what people think about you that you're willing to lie. to maintain whatever it is that you think they value. Like, there are places beyond which that becomes counterproductive, clearly. But of, of course. Well, I mean, I read the comments in YouTube particularly, and I pay attention to them. And if, you know, 30 people say something like, here's something I do, and I probably did it to you when I'm interviewing. I interrupt more than a certain percentage of my audience would like.

That's my comments. It's like, just let them speak. You interrupt too much. So I just try to shut up more now.

Do you know the joke?

What's the joke?

Knock knock.

Who's there?

The interrupting cow.

The interrupting cow. Moo.

Sorry, that's a stupid joke. It's a stupid joke. Anyhow, so, you know, I read those and that's what people think. And then I think, okay, I should probably try to interrupt less, but I get excited and then with Zoom, there's a lag and it's so yeah, that makes it harder. But I do pay attention and you should pay attention.

I won't say that I'm not always sort of updating my way of thinking, but the big model of my life is pretty stable now. So I would say that how well the things that I have cobbled together work in high pressure situations.

You mean like your values, your principles, your frameworks for life?

How to deal with your emotions. That's probably the most important one. Like when things are really going haywire, like how do you center yourself? And I learned very early in my business career that the thing that, because I looked back, there was a bunch of us at Awareness Technologies that were given the same Spiel. Don't think of yourself as an employee. Think of yourself as a partner. If you act like a partner and achieve certain results, why shouldn't make you a partner? And nobody did it. And so I was just like, why am I the only one that's doing this? And I realized that my ability to self-soothe was a huge part of that. So other people would get upset, they would derail, they would take their eye off what they wanted to achieve because they were frustrated or whatever. and I could just bring myself back to center. Now those are pretty small tests and obviously as things have gone on you start dealing with big numbers. You start to realize is this real? Like is this can I actually center myself when you know say hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake? And then it's like okay this still works and that was very encouraging, very encouraging because when you Get a test that's sort of way beyond where you've been tested before. You're like, how's this going to work? So that was pretty extraordinary.

How do you soothe under chaos?

It is a... For yourself. The big thing for me was recognizing that I'm having a biological experience and that I need to understand the brain, like the brain, not just the mind, which is incredibly important, but the brain. What is the brain doing? How does it hijack what is neurochemistry? What triggers it? What are all the things that evolution has primed me to do? It's what I call the physics of being human. So if you are a human, regardless of intellect or experience or upbringing, there are a certain number of things that are true. They're as universal as universal is going to get. And look, nothing is perfectly universal, but some things are really close, like an internal dialogue and an internal dialogue that that skews negative, right? Which is where most people start. You get people like Kanye on one end who just cannot see themselves doing anything but the best ever, the greatest and all that. And then you get people who actually don't have an internal dialogue. Like there are no words going on in their head, which is crazy. But nonetheless true. But the vast majority of us live in a place where you have an internal dialogue and that internal dialogue is largely negative. And so once you know, okay, cool, this is a trick of evolution. and my brain, this is so that a guy named David Eagleman gave me this insight. He's a neuroscientist. This is so powerful. Louis, I hope it hits you the way it hit me. And he goes, think about this. Your brain is enclosed in a dark box. Light never touches your brain. Sound never reaches your brain. And everything you experience is being in the world out there beyond you is all happening in your brain. It is a virtual reality that your brain creates for you. and so I was like, my obsession with the matrix. And I'm like, oh my god, even though I don't think we're actually living in a simulation, your brain is creating a simulation of the real world. And I forget, I had a physicist on the show and he said, Tom, objective reality is the number of photons reflecting off of any object. That's reality. But you don't perceive it like that. You look at something that's like, this is gray, that's white, your shirt is sort of green?

Sort of green, yeah.

And like you just perceive it like that. And so your brain is not making any attempt to represent reality. Your brain is making an attempt to keep you alive and help you navigate the world. And I just thought, oh, that's so interesting. So knowing the heuristics that my brain is using, the rules of thumb, the shorthand, it's not true, but it has this massive influence on my life. So something bad happens, and you take it on as negative, it makes you feel badly about yourself. And so I just put in all these rules of like, well, that's not objectively true. So if I'm not worried about objective truth, what should be sort of the North Star? And for me, the North Star became utility. What's useful? And so once I shifted away from trying to like be objectively true about myself, realizing I'm probably not gonna ever nail that, but I can get to something very, very useful. And so then I wrote my beliefs down and sort of started thinking about value system and I will end this rant with one thing which is recognizing that brain plasticity is real and so much of who we are, let's say it's roughly science says it's roughly 50%. It's not me making it up. That 50% is hardwired and you're not going to be able to do anything about it. But 50% is insanely malleable. and I love this quote so great that you can't make a racehorse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig. And I thought, okay, cool. So maybe I'll never be a racehorse, but I can be a really fast pig. And so whenever I'm feeling badly about myself or something knocks me off center, I just come back to that idea of what's useful? How do you move forward? Like, even if you're not going to be the greatest of all time, does it benefit you to act as if? you could become the greatest of all time if you pour yourself into it. And so I don't know that I'll ever end up being the greatest anything, but dude, acting like I can and like really practicing and moving through the world like I can become the greatest has propelled me forward.

Yeah, because acting like you can't won't get you there.

Yeah.

Won't make you good probably or great if you're constantly obsessing over why I'm not good enough or why I'll never become great. So acting like you can at least gives you a much better chance of getting somewhere than nowhere.

100%. It's what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that if I put time and energy into getting a new skill, I actually will get better at that thing. And if you then extrapolate that and say, and skills actually have utility, they matter. So knowing how to build a business that doesn't fall or build a business Build a building that doesn't fall down is very, very useful. Or build a business that doesn't fall apart. Right, that's it, right? So those skills actually let you do things. And so that's become sort of my obsession is getting people to understand you don't read a book to check a box, you don't go to school to impress your parents, you do it because the skill that you will acquire lets you do something in the world that other people can't do or you wouldn't be able to do and that has.

A material impact on your life. Yeah, I feel like you and I are are very similar in the fact that we talk about skills a lot and acquiring new skills. And I think when you have a down phase or a breakdown phase, that's when you should think about what are the skills I'm lacking that could benefit me so this doesn't happen again. I remember my early 20s, I had a lot of free time because I was broke on my sister's couch. I just obsessed over skills. And when you learn a skill that is hard that you don't think you can accomplish and you actually master it, for me, I feel unstoppable. I feel like I can accomplish anything. I feel like even in a setting where I feel uncomfortable, as long as I know in the back of my head I've got these other skills that maybe they don't know about that I could pull out at any time, it just make me more confident. I don't know if you feel the same way about acquiring skills.

100% and it's interesting and I know you talk about it so some people in your audience I'm sure have a sense, but I think of you very differently than they think of you. So I don't think of you as on air talent though you were obviously very gifted at that. Because I've spent so much time with you outside of that, like talking strategy around how do you grow a podcast? How do you get good at YouTube? How do you build a business? Like whatever and seeing how adept you are at those skills, like that's where it gets interesting. So that people understand that all the things you talk about, all the training that you do and stuff, it isn't the part that they see. Like the School of Greatness is sort of the tip of this very large iceberg of skills that you're building. And that to me is the fascination. When you're not focused on the tip, but you're focused on actually building that foundational set of skills, what you can do with your life and what you can make as the tip of the iceberg that other people will recognize becomes really, really interesting.

It's interesting. My skill was never, I'm a good interviewer or a host or anything. I never learned that skill, my skill was actually my fear was connecting with people. And as a teenager, I learned that in order to become successful in my life, I had to learn how to connect with people and build relationships. So I turned a fear into a superpower of building relationships. Then translating that into, okay, let me interview people was another thing I had to learn, but it was never my gift from birth. It was a skill I had to acquire and overcome. what was the greatest fear in the last five years that you had to overcome that has now become a skill or a superpower for you?

I think the only thing that I've sort of thought through like that is I feel like Kobe Bryant when he split from Shaq. And it was like he wanted to, he obviously had won a championship with Shaq, but could he win a championship on his own? And so my last company, so successful, but I did it with two partners.

Two partners.

And so now to have a new partner in Leesa, it's like, okay, can I also lead this team to a championship? And so that drives me in a way that I find so fun of like, okay, cool. Hey, as a part of that group, smashed it.

But can I do it over here?

So that like reinvention, you know, trying things and letting myself feel the weight of like, Hey, you gotta prove it, buddy. You had a big success once, can you do it again? And so doing that under new circumstances, to me, I love that. I love the excitement of, can I? Will he? Won't he? So that's a lot of fun. But that's something that I think if I thought about the world differently. So I don't value myself for achieving it. So whether I achieve it or not is irrelevant. But showing up every day and sincerely pursuing it is what I value. myself for. And I like to feel that sort of weight of like, hey, maybe you won't, maybe you're gonna fail. Maybe like it was only you as a part of this collective. Hey, you did a great job there. Or maybe it was just that moment in time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you wrote a wave, but like over here, can you create something from scratch? Can you repeat it? So yeah, that it's not, it's not, I don't live in a space of letting that be a fear. Sure, sure. But it's like, It's a cousin of that feeling.

Right.

Stepsister or something.

Yeah.

Where do you think all success starts with?

Well, the fast answer is mindset. Going back to the only belief that matters, you said it. The way you act is ultimately all that matters. And the way you act follows what you allow yourself to believe. Or maybe a better way to say it is what you choose to believe. So if you choose to believe that your energy and efforts will result in more skill set, then you will actually put energy and effort into getting that, which means you actually will get the skill set. But if you think, well, my talent and intelligence are fixed, so no matter how much I work, I'm never going to get better, right? I can't be a fast pig. And if you don't think that putting time and energy into it will yield anything, then you won't put time and energy into it and you thusly won't get the skills. So, and if you don't have the skills and you can't do the things other people to do. And so people just get stuck because they don't have the only belief that matters. So they don't put the time and energy. And so that's like where everything starts is are you putting the time and energy into getting better yes or no?

Yeah.

And when you get the most angry and reactive are the things that make you reactive?

Yes, very much so.

Maybe not angry, but like, well, no, this frustrates me. It's don't do that.

I think the same.

And I think you're right. I'm not somebody who's quick to anger in 99.9% of my life.

Yeah, you might not scream with anger.

I don't want to, Louis. That 0.1% really does get from me exactly where you're going, which is.

When.

I see somebody accept excuses, make excuses, do less than they can, and it impacts so if I'm honest, if it's just impacting them, I don't get angry, right? I feel compassion. But when it's like, and now you're dragging me down, now you're slowing me down, now you're trying to talk me out of something, now you're telling me I dream too big, now you're hurling stones at me or whatever, because of something that you've got on you and I'm freaking you out because of how I'm moving or what I'm going for or whatever, that actually does make me angry.

So how often does your team make you frustrated? If they're not taking responsibility 100% of the time.

Because we have, so one thing I learned back at Quest, because we grew so fast and I just wasn't smart enough at the time, you're only as good as what you write down. And you can be small and sort of communicate everything in these interpersonal relationships, but as you get bigger, it goes away.

And hope people have it memorized or something.

Interesting.

You're only as good as what you write down.

Correct. When you're running a company.

In terms of like having a process documented that someone could implement, not just a simple conversation that you hope they memorize.

100%. So coming into Impact Theory, you have to sign, it's not a pledge, but it's about as close to a pledge as you're going to get. And it's our culture code document. And it says things like, you will take 100% responsibility for your job. You will be expected to look beyond your role, I mean just like all these things.

I love this.

And one of them is, I only want to play with hardcore motherf***ers. And it says, this is not a safe space. So do not come here expecting people to be kind. Like look, here's the thing, I also expect you to elevate your team and to lift them up and to celebrate them and want them to win and like cheer them on and never worry about whether it was your idea. The only relationship worth being in, 'cause all relationships are sacrificed, the only relationship worth being in is where you feel like, whoa, like this person really cares about me. And I want people to retire at Impact Theory at a time where millennials stay at a company for 18 months. I'm asking them to stay for 40 years. Wow. Now, to do that, I've got to give you emotional stability. I've got to give you somewhere where you can build trust, where people are honest with you. But in being honest, people are going to be direct. They're going to say hard things in the spirit of I want to lift I want to see you get better because remember, we believe that you can get better and if you put your time and energy into improvement that you actually will improve and therefore you get more out of your life, the company gets more out of your involvement. But I really had to be hardcore about that because you'll hear a lot people say, Don't hire for skills, hire for culture. Or John Wooden, sort of the best explainer of this, the famous basketball coach, I don't look for the best player, I look for the best fit. That really is true, man. When you get somebody who you can really relate to and you can say hard things and they're receptive and they say hard things and you know they're coming from a good place, it elevates you. And it's fun to be around. As a social animal, we just love that stuff. That's huge, but I'm really hardcore on the way in so that once you're in, we can give you grace. Imagine if you were on my team and I don't, I try never to to people as employees. I slip up from time to time, but I really think of them as teammates. So if you're my teammate and you're like, Hey, look man, I'm really having a hard time. My girlfriend and I are just in a dark place right now and I'm gonna need a couple weeks just to go sort it out. Don't even explain.

I got it.

Cool, I got you. Tell me what I need to know to be able to pick up the slack for you. We refer to vacations as being sacred. So we don't have, the only vacation policy we have is that it's unlimited. So do whatever you want. get your work done. You need to be a high performer, yada, yada, yada. But like, if you need the time to deal with your girlfriend, the death and the family, whatever, take that time. Be an adult. Autonomy is huge for me. I assume it's huge for most people. So, but to do that, you've got to say, this is the criteria we expect you to meet.

You need to be high performing the rest of the time you're here.

And if any of this turns you off, then it's not for you. And it says that in the document. Like if this does not, if you're not prepared to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, then this is not the place for you.

Wow.

So is it literally saying a line, this is not a safe place?

Yes, this is not a safe space.

What does that mean, not a safe space?

It means that I'm going to make absolutely no effort to protect your feelings. I'm going to never, ever, ever sacrifice clarity for kindness. Now, I will be as kind. I want to be kind, dude. I want you to be kind to me. I want to be kind to you. My wife is my partner. I would never want an environment that was tearing her down. So it's like in the spirit of trying to elevate people. I'm not a Machiavellian kind of guy. That's gross to me. That is such a turn off. I want to, like you would treat a friend. Dude, if you're in a dark time, you're going to underperform and I'm down. I'm with it. I will do your work for you to create the space for you to have that moment. Because I know at some time it's going to be my moment, but that only works if I'm not parasitic, you're not parasitic. It's going to be hard enough if you don't have ill intent. Now, if you are lazy, if you have ill intent, if you are trying to milk the system or whatever, then it's never going to work. But if it's just legitimately you're going through a period we will all go through, which is a very hard time for whatever the hundreds of reasons throughout our lives that we will underperform, be in a dark place, whatever. If at that moment, people lift you back up, they brush you off, remind you of who you are and who you can be and they love you and they're there with you, cool. We all get it. But to do that, you really have to have a code of behavior on the way in.

You just have to.

The every day of it all, what do we expect? And I want to be around hardcore people for their own reasons, right? I don't want to have to sweat you. I don't even want to think about you. Like, I want you to go, I want you to go do your thing. I want to do my thing. I want to be able to count on you to crush it, and you can definitely count on me to crush it. And then if I need you, I will ask and hopefully you will aid me. And if you need me, I'm gonna run to your side to help you. But I don't want to micromanage. So, like, I want you to be good at what you do, to be getting better every day for your own reasons and there is a certain subset of humanity that is like that. If you get them in your company and you set them free, they won't all get in the groove but 80% is pretty magical.

What's the best hire you ever made?

My wife.

Besides your wife.

There have been a lot, dude. I'm super stoked in my team. How about instead of saying a person, I will give you types of personalities There you go. That I find intoxicating. Number one, somebody who is so convinced that they're not yet good enough to achieve their dreams, but so believe they can get there and are what I call a relentless problem solver. A relentless problem solver is worth their weight in gold. I don't need them to be highly educated. They will educate themselves over time. Somebody who's not afraid to speak to power, that is a big deal. I have a very strong personality and unintentionally I shut some personality types down. And a quote that popped into my mind one day when a person who shall remain nameless didn't use these exact words but basically said, Slow down so I can lead. And I was like, yeah, no. That does not...

Someone on your team said that.

Yes, not an impact theory. But at a point in my life, somebody once effectively said, Slow down so I can lead. And I remember being incensed that this person would allow themselves to say those words. That's so anathema to who I am. I could see myself saying, I can't keep up with you. You need to lead. And then I would follow and be the greatest follower that I could be. So that notion of, I want people that make me sweat. I want people that are like, they're trying to be so good for their own reasons that I'm like, yo, like keeping up with this person is intense. That's intoxicating for me.

So the times that most frustrate you, you have a code of ethics when people come in. So hopefully you're not frustrated because they understand their accountability, their actions, the behaviors, everything. But what are the times that frustrates you the most outside of your company?

Ooh, just in my personal life?

Yeah, just in life in general.

Inefficiency is the only thing that winds me up. It's the only thing that I will say I'm irrational about.

You're so active too.

You see something, you're like, nobody in the outside world would know because that's just ridiculous. I recognize that it's an offshoot of something that's very powerful in my life. My obsession with always doing things as efficiently as possible. But I also recognize that life isn't like you can't on my deathbed, I will never say, wow, I was efficient. Efficiency is useful towards getting to a goal. And so I prize it and I love it and all that. But my wife has tempered me and shown me that sometimes just the connecting, just being with somebody, just sitting and being is joyful.

It's enough. Yeah.

Yeah.

Not even not even just enough.

Enough.

Like it is precisely what the doctor ordered. And so, and I'm not great at that.

I don't care how you perceive David Goggins, because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars.

I thought it was women.

I thought it was.

I thought it was money. I thought it was everything.

The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself.