The 22 SIGNS You're Going To BE SUCCESSFUL | Lewis Howes

Success doesn't happen overnight but there are certain personal qualities and habits that will determine if you're on the right path. In this video, we detail the 22 signs that you're going to be successful. With all the tools you've learned and that wealth of information over 39 years, almost four decades, the strategies to break people through to help them overcome their challenges, If you can only have, if you had to strip them all away, you can always use one strategy or one thing to use. What would that be?

I wouldn't. Part of why I'm effective is because I don't buy that. I'm always looking for more strategy. Because one strategy will work with one person, not with another. But philosophically, I would say that the capacity to strengthen and increase your hunger is the one common denominator amongst the most successful people. You know, Richard Branson's a good friend of mine and Peter Guber, Steve Wynn, all these guys, they've never lost their hunger. Most people are hungry to achieve a certain amount, make a certain amount of money, and then they get comfortable and relax or to get a certain level of fitness and then they relax. But, you know, Richard is as driven today as when he was 16 years old starting. I mean, he's like, on fire and he's 65 years old. Warren Buffett is 85 years old. He's as driven today as when he began the journey, right? And so people that have that hunger, I believe intelligence, I love people that are wickedly smart. And I work to be wickedly smart by educating and training myself and so forth and training my brain. But there's a lot of intelligent people can't fight their way out of a paper bag, right? Hunger is the ultimate driver. Because if you're hungry, you can get the strategy, you can get the answer. If you can't model it, you can find it. So hunger, modeling would be maybe the next best skill, knowing that success leaves clues. Like, why reinvent the wheel? If someone took this plane, was Mickey's plane who owns the Miami Heat and owns Carnival, right? I mean, you can learn so much from the man like Mickey, blow your mind what this man has been able to do in his life. And so why would I go learn by trial and error and maybe take 10 or 20 years when I could learn from somebody in a few weeks or a few months or a few hours something that could save me a decade. That's what it is. That's why I read 700 books in the first seven years because if somebody takes 10 years of their life, they pour into a book, and I can read that in an hour, two or.

Three or four, why wouldn't I? So how does someone continue to stay hungry or rediscover what they're hungry about?

The best way is get around where it's better and things will hit you.

Say it again.

Get around where it's better and things will hit you. who you spend time with is who you become. So, you know, when I started coaching all these billionaires, you know, there's a part of me that said, I, you know, I'm as smart in these certain areas as they are. I gotta step my game up. It's not about the money. It's about how can I take the invisible and make it visible? How can I find a way to add more value to other people to such an extent where economics are not a question whatsoever? And then I can take those economics and do even more where I'm not there. I look at money as portable power. I can leverage my money to do things for people even when I sleep. Now, I love doing these for people and I work 18-20 hour days still, but it's really nice to have the leverage of that as well.

The gap between who people are and what they tell you they want to accomplish. Because in the beginning, I hired everyone. Everyone. Not because I'm super smart and thought, hey, I should. There was no one else. We had the smallest handful of people ever. And so I started doing the interviewing. As I was doing it, I start realizing, God, these guys tell me they want to do something amazing with their life. And if you just listen like, wow, yeah, I want to be on your team, dude. You're going to do amazing stuff. And then you realize they can't execute on that dream. So why can't they? They don't have the mindset yet. Like there's a... You could do an entire podcast series on how to get the mindset, but I'll just use Carol Dweck and her amazing book, Mindset. I'll have it up there too on the shelf somewhere. I'm sure, such a good book. I see Simon Sinek up there, who was also very influential on us. And she says some people either believe they're as smart as they're ever going to be and that's that, so they're going to be ego protective and they're going to try to thwart anything that makes them feel like they're not the smartest person or whatever. And then there's people with a growth mindset and they realize I'm not the smartest person and I'm certainly not as smart as I could be. So even if I am the smartest person that ever lived, I could get.

A little bit smarter.

And so when they're confronted with contradictory information, they learn and they soak it up like a sponge.

Whereas other people are fixed mindset, right? Correct. Fixed on like, no, this is the.

Way and I'm right and that's wrong. Yes, and I would say the world, everyone's on a spectrum, right? Even I, as much as I believe in it and work my ass off to be a growth mindset, I still have, let's call it 10% where I catch myself and I'm like, come on dude, you know better than that.

Yeah.

But so, people that fall in the let's say sub 50% spectrum of the.

Growth mindset, it's got to be 98%. So what's the question you ask people now when you hire them to know.

If they have a growth mindset?

Of our fixed mindset.

You ready? Ready. It's a weird thing. People actually, I don't let them do it anymore, but people actually used to ask if they could come in and sit in on the interviews because they were so weird. Not intentionally so. It was just to really get to a human being and who they are, it requires some weird stuff. So it goes like this. You walk in the door, there's a couple bad things happening. One, your anxiety levels are through the roof because you're in this weird setting. You're on my turf. You're sitting across from me. They built me up. Oh, it's the president of the company. So people come in and if you like, Put your fingers on their aorta, their arteries, and you're gonna, you know, the heart's gonna be just racing out of control. So that's problem number one. The blood is literally leaving the prefrontal cortex and they're just in a bad state.

They probably wanna say anything to get the job.

And that takes us to the tyranny of being chosen. Well said, my friend. So people come in, they want to be picked, right? Being picked is accepted, acknowledged, chosen, yes. Hell yeah, we all want that. I teach people about the tyranny of being chosen and I still have to check myself. 'cause it's just rad to be picked. Like there's no two ways about it. So they walk in, they're nervous as hell, they've got the tyranny of being chosen, they want to win the job, they're not trying to assess the opportunity, they're not asking is this job right for me? They're merely trying to be selected. So step one is, hey, welcome. I understand this is a very weird situation. So I want to bring your anxiety levels down as much as possible. You should be interviewing me. You should be kicking my tires and figuring out if I'm right for you. You're offering to give me 50% of your waking hours. you better love this job. Like for some reason, this job better be moving you towards what you want for selfish reasons. So literally, I open the interview by saying that and then saying, I'm here to answer one question and one question only. When you're at your most selfish, are you good for me? And when I'm at my most selfish, am I good for you? And when you see an alignment of selfish desires, it really is beautiful. And I'll give you an example. My chief marketing officer, Nick Robinson, really, really sharp kid. He wants to build a media empire. He's not so worried about obesity. He struggled himself a little bit, so I think it resonated with him, but that wasn't a stated thing for him. He's got much bigger goals that he needs to build a media empire to do it. Now, I need a media empire in order to get this brand to mean something to people so it can bring the kind of value to their lives that I wanted to bring. So here, I need somebody that has, when they're at their most selfish, they are learning about building a media empire. And he's thinking, I need somebody to.

Fund this whole thing while I learn.

How to build a media empire and try that. Because I can't pay it all myself. Yeah, exactly. so that's the alignment of selfish desires. So I'm trying to put people in that position where they're just trying to figure out if this is right for them, which hopefully lowers their anxiety levels and they're no longer worried about being picked. And then the sort of Trojan horse is I'm trying to get them outside of the interview answers because I'm not going to see the real them, I'm going to see the representative that they send. And when you were on Inside Quest, there was a moment on the show and that's why I stopped. And I was like, the way this dude is looking at me, like I wish everybody could see, because you weren't there to give me pat answers You were actually engaged.

I mean, I was almost crying at a couple points. It was like, I wanted to be as real as possible and be engaged as possible. And I think you got to allow yourself to go anywhere and everywhere to get that truth.

For sure. And when you, and it was like a beautiful moment, right? It was really, it was so cool to share that and to have been able to create an environment like that where you could be so raw, so real. We had an audience. I mean, it was just like, so it created this whole vibe in the room. It's like one of those late night where it's dark and everybody can and like let their guard down. If you can get that to happen in an interview as uneasy as that is, then you get to the real person. So the technique I use for that is a confession. So I tell them, look, I'm gonna try and get you to lower your guard and reveal yourself as quickly to me as possible so that I can judge you and I'm gonna reciprocate and I'm gonna lower my guard and reveal myself as quickly to you as possible so that you can figure out whether...

This is what you want.

Yeah, exactly. If it's what you want.

Right.

So and the confession is really simple. what to say is actually true. I want to be a Jedi. First of all, I think in movies almost at all times. So the Matrix is the perfect example of my life and comics. Yes, 100%. And so I have no interest in wielding a lightsaber. That's not interesting to me. But the ability to influence, these are not the droids you're looking for. That is so meaningful to me. One, because it allows you to control your own mind, right? There's no more powerful mind control than control over one's own mind. And then being, because I believe that I use it not only for the good of that person, right? You should be a quest for the exact number of days that it's the most selfish thing you can do. So I'm already thinking of you.

And then we've got... So you don't want them to stay.

Forever if it's not selfish for them anymore.

No way.

You want them to get out as quickly as possible. 100%. Interesting.

Dude, nothing terrifies me because I lost eight and a half years of my life. Like a place in being safe because.

It was comfortable, good money, good, you know. Exactly. All those things, yeah. And it really felt like I lost them. And I was like, time is the most precious commodity you have. And I mean, look, I reframed it because it doesn't do me any good to sit there and say I lost eight and a half years of my life. I learned a lot, but it was like, it was unnecessary the way that I went about, like I learned every lesson the hardest way possible with the most pain and suffering possible. So I'm emotionally just keenly aware of what it means to service someone else's dream rather than your own. And I think, so Elon Musk inspires the life out of me. Like that guy just dreaming the way that he dreams is so incredible. to me, I want to find the next Elon Musk, light them on fire, and get them to believe that they can do that and they can execute on that level. And so the sort of background thing that's really important.

Even if they leave you.

100%.

So help you get to the next level while cultivating that within them. And then when they're ready to leave and it no longer serves them or you, then you want them to go out and be happy.

For sure. And we've had, I've taught two people to be direct competitors and they've gone on to launch nutrition companies.

Their own bars or.

Yep. 100% and to me that's the, if you take it out to the natural conclusion. So we make a promise to our employees and I'm going to try to set you free. I think of it in matrix terms, right? So I'm going to try and free you from the matrix. As someone helped free me from the matrix, I feel obligated to pay that back. And getting free of the matrix is shorthand for learning to think like an entrepreneur, right? You hit an obstacle, you don't stop, you find a way around it, you have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. I want to do that for people and I want Quest to be that environment. Whether you meet me, spend time with me should be irrelevant, just that Quest environment is going to provide that to you. So to that end, we tell people, I will teach you anything you want to know. I will give you the list of books in order that I think you should read to be able to take my job from me. I will at every corner encourage or every turn encourage. If you have an entrepreneurial spark and you want to chase it, I will encourage that. I will never ask you to hide your passions from me. The only catch is your tuition. You have to be killer at your job.

Yeah.

Right?

If you're killing it at your job, Whatever you want. Right, then your reward is Quest University and our goal is to teach you all those things and some of it's formalized, teaching people basic finance and things like that. The whole show Inside Quest was meant to be us paying that forward and teaching people that mindset, bringing on people like yourself to come on and just show people how far you can take that mindset, how you can go from injury to just massive accomplishment in a ridiculously short period of time. People were super inspired by that. So that kind of thing is our promise but if you follow that out to its natural conclusion, ultimately someone comes and says, yeah, you'll teach me anything. you'll encourage me entrepreneurial, teach me how to build a nutrition company, and we'll do it.

What are some daily habits or rituals that you have to just sharpen your mind every single day that others can apply?

Okay, so I think here's the thing when it comes to your memory. Two-thirds of it is, so people are concerned that they're growing older, but I could say you can improve your memory regardless of your age, your background, your career, your diet, your level of education, your financial situation, your gender, your health situation, your IQ, anything, it can be improved. Here's the thing, one-third of your memory is predetermined by biology and genetics, but that's so exciting because that means two-thirds, the majority, twice as much is completely in your control.

That's cool.

And so the things that move the needle, for example, are like 10 things that I'm thinking about that's going to move the needle completely of that two-thirds. So it's a good diet. Right, so a good diet because you are what you eat. Right, and so there are certain brain foods that we know is good for your mind.

Dr. Amen talked about that as well.

A lot of that.

You know, everything from blueberries to walnuts and everything. Right, so there's good diet. And number two, killing ants. Killing in the automatic negative thoughts, which is a big for a lot of people. Remember, your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk and it's a practice, right? So you want to be able to eliminate the negative talk. And you can't just eliminate something, you just have to replace it with something else. Positive. Right, exactly. You can't just stop smoking. you have to start doing something else. So my memory, because here's the thing that you want to avoid. A lot of people start taking pride in how bad certain things are in their life. It gives them significance.

Very much so.

You nailed it. People start getting pride because my memory is so bad if I don't write my grocery list and triplicates, I won't remember it. And like, oh, you think you're forgetful? This is how forgetful I am. Or this is how bad. And people also have this with busyness. is so bad nowadays. Everybody has to be busy because that makes them so that person must be so important, right? And so that we got to get off that cult of being busy.

Congratulations for being the most busy person.

You're right, exactly. Like that everybody has to do. But people starting to gain pride, they start designing their life around being busy and they wonder why they're all stressed out all the time. So automatic negative thoughts kill those ants. Number three, that's good that you have to do daily is exercise, right? Because, you know, your body and your brain that's connected. And there's actually certain exercises you could do to build your brain power. So for example, juggling, extremely good for your brain. It's been shown on Oxford last year, there was a study saying that jugglers actually have bigger brains. You could actually build more white matter. It's also a great tip for speed reading because as you're juggling three balls, your eyes only have two of them. You can't focus on all three. So you have to soften your gaze. I take in more, like peripheral vision, and trains you that way so you can actually take in more words as you're reading. but it actually builds more white matter as you're doing it. There are certain exercises also we teach people. This is a field called educational kinesiology where certain body movements actually helps build your brain power, which is these cross-laterals and these kind of fun things. Even something simple like, you know, like we're always on the computer all the time, so it's really important to kind of keep your hands and your fingers kind of stretched. But, you know, can you do one twice as fast? Like, literally like this. Oh, that's interesting. Something like that, you know. Three times. Or something like that.

Yeah.

Or like you're pulling in energy like this, but what if you had to do one forward and one back? But there's been so many exercises for people, like eating with the opposite hand is actually good for your brain. Or brushing your teeth with the opposite hand. Very, very good exercise to actually build your brain power. So exercise is really good, but I mean just being physically fit is good for your brain, right? It's good for staving off a lot of brain challenges. Okay, fourth thing that people need to incorporate is brain nutrients, because a lot of people, they're not getting it from their soil or maybe their food. so maybe a supplement in certain things.

Right.

Number five, this is a big one and I know you're big on this, a positive peer group. Because you are what you eat, you know, and you are, but you are also who you spend time with. Of course.

Right.

So if you want a bigger brain, you want your mind to be active and everything, be around people that challenge you, that support you, that teach you things that encourage you, that are positive because we are the average of the five people, as you know, that we spend the most time with. So positive peer groups good for your brain. Number six that's good for your brain is clean environment. They find that, and you know this, like when people start cleaning their desk, that their external world starts reflecting their internal world and vice versa. So clean environment helps you be more organized inside also as well. Number seven that's good for your brain in terms of lifestyle, what I do every single day is things like sleep. Sleep is so important. People, that's where you're rebuilding, you're rejuvenating, you're restoring. But we live, there's this whole epidemic of sleeplessness. and people aren't getting enough sleep. And as I'm going through this list, people should go through it. This is common sense, but not common practice. That's the difference, right? People's like, there's some zones here that people like, you know, I'm not spending time with the right people, or maybe, you know, I'm really not getting that much sleep, or maybe my diet or my negative self-talk. There's one or two things that if you fix it and you put energy there, it'll just, your business could double, because you're double. That's number seven. Number eight is brain protection. So important to protect your brain because people who are accident prone or they're doing a lot of extreme sports, they're active, you want to make sure you wear helmets and just make, because your brain is resilient but it's this controls everything.

You smash it and you're done. My father 10 years ago got in a car accident and he's still recovering. He's not the same person. He can't work anymore. He forgets a lot. It's a challenge.

And see, that's why I do what I do, because I never want people to suffer the way that I was struggling every single day for like 15 years straight. You know, just because it reflects on, you know, when I was in that hospital bed going through all that, and then it was so funny, like not funny as in haha funny, but when this young lady who read the 30 books in 30 days and saved her mother's life, she gave me one of those books and inside the book was this photograph and it was she was using it as a bookmark and it was her mother in the hospital and it reminded me when I was in the hospital and so yeah take care of your brain. Number nine is new learnings. Learn something new every single day. Never let your head hit that pillow being the same as it was when it woke up ever.

So listen to podcasts.

Listen to podcasts. Exactly. Watch your TED talks.

Take my course or anything new learnings.

Because here's the thing, we've learned more about your brain in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years. And according to science neurogenesis, that your brain can create new brain cells even as it grows older. And neuroplasticity is saying you can make new, your brain's like plastic, it's so malleable, but just having a new thought creates more connections. And so Einstein's brain wasn't any bigger than anybody else's, but he had more connections than most people on the certain areas and those connections come from new learnings. And that's all learning is, is connecting something you don't know to something you know and making new connections like that. So always new learnings and always challenge yourself. And that's probably the most out of it. And then finally, number 10, what I try to practice every single day is stress management. You know, if you want to know what the biggest obstacle is for people's brains is stress. Stress creates cortisol, adrenaline in your body. It's really good for fight or flight. It's not really good if you need to take a test. It's not really good if you need to study. It's not really have to read reports and journals and learn something brand new or learn a language.

Sure.

Because that'll shut down parts of your brain.

Wow.

So those are the 10 things that I focus on every single day. That's what's gonna move the needle.

A lot of people that come to me are afraid of certain things. And at an early age, I was afraid of a lot of things. I was afraid to talk to girls, as a 12 year old, I was afraid of speaking in public, I was afraid of dancing, I was afraid of.

All these things, right?

And I got so sick and tired of being afraid that I just said, I'm gonna give myself a challenge every day, you know, when I was afraid of girls, I was like, every time I see a girl that gives me butterflies, I'm gonna go up to them and start a conversation. And it's terrifying and I'm sweating and I'm stumbling over my words, And people rejected me the first few times, but I just kept doing it until the girl said, hi, nice to see you. And you give a little confidence until, you know, by the end of the summer when I was a teenager, it was like every girl was talking to me. -Of course. -And I tell people you gotta embrace the fear until the fear disappears. It's similar with the feelings.

Yeah.

You've gotta live in the feelings until... What would you say?

-Feel the feelings. It's no longer requires to be felt. That's right. Because what you're really describing so eloquently is you had a massive massive fear of rejection, talking to girls, speaking in public, asking...

Feeling enough?

Yeah, someone asking to employ you or pay you. So we have a great fear of rejection, which is not surprising because when we're born, we have two drivers: find connection, avoid rejection. After all, if a mother rejects a child, if a lion rejects the cub, it's not going to be adopted. It will die.

Yeah.

Or it just starves to death. And so we know innately that our survival on the planet is linked to not being rejected. and not that long ago you would have died from rejection. You know, in a thousand years ago when they banished you outside the walls of the city or you marooned a difficult sailor or you cast someone out of the community, you pretty much died. There was nothing out there but purgatory. So we have a wiring that says rejection will kill me and that's why you had the fear. But when you can dialogue with the other, no, it feels like it will kill me. It can't kill me because no girl can reject me unless I give her my permission.

Right, give them my power.

You can't reject me unless I agree with everything. I don't like you because you've got short hair. I don't like your shirt. I don't like you because you're white, not white tall, short glasses, not. But when you say you can't reject me, I can't be rejected because the only person who can reject me is me. You can talk to girls realizing even if they say no, you're not my type, I'm with someone, no thanks, or even, ew, not no. they can only reject you if you let that in. And we look at someone like James Corden who's certainly not gorgeous but women love him because he's funny. So funny.

So funny.

You know, we like warm people, you know, the packaging is all very nice. Well, us will have a great packaging, a great wrapper, but they're unhappy. And so our greatest fear is to be rejected. But the truth is In 2018, you could live in this apartment, have Amazon deliver your groceries, never see a soul, and you probably live until you're 106. Wouldn't advise it, but we don't die of rejection anymore, but we still feel like we will. And all schools should be teaching kids you cannot be rejected. You can ask for a pay rise. You can ask for crowdfunding. You can go to someone and go, Here's my idea. You can write a book. Speak in public. because I work with a lot of actors who say, I'm so scared of rejection. I'm like, well, how are you going.

To be an actor then?

Because you're supposed to be rejected. So what you and I write books for everyone who loves it, there's going to be the odd person who goes, I hate this book and I hate that writer too. But we don't let it in. We have to laugh about it when you give a YouTube talk. I mean, I've got, one of my talks has got like three million views and there's a few in there going, I hate her stuck-up English snob. but they don't know me because that's not me at all. But I don't go, oh my god, I can never write another book. I can, I'm okay because I don't let it in because the only opinion that matters is my opinion. I know I'm not a stuck up English snob, so that can't hurt me.

Because if it did, I wouldn't be sharing it with you.

Right, yeah.

So if everyone's giving you negative feedback or critical feedback on who you are, your performance, your work, how does someone not let it affect them? How does someone say, okay, it can't be changed?

That's such a great question. So if someone just comes in and goes, I hate that shirt, or that color is so not you, or you should never have cut your hair, or, oh, you've got a bit heavy, you just go, thanks for sharing that. Just a really simple thing which says, thank you for sharing your opinion, which I can choose to not let in. You don't have to do anything else. When the minute you go, your shirt's pretty awful, or look at your hair, or calling me heavy, you look anaerobic, you've let it in, and now you're trying to retaliate. And it's like a game of tennis. If you put down your racket and walk off the court, you can't volley. So the first thing to say is thanks for sharing that. And it's very good for the little barbs we get from people, family, friends, sisters, cousins exes. If someone is really mean and says, you know, I listened to your talk on YouTube, oh my god, you stank up the place, I was embarrassed for you. Then you go back and you say, I missed that. Could you repeat that for me? Slowly. They were usually not bothered because they know that in you asking them to repeat it slowly, you're gonna call them out on it. And they usually go, oh me and my big mouth, I'm just having a bad day. I didn't actually really watch it anyway. Just ignore me. And if they do, you must not go after them and go, no, I want you to just repeat it right now, say it to my face. Don't do that because a bit like a lion who bares the teeth, they're saying, Back off and I don't want to attack you. When a lion bares its teeth, you don't go up to it, you walk away. It gives you a chance to retract. So saying, Could you repeat that slowly? is giving the person a chance to retract. They almost always do, but occasionally they'll come back and go, no, I just said you're so wooden as a speaker, as an insult to wood. And then you have your third reaction which is oh are you trying to make me feel bad about myself? Amazing. They usually go no, no me. No I thought I should tell you how bad you are because you need to get help or never speak in public again or I mean I had a nanny once who was so awful I had to say to her darling you're wonderful but you're not meant to be a nanny. and I didn't criticize her, I just advised her to go and do something else and we're still friends. Sometimes people think that the criticism and the barbs and the humor are a good way to give you a message. So when you say you're trying to hurt my feelings, they often say no. When you're being bullied at school, if you say they go, yeah, I really am. I want to hurt your feelings. That's the point, dummy. Why? Because it's a domination. Bullying is just dominating. It's a bit like a the seesaw, the bully feels there at the bottom and you're above them and they can only diminish you or embellish themselves to be above you on this little seesaw.

So they feel inferior.

Yeah, bullies always feel inferior. So let's imagine you're poor, your dad drinks, you don't have any money and there's this kid with new trainers and a new backpack and they come up and say you're just a faggot or you're gay because they can't really embellish themselves themselves. So the next option is let me diminish you. I mean, the embellishment is that no one in my family has been divorced, so when we fight it must be your fault. I mean, you're from divorced people or, well, I've got a degree and you haven't or I've already raised a kid and I've got no problem with those ones, so this must be your fault. So you can embellish yourself, but if you can't, you go into diminishment. And so when someone says, yes, I am trying to hurt you, your feelings, you simply reply, well, it's not going to work because I'm not letting that in. And I was in my garden last week filming an anti-bullying program which we're giving away to every school. And I had these kids and this little girl was saying, I'm not letting that in. That's not going to work. And I said, how do you feel? Because I feel so good because he's not hurting my face. I'm not letting it in. He can't hurt me because I'm just. I'm not going to let that in. And then when it was his turn, he said, I'm kind of running, I'm becoming demotivated to bully her. I'm totally demotivated. I was enjoying it because he got to the horrible things. He said, I'm so demotivated. I'm running out of stuff to say because she just won't let it in. And then they switched and she said the same thing. What's the point? He's not letting it in. I just want to stop this now. So that's the fourth option. Well, that won't work. because I'm not letting it in. And the fifth stage is to say, particularly with adults, like if you have a bullying co-worker, do you know, since we're sharing here, you do know, don't you, that people who are critical have so much criticism reserved for themselves, they actively dislike themselves. And you're actually showing me and the entire office that you really don't like yourself.

By critiquing me?

Yeah, by critiquing, you're just showing me. Yeah, critical people always have criticism reserved for themselves. They are full of self-criticism but they reflect it out. And superior people and happy people always praise and people who feel inadequate always criticize. Because criticize withers you and praise builds you up. And if you can use those five dinnings, thanks for sharing, could you repeat that? Are you trying to hurt my feelings? Won't work, I'm not letting it in. Since we're sharing, did you know what is running your critical behavior? you don't let it in and being able to not let in criticism, that too will change your life. It makes you bulletproof. You can't stop being mean and having a horrible day and we now have trolling which is becoming an epidemic so it's actually worse. Our kids used to get bullied at school and go home to a sanctuary.

Now they're bullied online.

Now they're bullied online, on the phone and it never ends and they feel really attacked. And see when you find trolls, they're usually really miserable and unhappy, but they love the power because they have no power. They live on their own or with their mum. They have no life. I mean we had a terrible situation in England where somebody was trolling this person whose child had been kidnapped and when they exposed her, she killed herself. Which was a terrible thing for her, but obviously her sense of shame that she was outed and to kill herself but she must have felt terrible. I felt so sorry for her. But she was very vicious in her trolling but that's a really unhappy person. She needed a lot of help. But when you can teach people to come back from criticism without fighting or going well I hate you too or you're all shut up or crying when you can just teach them look I'm not letting it. It's like if I try to give you a gift, you go, and I don't need that gift. I'm holding the gift. I can't give you something if you don't take it. I can't serve papers on you unless you accept them. I can't serve a volley to you unless you volley it back. So when you learn that people can try and give you anything, but if you don't accept it, you haven't let it in. And if you don't let it in, it can't hurt you. It just hurts the person who's left holding it.

Years ago, I used to, when I got early in my career, I would react to any negative comment that I got online. Twitter, Facebook, whatever it might be. Anything that was critical towards me, it was like I had to defend myself.

Sure.

You don't know this much.

-'Cause you let it in.

-I let everything in. I let everything control, consume me. So, I was driven to be perfect to try to like never let anyone criticize me. And then when they did, I was like, You don't know me, you don't know this. And I remember feeling so exhausted.

Of course.

Trying to reply and be defensive and whatever it may be. And sometimes these arguments online, we go back and forth for days or weeks.

Just waiting for... And then you forget what you've even argued about in the first place.

And a good coach of mine at one point, he saw me, this was years ago, saw me like I'd gotten a lot better. But still five years ago, I like tried to defend myself with like a very positive response that was like, well, here's why I did this, this and this, but nothing negative about that, right? And he called me out, he said, Listen, don't even respond like that. Just say thank you for the feedback.

Yeah.

Period.

Thanks for sharing. Exactly what you said. Just like, thank you for the feedback and let it go. Yeah. And really now I think about, you know, the biggest critics are the ones who aren't creating. If you're, you don't see an author you never go on Amazon and leave a negative review for another author.

No, I haven't. You know how much?

Yeah.

And it says there's never been a statue erected to a critic. And I gave it to one of my clients who's an actor. That's great. And it's such a great thing. There's never been a statue or a monument directed to a critic. That's great.

Yeah.

We had a critic in London, a critic play critic, and he actually wrote a play and it was absolutely hammered. And he went, I never realized what I was doing to people, how much I hurt them when I reviewed them. it was funny to make a joke at their expense. Oh my god, this book should not be put down, indeed it should be thrown as far away from the unfortunate reader as possible.

Wow.

He wrote that and then people started to get their own back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The trouble with this book is once you put it down you simply can't pick it up again. That's funny isn't it? But not for the person who wrote it.

Exactly.

But I wanted to ask first what the difference is between someone who is financially rich and someone who's financially poor. What's the difference?

There's lots of differences, but I'd say the first one is someone who is financially rich is an owner. They're not a consumer. They're a consumer also. But when somebody is poor, they're a consumer. All they do is they take, you know, I always tell people we're all financial traders. I'm not a financial trader. Yes, you are. You're trading time for money. That's the worst trade you can ever make in your life. Somebody who's wealthy has made money their slave. They're no longer the slave to money. And the way they do that is they figured out how to become an owner. And the way you do that in the most simplistic way, I even taught it in my first book, was you have to decide there's a percentage of money that you're going to keep forever. You're not going to give it to Kate Spade or Ferrari or anybody else. You can do that too. but there's a percentage of that income that never will be touched, that you will grow and compound and will provide income for the rest of your life so you don't have to work. Now, when I was growing up, everybody's goal was get rich enough so you never have to work. Now, like all my friends are 15, 18, 19 years my senior, people like Steve Wynn, who built most of Las Vegas, he's like 74. Warren Buffett's 85. Peter Guber, one of my dearest friends in the world, owns the Golden State Warriors, the LA Dodgers. We're partners in the LAFC football team. in LA, brilliant guy, 74 years old, and they're all working harder now than they ever were, and they don't have to work. So the goal is make enough money so you don't have to work, and then you'll do what you love, and you'll pour your time and energy into it. But you have to make that decision. It's the first, most important decision is I'm going to become an owner of American business. You don't want to have an Apple phone and not own Apple. And you don't want to just own Apple because any company can go up and down. You want to own the index. You want to own a variety with enough diversification. but if you can just shift, and I've taught people who've told me they couldn't, they have no money, they can't save, it's really easy once you get momentum. There's a research project I did with a gentleman who was nominated for the Nobel Prize on behavioral finance. And what he did was he said, if you can even, you know, you need to save 15% ideally, but if you could even save 3% because anybody can do that. They took a group of blue collar workers in the Midwest and said, We're going to force you to save 3%. I think it was 3.25 or 3.5. But then everybody can go on a diet tomorrow. Everybody can save money tomorrow, right? So his tool was, all right, you're not going to save today, you're going to save tomorrow. We'll do the 3.5%, but then you go to your employer and say, the next time I get a raise, the first 5% goes to my savings account, to my investing account. And then every time you get a raise to do that, well, in 14 years, the average person was saving 15% and the top 40% were saving 20. Let me explain what that means. You and I were together before. When I'm trying to explain compounding to people, everybody understands it intellectually. But when I ask some of the richest people in the world, what are most investors failing to do? And they all say they're not tapping the power of compounding. So if you're in a situation where, as an example, let's take you've got $100,000 that you've saved. You're 35 years old. and you put it in the market and just leave it there and never add anything to it. If you leave it in the market and you're only being charged 1% in fees at retirement 35 years later, you got 762,000 from that 100. Never added a dime. It grew that much. But if you pay 3% in fees, which is the average most people are paying, when you ask people, are they paying, they don't know, or they say 1%. Because when you hear about fees, let's say a mutual fund fee, you'll always hear 1%. That's the expense ratio. There are 17 other fees. So, every 1% you overpay, 1% is the average. If you pay two or three and the average mutual fund is 3.12, it sounds like nothing, 1% or 2%. But every 1% you overpay because of compounding means you lose a decade of income. So, the person who paid 1% has 762,000. The person who paid 3% has $452,000 and they own the same stocks. It's just fees. So, while we compound our interest, we also compound fees. So if you could save 3% and build it to 5, 10, 15, or you start with 10 or 15 and eventually get to 20, the best example I can give your viewers is that there's a gentleman who worked for UPS who literally never made more than $14,000 a year. You heard about him in the book. And when he retired, he had $70 million. And he gave away $35 million while he was alive. And the reason was a friend of his set him aside and said, look, I'm going to make you rich. He goes, I'm never going to be rich. I make 14 grand a year. He goes, I'm going to make you rich. I'm going to make you rich later in life. And I'm going to do it by a 20 tax to your business. And he goes, I make 14,000 a year. I can't live on 20 less. His friend said to him, if the IRS came and said a 20 more tax, you'd scream, you'd yell and you'd pay it. And he said, we're going to pay it for you. And that 20 compounded generated $70 million. So, for the people that are home, the sooner you start, the better off you are because compounding does it. I've got an example in the book of a guy that starts at 19. He puts aside $300 a month. He stops at 27. So he does it for eight years. He only puts in, I think it was $35,000. But it's a million dollars by leaving in the market when he turned 65 and he stopped at 28. He has a best friend that starts at 28 and invests his entire life, puts in $180,000 and he has less money at the end. The sooner you start, the better you are. Yeah.

So many questions I want to ask.

I don't know how many I want to ask.

So, is there a way to be financially free just by saying I'm going to earn more every year as opposed to investing every year? Can you do without investing at all or do you have to invest? And when you say put it in the market, you mean put it in index funds is what I'm-- well, in.

The book I explain you've got to have diversification.

Don't just throw it in the stock and just-- no, and what most people.

Do is they go to a mutual fund They think it sounds logical. I'm no good at this. This is not my skill a person says. You go to a professional who runs a mutual fund. What do they do? They figure out a series of investments to make. They put it in the fund and they do it for you. And you think, well, gosh, they're smarter than I am. They'll do well. You assume that, but the truth is they charge so much that even if they did have an advantage, they lose it. I interviewed David Swensen, who's the head of chief investment officer at Yale. It took Yale 200 years to get a billion dollars that they saved. He turned it into 25 billion in two decades. It's unheard of. He's the greatest institutional investor of all time. And one of the things that he told me, he said, Tony, you just got to understand something. He said, you,'re never going to earn your way to wealth. He said, how many people have you seen, movie stars, actors, athletes? You know, the other day, 50 Cent just went broke, right? He made $100 million on vitamin water alone. Somebody gave him a tip. And he would have had a half a billion dollars and he's broke. Completely broke. Mike Tyson made a half a billion dollars and went broke.

You can understand that a little bit. Yeah, I think it's 78% of NFL.

Players go bankrupt two years after that's correct. And the average lifespan of an NFL player is three and a half years. So these guys work their whole life, they go through these rough injuries and they do not invest. So the answer is you can make a fortune. Elton John didn't go bankrupt because it's different rules in England, but he got in trouble. who I just saw the other day is, what's his name? The Pirates Caribbean, what's his name? Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp's going bankrupt right now.

Johnny Depp, he's making like 20, 30 million a year. Johnny Depp was worth $700 million, three quarters of a billion. He's on the verge of bankruptcy right now, can't pay his bills. He was spending $30,000 a month on wine alone. Oh my gosh. He spent $3 million to take Hunter Thompson's body, burn it, put the dust into this giant cannon and shoot his dust into space, three million bucks. It doesn't matter how much money you earn, you can always get rid of.

It and lose it.

Buy an island and watch how quickly it disappears. So what I show people is, what you really want to do is create an income for life without working. The goal, if you own a business, and I would assume a lot of your viewers are business owners or getting started in business, no matter how good you are in business, think about this. The one universal rule that idiots in finance know is diversification. It's the only free lunch. You've got to diversify. Because if you put all your eggs in one basket, no matter how good the basket is, one day that real estate market, that stock market, that bond market, that collectibles market, whatever you invest in, Ray Dalio showed me statistically, it'll drop 50 to 70% on a day. Now, if you're later in life when that happens, it's over for you. So you have to diversify and yet most people they know real estate so they do it or they know stocks they do it or they grew up with their parents flipping things and it's the wrong thing to do. So you've got to diversify in order for you to be able to truly succeed and that's why when you own a business, if you put all your money in your business which is what most of us do naturally, you put all your eggs in one basket and there's things that can happen. I mean, you know, let's say you spent 20 years and you figured out how to put together the ultimate map You know, and you remember Garmin came out with this thing called the TomTom. I don't know if you remember, used to put on your... Are you old enough to remember that? Used to put on your phone? Yeah. Or you put on your... On the dash?

Cost a hundred bucks.

It was a breakthrough. They were making like a hundred million or something.

Yeah.

They were.

Yeah.

Six months later, what happened? The iPhone came out with Google Maps. These little bastards. Excuse my French. Came out with it, put Google Maps, put their own map on here, and cost how much? Zero. What are they gonna do to your business when someone takes your product or service and gives away for free? free. So I always tell people, competition happens, technology happens. What you must do is have a second business with no moving parts, no people, no time. Maybe it takes you two, three days a year for two or three hours after you've read the book. You put it in place and you measure it two or three times a year. That's it. Go on with your life. Now if there's a trouble in your business, you're financially set. I, in my life, have 31 companies now. We have, you know, what do we have, 1200 employees. seven different industries, we do five billion in sales. I mean, that used to be, you know, me and my seminar business, it's grown geometrically. But with all those moving parts, the only way I've been able to succeed is because I've taken every one of those businesses and I've diversified my assets so that when things were in trouble, I still had enough economics to take care of myself and keep the business going. So everybody needs to create a money machine that works while you sleep, that doesn't have moving parts, and that's what.

This is really about. You have a great cartoon in the book where there's a kid asking his father, you know, something about like how do you invest your money or how does the stock market work? And he says, you put your money in at the peak, it starts to go down and lose money and so you get scared and you take it out and then someone smarter than you makes all the money. Something like that. So how do we, and I've done that in the past where I put my money in somewhere high, it went down and I was like, oh, I just lost a bunch of money. Let me take it out. And then I put it back in another time and I'm like, what am I doing?

Doing?

So how do we invest without fear of, oh, it's going down, I need to take it out, or trying to time it? How do we do that?

Great question. It's one of the main reasons I wrote the book. I always tell people, if you just read the second chapter of the book and nothing else, it'll change your life. You can do that with multiple chapters, but that chapter is really about teaching people that winter is coming. We all know winter's coming, right? To coin a phrase. But that winter is the best time on earth. And I know that's counterintuitive, and I don't mean like being a positive thinker. pure facts. So in the book, I take you through 10 facts. I'll give you a couple of them right now. The first fact I give people is why do people not invest? They're afraid of failing. They, if you're a millennial, right? So you grew up witnessing 2008 when you were still relatively young. How old are you now?

33.

Okay, so you were, what, 27?

2008? Yeah, 27, I guess.

Yeah, 27, 28 years old. So you're a young man and you're watching the world melting down in front of you. For most millennials, they are the first generation since the generation that went through the depression that is not investing at the ratio they need to even close. They have more debt than everyone probably, right?

With all the- They have more college.

Debt than everyone, absolutely true.

I have a friend that has $400,000 in debt. Dental school.

President Obama just paid off his debt five years ago while he was still president. What? No. I swear to God. Oh my gosh. It's mind-boggling. And he had a bunch of scholarships. ships for the last bit. It took him that long. So what I tell them is, listen, that paying off your debt's not enough. You've got to become an owner or you're always going to be in that place. So, yes, pay off your debt. But here's what you need to know. You got to become an owner. You got to get in the game, but you got to understand the rules of the game. You don't know the rules of the game. The old phrase is you get, you know, when a person with experience meets a person with money, we know the phrase. The person, the money ends up with the experience. The person with experience ends up with your money, right? So I teach people the rules of the game so they get screwed. But the most important thing is this. Winter's coming, but people react. So let's take last year. Last January 2016, we had the worst stock market opening in the history of the stock market. Worst first, I think it was 10 days. There was a drop of $2.3 trillion with a T. Crazy. Everybody's freaking thinking the bear market's here, the market's over, the crash is here. I think the market dropped 800 points one day. And on that day, all the richest people in the world were in Davos, Switzerland, you know, for the big conference that they do every year. and they went there, MSNBC went there and everybody's freaking, what are we going to do? And they said, let's go ask Ray Dalio. Now, your listeners may or may not know Ray Dalio as, if you're not in the financial business, probably never heard of him. You probably heard of Warren Buffett, but Ray Dalio has been more. You have to have a $5 billion net worth and $100 million to give him where he wouldn't talk to you 10 years ago. Now, he doesn't care for shit how much money you have, he won't talk to you because he's got a closed fund. But they go and they put Dalio on television, CNBC, he's the king, What do we do? And he says, well, you don't need to panic. Corrections happen all the time. But you need a strategy that when markets go up and down, you don't go up and down. And he said, I spent 15 years of my life to perfect such a strategy. All of my money's in that plan. And he said, it's called All Seasons, and I've never revealed it before, but I gave it to Tony Robbins. He extracted from me, and it's his book. So you gotta go read his book. He says, on National Television, the data markets are crashing. and that day, to give you an idea, which is the beginning of February, I think it was nine days into February, the market was down 9% in the first five weeks of the year. His strategy, which he gave me, which is made money 85% of the time for the last 75 years. It's averaged a 10% return just under, and the average loss when it 15% loss was 1.6. So if you go to Vegas and you could spend 85% of the time make money. And when you made money, it was 10%. Your loss is 1.6. You can go forever. His plan made 2% while the market was down 9%. So it was up 11% difference. Now, I'm not suggesting that's the only strategy to do. There's many. His is the smoothest ride with the least risk. But what it did was combination of that. And then right after that, I interviewed Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. He was the head of our economy, the most powerful man in finance for 19 years, four presidents he was there running. I was just with President Clinton this last week. He was the Fed chair for him. And I interviewed him for like two hours, you know, or three hours off stage, two hours in front. And I asked him, in the very beginning of this thing, I said to him, I said, look, if you could put the Fed today, what would you do? And he looks at me and as I said, he leans forward and he says, resign. So I look at that and go, oh my God, I need to write a book that'll free people. So here's what'll free you. Everyone's afraid of the crash. Here's what you need to know, two terms you should understand. Correction versus crash. Anytime the market drops from its high by 10% or more up to 20%, it's called a correction. If it drops 20% or more up to 80%, like in the Great Depression, then it's called a crash or called a bear market. So how often does a correction happen? How often do we have to be prepared for it? Since 1900, we've had a correction on average every year for 116 years. so when is winter coming? This year on average. It's like how often does winter come? You wouldn't be surprised if it stormed and rained. Now some winters are long, some are short, some are harsh, some are light, but winter always comes. So I wasn't panicked when this happened last year. I'm not panicked whenever it happens because I know it's supposed to be. How long does it last? Average 56 days. Okay, so just under two months. What's the average drop during that time? 14% over the last 30 years, 13.5 of the last 100 years. So I use the more recent one. 14% gets your attention, right? 14% you get a little gut check. But here's what you need to know. 80% of all corrections never become a bear market. 80%. So all this fear and what people do is what you said you did is they see it, it's freaking out, I'm losing money, I'm the hell out of here and they get out. The stock market never took a dime from anybody, only you can take it from you sold, that's why you lost. So if you look back and say, what was it like in 2008? I can remember vividly being with my platinum partners and saying, you see these $80 stocks? This is six months before the crash. I told them in April, I brought them to Dubai and I said, these stocks are going to go to eight and some are going to go to a buck. And by October, and I told them what to do. So they were able to get out. October, I go on the Today Show in October of 2008 and they go, Tony, there's been $3 trillion meltdown. Pump the country up, you got four minutes. Ready, go. That's not what I do, first of all. And I said, I'd be a liar, I'm not gonna blow up. At that point, the $80 stocks were eight. I said, some of those, I said, I'm not a market forecaster, but I work with Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest investors in the history of the world. In the biggest market crash in history, you know, 1987, he made 200% when everybody else was losing their entire life. I've been coaching him continuously now for 24 years, every single day. So I said, I work with the best in the world, and they're telling me based on history in the 30s and history in the 70s, this $8 stock some are gonna be a buck. And I remember the day in March of 2009, Citibank, which had been, I think, $70, sold for 97 cents. You could go and take your money out of the ATM, it cost you more to take your money out than to own the bank, right? And then I told people, it'll jump from 99 cents to $6, $10, $12 in a month or two, exactly what it did, right? So what you got to know is corrections happen every year. You got another couple months, got to know it's 14% and you won't lose because 80% of time it doesn't go to a bear. Now, what about the bear? The bear market, it happens to give you an idea in the last 100 years, every three to five years, you've gone eight without one. We're way overdue. In modern years, last 30 years, it's about every five years. The average length of a bear is one year. The average drop is 33%. A third of those drops go 40% or above. That, I don't care how well prepared you are, that's a scary thing.

Yeah.

But it is the greatest opportunity in your lifetime to go from wherever you are financially to where you want to be. I hope your audience is listening right now. Hear me. If you want to leapfrog and you're a millennial and you think there's no future or you're, you know, a baby boomer and you think you're too old and it's too late. The greatest gift you have is coming. I know it doesn't sound like it. This is not positive thinking bullshit. This is the truth. Wall Street, the stock market is the only place that when things go on sale, people freak out. If I said, you like Ferraris? Sure. If I said to you, Ferraris go on sale for 50% off.

Awesome.

But when I tell you Apple's on sale for 50% off, you go, oh, what am I gonna do here? What's wrong? The whole world's gone crazy. coming to an end. If you think about it, how old are you?

33.

33. So let's assume if you were 35 and you lived 85, you got 50, 52 years ahead of you. That means you have 52 more corrections to live through. That means you're probably in those 50 years gonna have 10 more bear markets to live through. If you're gonna have a gut checks every time or you're gonna leave out of it. If you didn't participate because you thought, oh, the market's too volatile, I can't trust it, all that stuff, you missed 200 a 250% return in the last eight years. I mean, you've missed out on everything while you're waiting for things to be better. And if you won't do it when it's like this, when it crashes, you're not going to get in. So here's the good news about the bear. Good news about the bear, average ones a year. Could be longer, but that's the average. Could be shorter. But here's what's cool. Every single bear market in the history of the United States has led to a bull market, meaning right afterwards. So 2008, this plummeting, what happened in 2009? Up 67% in a year. I can show you every single bear market and the next year when it comes out, it's this explosion. Now that's not true in every market in the world. It's true for two centuries in the United States. So that's why Warren Buffett says, I want to be greedy when people are afraid. And I want to be afraid when people are greedy. If you remember 2008, he was telling everybody, Buy! He was having the time of his life. Buy, buy, buy. Everything's on sale. So, what you have to do to become unshakable is turn, the metaphor I use is turn the snake into the rope. Meaning, we all know the story, it's the middle of the night, you're walking through the yard or someplace and you see a snake and you freak out, you pull back, you come in the morning and it's a rope. Once you know it's a rope, you're never afraid again.

Why is this stuff really taking off now? in the last year, year and a half because you've been doing this work.

For a couple of decades now, right? -Yeah.

-Two decades? -Yeah, just about yeah. -Almost two decades and you've been in tons of documentaries, movies, you've been doing interviews for a long time but really it's taken off in the last year and you said because now we have evidence about a lot of things that you're working on. The things that you've been believing for so many years that you knew worked for you and you saw transformation with yourself. We're not going to go into your accident because that's in the last interview. But now we have proof and evidence and science backing all this. And how did that start to happen?

Yeah, it's a great dialogue because I think this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is time in history to know how. And if you rewind the tape 10 years ago, you know, information was the thing that stimulated thought, stimulated new ideas. And, 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? 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 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. Nobody changes until they change their energy. Then how do you get a person out of resentment, frustration, into joy and freedom? Why would they feel grateful or joyful or free if the experience hasn't happened? 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, right? So instead of living by cause and effect, now we're beginning to cause an effect. So 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've always been told they're not worth it?

Yeah, well, so let me tell you.

Or that's the story they tell themselves. Yeah. 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?

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 of the 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 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 this conditioning only requires an image and an emotion. Most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past, into the known. Now if you're in the familiar past and in the known, you're going to crave the predictable future. That's the known as well and 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. 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 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 has 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.

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. The stronger the emotion you feel 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. 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 going to 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 going to 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, and patience creates a very incoherent heart. And when that heart becomes incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. There's no energy. 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 is 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 traffic or some co-worker or your ex or whatever people come 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 being.

That's practice.

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? So then, if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions, and those emotions linger for days, that's a mood.

Years for some people.

Mood, and then months, temperament, years, personality changes. 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 it 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 a 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. When 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, they'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 that 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 wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, and with all you want, and that.

Thought'S going to stop right at the.

Brainstem and never make its way to the body because the body... You're not feeling it or because why? Because you're feeling resentment, and 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.

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 energy once the heart is open and then you're thinking a different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that. Here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell. It literally begins to open up and there's more energy going there and now you're coming from a different level of mind. So then what about what happens to your immune system when you do that? Well, it turns out we've done an experiment. Just 10 minutes a day, three times a day with 120 people trading resentment, frustration, fear, for gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness. Measuring their immune response, the chemical immunoglobulin A, your primary defense against bacteria and viruses, the best flu shot you'll ever get lives innately within you. Turns out when you're frustrated, when you're impatient, when you're fearful, the immune system dials down because you're an emergency. All your energy is going for some threat in your outer world, there's no energy in your inner world. for growth and repair. But how do you turn that around? So then as people begin to open their heart, can that chemical begin to elevate? Four days, 50% change in the 120 people. Their IGA levels went up 50% in four days. That's your body's immune system is now up regulating genes that are making proteins and immunoglobulins and antibodies that you don't need a flu shot. In other words, your inner state is greater than your outer world. So then, just by doing that, we now know that your immune system is going to get stronger by the same means. Take 120 people or 50 people and measure 7,500 gene regulations. Okay? In four days, two genes that suppress cancer growth and tumors are activated and upregulated. The genes that stimulate stem cells to go to damaged tissues and repair them, upregulated. The gene for oxidative balance is upregulated, anti-cancer, anti-aging, anti-heart disease, anti-stroke, anti-neurodegenerative, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial. Your body's naturally doing this. The gene for neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in response to novel experiences, this is four days, the gene switches on. The gene for more balance in the pituitary and the pancreas, the gene for the microtubules of the cells, the little fibers that respond to energy and frequency. So in four days, we now know that you can change your genetic destiny if you just practice the inner work. We have research to show that 60 days of meditation five days a week will lengthen your life. The telomeres, the little shoestrings on the end of your DNA, get longer. That means your biological age is changing. So we have the evidence now to show people what's possible. We have brain scans that are so outside of normal that when neuroscientists see them, they're blown away because the amount of energy that's in the brain during this transmutation Transcendental moment is hundreds of times outside of normal. I mean, you can't make your brain do that. Something is happening to you and that person's having a transcendental moment. We now know that we can predict it and we now know that we can induce it. So then there's the evidence there. Then you take our community and you see people with stage four cancer, with Parkinson's disease, with myasthenia gravis. with lupus, with MS, with brain injuries, with rare genetic disorders, with vertigo, tinnitus, kidney failure, all kinds of health conditions come to a week-long event and then at the end of that event they make significant strides in getting beyond the emotions of the past. Now think about this. The science says that the environment Signals the Gene, that's epigenetics. The end product of an experience and the environment is an emotion. So as long as you're living by the same emotion every single day, you're signaling the same gene in the same way. And if that gene is related to a survival emotion, a stress hormone, then you're down regulating the gene and you're creating disease. So when the person trades that emotion and really breaks free from the chains of their past, and now they're feeling an elevated emotional. Well, now they're dialing down the gene for MS and they're up regulating the gene for health and balance. And so the person will you say to them, where's the disease? Well, I'm not the same person. I'm not this. And the side effect of that is a transformation in healing. So the funny thing about it is the person who has the healing is not talking about the healing, whether it's blind people seeing deaf people hearing, hearing, we have crazy evidence now. What they're talking about is how amazing they feel because they're refreshed. They're, they're, they're, they've got a new lease on life. And so now we have evidence in our research and that silences the critic to show that what's possible for people. And now we have evidence and testimony that we have evidence where people will stand on the stage and say, Hey, I broke my back in three places. I haven't been able to stand up straight. I came into this event hunched over. I couldn't lay down. And now this guy's jumping around on the stage. He's laying on his back. He's touching his toes. You can tell. I mean, this is, he's having his moment. We freed, we changed somebody. Someone with Parkinson's disease can't swallow, can't chew, can't blow our nose, can't stand up. One moment, one moment, the next thing you know, she's blowing her nose, chewing and swallowing. We changed her body, we changed her life and we changed her future. She doesn't look like a movie star and she doesn't look like she's a vegetarian and she doesn't look like she's buffed. She just looks like a normal person. Now the person in the audience who's watching that and looking at this person and seeing that they're no different than them, it just starts starts to cause them to think if someone else can do it, I can do it. So you see the person with the stage four cancer that got the voodoo curse that they have three months to live and now they have no evidence of cancer in their body and they're standing on the stage telling that story and somebody in the audience is checking her out going, I have the same condition and if she can do it, I'm gonna step right in that footprint. I'm gonna do it the way she did it.

I was telling you beforehand that I was terrified to speak in front of a few people in front of an audience of 3, 5, 10. It was terrifying. The idea of being in front of a hundred or a thousand people was like, I'd rather, you know, curl up in a ball when I was 18, 22, those ages. And I remember someone telling me, I heard that somewhere. The most interesting person in the room is the most interested. And I said, that takes all the pressure off of me. I don't have to say anything interesting. I don't have to be like this. funny, charismatic, you just have to be interested. Just listen and ask interesting questions or ask a thoughtful, genuine question. It doesn't have to be smart.

See, most people, they don't even remember the person's name.

Why?

Because they're not interested in their name. They're too focused on themselves. What does the person think of me? If you're really interested, you're going to remember the person's name. Do you know what's interesting? You mentioned there, there's a good story about that, about public speaking. I had studied this stuff for a long time and I had used it. I knew it worked. I didn't wonder if it worked. I knew it worked.

Yeah, yeah.

And all I wanted to do was teach it to other people. It took me nine and a half years to figure out why I changed. And when I learned, all I wanted to do was teach it to other people. But I was afraid. I was very shy, very self insecure.

Yeah.

Very insecure, but I had all this knowledge. I was earning a lot of money. In there, you know, I did well. Outside of there, forget it. And on one of Earl Nightingale's tapes on the recording called the Magic Word on Attitude, It's a funny thing. Are you familiar with it?

Oh, let's check it out.

You've got it. I will get an original copy and send it to you. Oh, please do.

You've got it.

I'll listen. I will send it. Well, he said, now right there's an unadmitted. He said, now right here we come to a rather strange fact. We tend to minimize the things we can do, the goals we can accomplish, and for some equally strange reason, we think other people can accomplish things that we cannot. Because you want to realize that you have deep reservoirs of talent and ability within you. Now, if you had asked me, Do you understand that? I'd say, Of course I understand it. I've listened to it a thousand times, at least. Well, I was in the back corner of the room at the O'Hare Hyatt. Bill Gove was speaking to a thousand people. I was in the back that corner of the room. And I was watching him. Bill Gove was the Frank Sinatra speakers. One of the best speakers in the world. And I watched him, he come off, there was a thousand people, about 500 bank here, 500 here, and then there was a central aisle. He got to this corner, he had a handheld mic and he had his hand up. And he said, if I want to be free, I've got to be me. Not to me I think you think I should be, not to me I think my wife thinks I should be, not to me I think my kids think I should be. If I want to be free, I gotta be, and I was watching him, I think, my God, this guy's so good. If only I could do that. I could never do that. All of a sudden, that record of Earl started to play in my head. Now, right here, we come to a rather strange fact. to minimize the things we can do, the goals we can accomplish. And I thought, damn, that's what it all means. And I suddenly realized, and I had been listening to this thing for years, if Gof could do it, I could do it. And I made up my mind, I was going to learn how to speak like he did, and I was going to get him to teach me.

Wow.

And so he became a mentor of mine. I paid him a lot of money. just to sit down and talk to him for a few minutes a number of times. Now, I speak nothing like Bill Gates. I mean, I'm nothing like him. He speaks totally different than me. Although I'll speak to thousands of people at the same time. What he taught me was to be relaxed in front of the audience. That was the big lesson. If you're not relaxed in front of an audience, the audience will know it.

How do you relax in front of an audience when you're terrified?

You've got to think of the audience. You've got to think of how you're going to, what you're helping, how you're going to teach them something.

Another mentor of mine a couple of years ago told me very something similar because I was, I'd been training in Toastmasters and had coaches and had overcome A lot of my fears were speaking in front of big crowds and I got pretty good. I was getting paid big fees and things like that, but I was still nervous a little bit before and felt a little insecure. I remember calling him about 15 minutes before being like, Can you give me some grounding? Can you give some coaching? And he said, Don't make it about you. Make it about them. You're gonna mess up. Be okay with it. You're not gonna remember every word you want to say. Don't beat yourself up. focus on them and how you can serve. Don't focus on yourself. And that's when everything started to shift. Just like you said, when you focus on service to the audience.

You got to fall in love with helping that audience.

Helping, giving, doing whatever you can to serve. You stop worrying about everything the way you look. It's the same thing when you're having an interaction with a group of people and you're just listening and you're not worried about what people think about you. You're just being interested in them.

You kind of have a very confident feeling in what about what you're doing, you know.

How do people build that confidence if they don't have it?

Well, you build confidence by learning, don't you? I mean, that's the only way you get confidence. Yeah. I went to a nightclub in London, England back in the 60s, the Talk of the Town. It was the largest supper club in the world. And the show they had was a wild, wild Wild West, Wild Wild West. And it was like a Vegas show and they'd bring in, that show may run for two or three years and they'd bring in the stars to work it. And I went one night and I had a seat right by the stage. It was a thousand, they'd set a thousand people down to dinner in the talk of the town. It's not open anymore. Wayne Newton was the star.

Wow.

Wayne Newton was as a kid. He was 20, maybe 21. His brother was playing with him, playing guitar in a little group of his. He walked out on that stage, bang! Just like that. He owned that place. I never forgot that. That guy was so confident, and he had that audience in the palm of his hand right away. Whenever I go to speak, I will find a if I'm speaking to a group, they go in the kitchen, sit down, I've learned if you're dressed, they'll think you own the place, they'll just leave you alone. And I sit down there and I see Wayne Newton walking in that stage as a kid. That's what you gotta do. You gotta really fall in love with the idea of helping the audience and you own the place you go and you're gonna be and delivered. And anytime you see a star come out. They own the place when they walk out. But they've fallen in love with helping you.

Something else, it sounds like you've mastered the power of alter ego. For me as an athlete, I used to be scared to perform, to play in front of big games. And I used to tap into Jerry Rice because I was a wide receiver and Jerry Rice was, you know, the best. And so I was just like mimicking him. I was like, how would Jerry Rice do this? How did he carry his body, his chest? How did he walk on the field? His swagger, his confidence. And I just acted like I was Jerry Rice. I became him when I stepped on the field and it helped overcome the insecurities of the nerves by just embodying the energy of Jerry Rice. It sounds like you've been doing that.

In different ways with different people.

Yeah.

Different scenarios, right?

Yeah.

Years ago, I started to realize the real power of self-image, studying Maltz's work. And I will, and I've taught this to many people, I will build an image, different parts of my personality, I will see someone that I really, something they do that I really admire the way they do it. and I will adopt that. Now, I've got this, I've been doing this for years. And if you were to watch me going from one place to another, I never walk fast. Never. When I was a kid, this stuck in my mind, there was another kid, Donnie Miller, lived down the street from us. Now this was during the Second World War, there were no fathers at home. They were always shooting at each other.

And.

But his dad was home. His wasn't. His dad wasn't well. His dad had had a heart attack. So nobody went around his house because his dad was sick. They'd come around the other houses. But some. The doctor must have told his dad to walk. His dad was always dressed. Suit, shirt, tie. And I'd watch him walk up and down the street. I'd see. every now and then he'd walk up and down the street and he had this real relaxed walk about him. And when I was building this stuff in, it's a picture of his dad stuck in my mind. And so I sort of mimicked his walk.

Wow.

You know, but I've done different things. Like, I used to watch Earl Nightingale record. When I first went to work for him, he had a recording studio. It'd be like this with there was a window. my office. I could look in when he was recording. And one day I realized he's talking to that damn microphone.

Right.

Here it is. The microphone. He was it. And I thought, that microphone's a person to him. Now, you create all great broadcasters. They just talk to one person. They say, you people or you folks or talk to you. But David Beatty talking. And I realized he's talking to microphone. microphone. So in an hour recording, I talked to one person. It's a microphone. If I'm working with an audience, I talk to one person. These are little lessons that I picked up to get better at what I was doing. I remember if a person's negative in an audience, real negative, there could be 500 people in that audience. That one person's energy is so strong.

It stands out. Yeah.

And there was a woman that I Beverly Lynch years and years ago when I was at Nightgale, Conant. And I asked her one time, I said, Beverly, she was the speaker. I said, Beverly, what are you doing? There's a negative person in the audience. She smiled and she says, you, talk to the light, not the dark. I thought, wow. So obvious, why'd I miss that? So if I'm talking on there's a negative or a few negatives, I just take one person that's super positive. And it doesn't matter where I'm looking, that's the person I'm looking at. I'm talking to that person.

So you focus on the positive people.

Always.

Always. You won't try to put your attention on the negative person and try to get them to be happy and smile.

If you just keep putting the positive, if they just open their mind for a minute, you're in. You've got to get the information into their subconscious mind.

You mentioned, I think one of the faculties you said was the most challenging is imagination. Is that one of the most challenging for people?

It's not the most challenging. It's something we really want to gain an understanding of because most people use their imagination. They use it the wrong way. They imagine what won't work. They imagine something bad happening.

What should we imagine more often every day?

We should imagine you should see yourself where you want to be. you got to live there. There's a great book. You may be familiar with Stella Adler's book, the Art of Acting. Oh, gosh, you got to get it. Stella Adler was a great acting teacher. She was a method acting teacher. She studied and understands loski, the. The Russian acting teacher that originated method acting.

Okay.

Marlon Brando wrote the forward in her book. He was the first. method actor to reach superstardom.

Okay.

And he wrote the foreword in her book. Now, still Adler never actually wrote a book. A man named Kissel took all of her teaching, all her lessons for teaching, and she put them into, or he put them into a book. So when you read her book, you're going to her acting classes. And like Shakespeare said, we're all actors. You know, the world's a stage, and that's true. well, when you reach a goal, you're going to act like you're already there. It's already happened intellectually the second you think about it. It's already happened emotionally when you're emotionally involved with it. So it's only a period of time until it manifests in physical form. But because it's not in physical form, we act like we haven't got it yet. Well, so that's why most people stay stuck, because they're acting like they haven't got it yet. Or I can't act like that. that Lewis would see that I haven't got that result, he'll think I'm phony. I've got to quit worrying about what Lewis thinks and start concentrating on what Bob thinks. And so you see yourself, your imagination, you've got to be that person. Gurdjieff said that, great philosopher, he said, Before you can do something, you must be something. So you've got to be it intellectually, you've got to be it emotionally, as Sigmund says as and things within their heart, the emotional mind. Well, it's only a period of time then until it manifests physically. That's one of the first laws of the universe is the perpetual transmutation of energy. Energy is moving into form, always. To form, moving into form, through form, back into form again. So we cause it all to happen the way we think.

I look at my life as like, you know, and here you talk about like really diving into pain and like embracing pain and finding, looking for the pain.

Right.

I think there's like a, there's a, there's a safe pain and then there's probably an unsafe pain of just like jumping off a building and you know, whatever.

Right.

Trying to land on 20 floors or something is probably not the safe way to do things. But doing 200 miles of endurance running is like a different way of pain, looking at pain. And that's what I've been looking for my whole life is like finding the pain and I talk about like do something every day that that's painful.

Right.

In that good structured environment. You've been doing that for the last couple years now. It's like you work out every day. You haven't missed a day.

I did it for the last 20 years of my life.

20 years?

Or they say two years. No, 20 some years of my life.

20 every day you work out.

So I used to take one day off a week. I used to take one day off a week.

For the body to recover, right?

Makes sense.

But that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours.

Wow.

But at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate, and I replaced the carbohydrates in my body while I rode because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate because therefore your blood's flowing through your body.

Yeah.

As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it with the nutrients because then your blood's flowing, the nutrients is going through all your cells in your body, all that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it. So every Sunday used to be that. And it kind of snowballed into, as human beings, we believe, like so many people, before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Work out first. Work out first before you talk to me about recovery.

How to recover, yeah.

Work out first. We are always looking for, like whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this person was not built. This person was not made by God. This person, sorry, this person was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me, because now they're yours. They're yours to own. if you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay, because you are. But take that notice. Putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be 300 pounds.

We.

We want to talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I used to tell people lies so they would like me. Because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real authentic confidence from hard work.

Work.

Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem. That's right. You now know. I walk in the room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something. It's not on the wall. It's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal around your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart. And people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have yeah.

Yeah.

I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a very focused person. But the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh, my God, you look happy. Because half of us aren't happy. We're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. 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 money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. People are going to be like, you're about working out. Where I got my work ethic from was the hours I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart and you have a disability, and you still want to be at the top of your class, I didn't want to just get by. When I realized that I can learn through hard work and I can beat the valedictorian in school, but I got put in 10 hours more a day than he does. You know what kind of strength comes from that? When you're sitting down, that guy, that valedictorian, for an hour, and you know I caught you. I caught you and I am dumb. But I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Goggin's got really invented.

Yeah.

Was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty. And then three months later, yeah, they were full. And when you can go through that, I still have them in my storage unit. You go through these spiral notebooks of your life. and you realize, this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that having a discipline every day to say, for me to learn this one math problem, it's gonna take me 10 hours. And that's where it. And you realize through hard work, you can do. You can outwork anybody. Remember how badass they are? But that's the part people. don't want to dive into.

-Yeah. -When someone's lacking confidence in themselves, what's the answer you would give them if they're like, how do I gain more confidence?

It starts with yourself, man. You got to start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot that makes you feel good. It's going to be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge, all you want to do is go back to what made you confident or what gave you confidence? Is that happy spot?

No.

What gives you confidence? What gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table trying to learn how to read and write on my own. Realizing I can't learn the way you learn. I can't, but I can learn. What gives you confidence not being afraid is overcoming the fear. I used to stutter severely bad. So right now, I don't know how many people are gonna watch this. You know what gives me confidence? It's knowing I no longer care if I sit here and start stuttering to you. Yeah. That's what gives me confidence, is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them. And facing them and facing them pretty soon like this, you know what man?

This is where it's at.

It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone. is where my conference is getting built.

Mm-.

That's where it's getting built. But people want to, they want an easier answer.

Yeah.

There has to be an easier way. It's not. I'm sorry. I searched for it my entire life.

You cheated.

I did. I lied. I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, man, I'm still missing missing something. It's because they did what they were good at and they had this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything in the world on the outside looking at like, my God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with the backpack with all my stuff in it, no car, right? And I walk around happiest person in the world. Have nothing, happy as hell. it's because I found out the whole key to life. It's not in all that you have to face yourself. So many people live to be a hundred years old and they die miserable, having everything because they never examined. I caught my live autopsy. You never examine this happiness, peace, Enlightenment. It's all up here, man. It's all up here. If I start talking like this, people go, man, you know, I don't know. It's the truth, man.

Yeah, it is true.

It's all up here. You just gotta be willing to go and face it. And that's the hard part.

What's your biggest insecurity today?

Not to be arrogant, I don't have one.

What was the last one you had? And when was that?

The last one I had was probably, still me. Me. Still living. Because I always talk about, I pay rent. So we used to live in a $7 a month place when I was growing up. Is this in Buffalo or is this in Indiana? So we had a lot of money in Buffalo. And when my mom left, my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet. And that $7 a month, My hometown place used to be, it was my, it was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom wasn't there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I've gone through Ranger School. I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I've done so much. I run 200 miles, pull-up records, everything. learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. And I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick. And I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick. And I was about 38 years old. I'm 43 now. And my life got real quiet. I went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to I couldn't get out of bed. the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. But once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why is that?

In that moment where my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training. Now, you didn't have.

I didn't have anything. Now you just had to sit alone. Alone and not train.

And that's what changed me. And that's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I had done in my life.

You hadn't reflected yet.

I hadn't reflected. I had done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect.

Yeah.

I was just going. I wouldn't even, I finished a race of life, and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on.

You're like, on to the next.

I get in the car and I go.

You wouldn't even take the medal.

Gone.

Don't care about it.

I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting.

Around for this ceremony. Most people sit around and that's what they like. They need the ceremony if I accomplish something. Validation. I haven't done anything. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started. It was right. When I started figuring out life that I was leaving so much in the tank, I caught my 40% rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my god, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied. And now I'm 180 pound person lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. I never took time to say, my God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities, and this is how I explain it the best way. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL PEP prep program.

Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

That's right. And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids.

Wow.

To get ready for the real thing.

18, 19, 20 years old. Yeah.

Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were hybrids.

Wow.

But they get the buds and the same amount of people would quit.

Why is that?

This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.

Hmm. It's not about... Not the mind.

That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. we have, we all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Yeah. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I want to talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure and they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me, but you go back to your insecurities and then you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently in hell. I wasn't training them to do that.

Why weren't you training them?

I wasn't training myself yet because at that time I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard.

Physical standard.

A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet.

Meet.

It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come. Wow. I wasn't. I. I had come 8, 000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still. in the seven dollar a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, and I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that that sick portion of my life is long. I didn't care if I died or lived. Wow. Because I was for the first time in my life happy.

Wow.

And at peace. Because I reflected back on where I started.

You said, well, I have come a long way.

That's right. And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have, that's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else.

Yeah.

You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callousing over the victim's mentality. you're always a victim, even if you have everything in life until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved in my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father, but she hasn't done that one step.

Really? She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect on it.

She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life.

And live in that space.

And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now. and reflecting back on my God, this is what I've done with my life.

Let's just say there's been a few people that have been attacking me lately online and very aggressively with rumors, lies, manipulation, trying to control a narrative. And I've been in complete peace about it. I mean, there's been some moments where I'm like, ah, you want to like react and defend yourself and your ego's hurt. But overall, I've had zero reaction and I've been at peace about it. Because one, I say to myself, I must be doing something right if people want to try to take someone down. Two, I say to myself, gosh, in six months, a year, 10 years, this is going to give me so much more wisdom to be able to serve humanity at a higher level. and three, it's purging my ego and attachment to the way I want people to think about me. But I'm curious if you have any coaching for me or wisdom that I should be approaching through all this and if this happens again from whoever in the future.

Well, Louis, you know, I appreciate your humility. I you don't need coaching from me. You know, but I appreciate your humility. Here's my suggestion because I've gone through this as well. And for all your listeners from across the planet, as you go out and bring your gifts and genius to the world, as you stand for something higher in a world with a lot of people suffering from victimitis, excuse it is, as you bring your glory to your days, you're going to threaten people. I was in the Barcelona Picasso Museum in the Born District, and there was a quote on the wall in the Picasso Museum that said, People were terrified by the genius of Picasso. So the more you shine, the more you're going to attract shadows and darkness. So here's what I would say. I've actually worked out in my journal what I call the troll deconstruction.

Wow.

Is this the journal that got stolen?

It's not the one that got stolen.

So I still have it.

Okay. But that's why journaling is so powerful, because you can actually deconstruct and figure these things out.