Success Mindset: Visionary Leaders & Holistic Health | Richard Brooke

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here with Richard Bliss Brooke and Amy Arp. Hello, Richard. Hello, Amy. Thank you for joining me today.

Hello. Honored to be here.

I am delighted to have Richard here. Richard's been my mentor for the last several months in our, uh, he is an advisor, not a, uh, not involved directly, for the record, uh, in helping us build a network marketing business. And that is how I came to read his book, Mach 2 with Your Hair on Fire, subtitle How to Master Self-Motivation and Stay on Fire for Life. And I was very, very surprised to find that a book that was primarily— I don't know if you— if I could say it's primarily written for people who are interested in or who are network marketers— was really forcing me to think in a different way about how I coached people in the health and wellness space. But that's exactly what happened. Now it's probably one of the most worn-out books in my library. I've read it at least 3 times. And the reason for that is that I don't think you could, or I haven't been able to find a more concise, hard-hitting book that describes the process of personal transformation for success, uh, or a more concise, more powerful one than this. Which for me is very exciting because one of the great challenges I face is that people are exceedingly busy. They find it difficult to focus. And one of my great problems in the health and wellness industry is that many, many people are problem-focused, not results-focused, and they don't give people a clear, concise explanation— not of the problem. In fact, their problem descriptions are usually 95% of their book. And the solution is 5%. And I think that's a big part of why the world is as sick as it is and is focused on its health as it is. So without further ado, thank you, Richard. And I'd like to start by really asking you, what's the story behind this book? Where does this really begin for you?

Well, you mentioned network marketing. Um, from a business standpoint, that's where I cut my teeth on financial success, business, um, growing wealth. And the interesting thing about people that choose network marketing as a journey for building an income and wealth is you're choosing to sell something the idea of network marketing, that everybody that you're going to talk to has already decided they don't want anything to do with. It's kind of like maybe you decided to sell Mercedes, but everybody you know has already decided they're never, ever, ever going to buy a Mercedes. It's not the easiest journey, and where it— where the essence of it is, is, you know, you have to deal with rejection. And so, you have to maintain your state of motivation. You have to maintain your fire and your drive and your enthusiasm when most people are not only telling you no, but they're probably raining on your parade. It's not an easy journey. And I, after a couple of years of struggling in the profession, became very successful. And one of my secrets was not dealing so much with how to sell the product and anything to do with the opportunity, but dealing with people's managing their state, their motivational state, like keep them in a place where they had a story that gave them a green light to do what needed to be done. And so, you know, that's kind of where the book came from is I, you know, mastered this art being a network marketer. There's one particular distinction though that probably was the defining moment for the body of work. I always thought, I believed, I thought I was taught that motivation, you know, that burning energy to get something done, came from desire. That if you wanted something bad enough, you would be willing to do what it took to get it. And I operated that way, you know, even before I got involved in network marketing. And for the first few years of network marketing, I thought it Everything had to do with desire. And then I invested a lot of money and sat at the foot of a brilliant coach, a man that had a global company. He coached Fortune 100 companies, like all their employees, their C-suite, their CEO. He coached governments from around the world and sports teams. And so, I paid a lot of money. Lou Tice. His name was Lou Tice. He's passed on now, but he owned a company still in business called the Pacific Institute in Seattle. And I became a certified Lou Tice facilitator coach, went through his programs. And one of the things that, one of the distinctions that he gave me in that process was that motivation, the energy to get things done, the mood the magic, it actually has nothing to do with desire. All desire does is point us in a direction. It's kind of like a GPS coordinate, you know, dial in the coordinates. This is where I want to go, but it doesn't give you the fuel, the jet power to get there. That's a different distinction. Okay, what is that distinction? And that distinction is a story which I call a vision, a story of inevitability. And the story is like a film script. It's like a movie. And so, let's say, you know, I want to go here. I want to accomplish this. But now, I have a story of accomplishing it and of the journey. And it's all in the light of inevitability. Go a little deeper, like there's 3 levels of belief. There's possible. So, I think it's possible that I might accomplish what I want to accomplish. That's a story. It's a flavor of the story. And when our story has the flavor of possible, we lean in, we put our toe in the water, we try. We don't fully engage. The second level is probable. So, when our story has the flavor of what's probable, then we really lean in and we engage to some degree. But no matter what we're doing, we're going to meet resistance. There's going to be setbacks. There's going to be opposition. There's going to be failure, right? And no accomplishment that's worth talking about comes without a great deal of resistance. And so if all you've got is a story of probable, very often the resistance is too much to overcome and people bail. But when you have a story of inevitable, the, the, the sense of inevitability is kind of no matter what. Right? Like Nike's slogan is "Just do it." And that's a great slogan. But I don't think it goes all the way. What they perhaps ought to have made their slogan was "Just do it anyway." Because if you're just doing it, you're going to face all kinds of opposition. There's going to be all kinds of distractions, all kinds of excuses, right? And what that does is it leads people into a story of, "Oh, I was," and you have to get this all the time, Dr. Stillman, with patients that you give a protocol and you give them guidance and they start off on it and then you check up on them a week or two or a month later. And what you get is a story of, "Well, I was and I was trying and then," you know.

You gotta unpack everything you just said there.

Somebody else got elected President of the United States and for my whole world, you know, like, The world won't let me. I'm a victim. And you get this messy, stupid story. And, you know, people just, they just don't do what they set out to do. But when you have the just do it anyway, it doesn't matter that your cat got sick and it doesn't matter that you got busy and it doesn't matter who the President of the United States is. It doesn't matter what your circumstance or your excuse, you just do it. Anyway, and it becomes the highest priority or one of your highest priorities of action bias. And so I just learned all of this from Lou Tice. And Lou Tice's program was very expensive and very involved and not— wasn't practical for the common person.. And I just found huge application in everyday life for no matter what people were wanting to do. And I would listen to their language and people would say, well, I really want to do, I want, I want to, you know, whatever. I want to lose weight. I want to get healthy. I want to get rich. And then even if they didn't say it, you could hear the but. Right? Like, oh, I really want to— you can hear it, right?

It's in the—

but it's right there. It's but.

It's right there.

Yeah. And so, okay, well, well, why haven't you, right? And you've asked that question, then you'll get the whole story about, you know, the president and the cat and everything else, right? And okay, well What if you had a different story? So, I just pursued mastery of hearing the story, the real story, the real vision, and helping people see, for example, what is the real vision. This is why you're stumbling. This is why you try and give up. This is why you get distracted. Because your story is a story of try. You know, Yoda— I don't know how many times I've done this exercise, but, you know, a whole, like, you know, have 1,000 people in the room, or have everybody put a pin on your hand, right? Okay, now try to pick it up. And what people will do is they'll Pick it up, right? No, no, no, no, no. If I wanted you to pick it up, I would have just said, pick the pin up off your hand. What I said was, try to pick it up. They're like, no, no, no, no, that's, that's picking it up. Try to pick it up. So they grab a hold of it, and a lot of times they'll do like Yeah. Okay. Did you pick it up? No. So that would be not picking it up. There's either picking it up or there's not picking it up. Any amount of this, so you're blue in the face and have a heart attack, is still not picking it up. What did Yoda provide us? The distinction is there is no try. And yet that is almost everybody's story, mm-hmm, that is supposed to motivate them to get done whatever they want to get done. And then they wonder why can't get it done. It's more than you wanted to know about the story of Mach 2, but That's the genesis of it.

It's exactly what I wanted to know. There's a lot to unpack there.

Yeah, that's great.

And everything you just said about success is directly applicable to health and wellness.

Of course.

And I've long told patients that the number one and two reasons for what I call therapeutic failure— and I consider myself very unusual in the medical world in that I actually discuss therapeutic failure— why do people fail to get better? I am fascinated by this concept. Yeah, it motivates the majority of the changes that I make in my practice because— and I don't mean changes to protocols, changes to supplements, changes to whatever. We actually have a very, very increasingly sophisticated system for, uh, it's not so much maximizing success as it is operating with our patients with total integrity. Because what we've seen in the health and wellness industry is that there's a tendency to dial up the, the pain and the cost of care to basically get people over that resistance and almost force them to engage and commit, to the point of sometimes just outright manipulating them in a way that I find deeply disingenuous. But if someone's gonna come into my practice and they've got X problem and I know it's gonna take, you know, Y, Z, M, N, O, P, whatever, love letters of the alphabet for this duration and this amount, this many tests, this many supplements, this many rounds of whatever, I'm gonna tell them. And then it's up to them to execute and engage. And we give them the option of higher levels of care with more accountability, more touch, more time. And lower. And we don't force them into any of these, but we will sometimes explain to them that for the goals they are set, they are trying to put what I call— I call it this way— they're trying to fit size 12 feet into size 10 shoes. And I sleep easy at night knowing that I've told them that. And then when they don't get results, I know that I at least gave them, you know, the, uh, the honest honesty and of my opinion right from the get-go. And invariably, whenever we are faced with someone who says, I'm not getting better, I'm not seeing results, the weight's not coming off, the headaches aren't going away, the anxiety is still there, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, we've got a very, very, very clear list of things we go through with them. Because at the end of the day, you know, I like the saying, success leaves clues. Being healthy is not some kind of magical, mystical You don't have to go meditate on a mountain for the next 10 years. When you really talk to people and you listen to them, what did you do to get or maintain your health? There may be, well, I did this weird supplement protocol, or I did coffee enemas, or I, you know, went to some whatever and smoked this thing. There's some weird stories out there, I guarantee it. But by and large, most of those people, those successes they're talking about are basically a flash in a pan. They're better for 3, 6 months, a year. True lasting good health starts with foundational habits. And we all— we just— it's very simple. We go through a list. Are you doing these foundational things? And if you're not doing those foundational things, why are you not doing them? It's just what you were saying. I have the kids and I got the husband. I got, I got all the other things that all the other people and all the other places in the world have. And some combination of those things got in the way of me taking 3 10-minute walks and getting natural sunlight and eating a healthy diet and drinking some water and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what's also fascinating is when you get into the psychology behind, well, why did they get in the way? And that's what you were talking about with people have these stories Uh, and you know, your book is— I think what I love about it is it's so concise. I've read more books on mind-body medicine than I can remember. Some of them are incredibly just detailed, going into things like fMRI and PET scanning and functional neuroscience, and all that's great, right? But if people spend 10% of the time that they tend to spend focusing on the problems of neuroscience, focusing on the known solutions which are pretty much right here, uh, the world would have a lot fewer problems. And I— one of the things that most impressed me was how you distilled this down. What I see people living through in their life when it comes to their health is these, these I am statements. You talk about how in very simple terms, people, they get these, these beliefs about themselves and the world from their early childhood experiences. I don't know if you've ever looked into this, but there's a scale, Adverse Childhood Experiences scale. The higher you score on that scale, the more likely you are to fail in life.

I haven't seen that, but yeah, it makes sense. Of course.

Yeah. Do you want to talk to people about this whole I Am-ing process and how it affects them at a subconscious level?

Well, there— we've all heard of the developmental years, right? Like, kind of— it's actually prenatal through about age 5, but it can be older, you know, younger, just depends on the emotional development of the child. But if you can, you know, we just don't think about this as adults. We're too close to the forest to see the trees here. But when a newborn human being with a mind and eyes and ears and feelings and comes into this world, what we fail to realize as stewards of the world is that this baby, this infant, this being does not have any points of reference to be able to understand what is what. Where am I? But what are all these things? Who are you? What are you?

Why are the adults acting the way that they are?

Well, that's a sophisticated question. I'm not sure they asked that yet, but it's pure disorientation. You know, we just take for granted, okay, baby's born, we're in a hospital and there's a hospital bed and there's, you know, machines. And of course we understand all of this, right? Okay, this is a bed. Of course it's a bed. This is a chair and this is a room. We're not— we're in a hospital, of course it is. This is a whatever machine, right? We just understand all of that. But imagine a newborn looking at these things. It would be like you somehow getting captured by aliens and they take you to their world and nothing is the same in their world. Like, they don't have a physical shape, right? We're used to looking at, okay, you're a a being if you have a shape. Well, what if aliens don't have a shape? What if they just didn't bother with shapes, right? And we're used to like, okay, well, you must have got me here in a spaceship, and it's supposed to look like a flying saucer or something, right? But what if they didn't? What if they don't have saucers where they come from? And so they take us to their place, whatever that place is, and we expect it to look like our place, like It should have chairs and walls and doors and windows or something, right? And it has none of that. And we're like, where am I? But it gets deeper than that. It gets, who am I in relationship to this environment and how do I survive? And that's what newborns are trying to figure out. They're not trying to figure out who we are or what that is. They're trying to figure out who they are. They're trying to figure out their I am. I am what? I am who? And of course, because they're alive and a being, they have the innate sense of how do I be safe? How do I survive? And that's what's going on in these developmental years. Now, on the outside, what's going on is generally clueless parents that are just— I'm not being critical, it's just the paradigm, right?

Well-intentioned, but yeah.

Oh, oh gee, Amy, uh, oh, you're pregnant. Oh, awesome, congratulations. 9 months later, Amy has a child. Um, well, you know, Amy, how you had to go through the, uh, course and pass the test to drive a car. What did you have to go through and what test did you have to pass to be a parent and nurture this precious being during their development? Nothing. All you had to do was watch soap operas and have casual sex and you're qualified to be a parent.

Even soap operas are optional.

Yeah, parents are overwhelmed by, we can't afford this, we're both trying to cover jobs, the kid won't go to sleep, they're crying all the time, how do we feed this, nursing, and I mean, we're like at our wit's end, right?

Yes.

We're not at our best and we're a little stressed out and our voice may raise or our irritation level may raise, right? And there may be stress in the household. There may be anger in the household. There might be yelling. There might be banging. There might be physical violence. Whether it's us or the TV shows we're watching. Cluelessly while the infant is trying to figure out who they are. And this I amming is what happens in the developmental years. And what most kids decide is that they are not safe and they are not enough. And the not enough comes from they are wired to get unconditional nurturing from the parents. Those are the giants in the room that provide safety. Remember, we're this big, they're this big, right? And so just the natural orientation is these people can kill me. So I need—

I need to control all access to food, air, water, everything, you know, elimination of waste products, right?

Everything. And so the orientation is, what I need from the two giants in the room is constant reinforcement that I'm safe, that I'm loved. Not that they know that word, but they can intuit the feeling. And that I'm special and that I'm everything to them. And if we look at them sideways or we argue with each other, or we raise our voice, or we do this to the kid— not hit them necessarily, but just, you know.

But also things like, say, neglect. How common is it for a child to be crying out and to get a huge delay in care? And obviously there's things in life get in the way of taking care of kids.

They—

it's part of what's part of the world.

Common is Kids decide who they are in these formative years, and most of them declare a low self-esteem identity. I'm not safe. I'm not enough. Now, I don't know why, but they split then on two paths. One path succumbs to that I am. I am not enough. I am not safe. They succumb. They play small. They hide. They make poor decisions. They lead a less than ideal life. The other, they rebel against that unnatural declaration that I'm not loved and I'm not enough. They rebel against it. By living a life of proving that they are. And these are the kids that get the best grades, that perform the best in athletics, that win all the contests, that do what society wants them to do. They are the most successful in business because they're driven to prove that they're enough. Challenge is both kids come from a nexus, a truth that they're not enough. This one believes they're not enough, and so they're out to prove that they are. You can't be out to prove that you're enough unless it starts with you have the thought that you're not enough. So what I look to do in Mach 2 is teach people To basically identify what did you decide in your formative years? And that's not necessarily an easy process, but it's simple and you can get there. And then which course did you take? Did you take the, I'm going to lay low and try to, you know, just basically play out the story that I'm not enough, or I'm going to rebel? Which path did you take and what did that lead to in your life? And then what do you want your life to look like? Who do you want to be? How do you want to feel? You want to be driven by having to beat everyone in every contest and always be the most special and always be the best dressed and always make the most money and always be the most popular. And like, social media probably just blew that up for people, right? Where, you know, all those people now, they have to dance on their head naked 24/7 to be the most special people on social media. It just wears you out, right? And it also does not allow you to be the best you can be and accomplish what you need to accomplish because it also wears out everyone around you. That who you are is, I always have to win. I always have to be the smartest. I have to be the best. I have to have the last word. I have to dress the best, right? Wears everybody out around you. So there's a, there's a, once you understand all of that, there's the possibility that, okay, when you were 2, your dad did not let you crawl up on his lap when he got home from work because he was worn out. And he just brushed you off and said, no, not now. And you decided, that's it, he doesn't love me, I'm not enough. And now you're 50. And what I look to do in the book and the subsequent courses is, okay, your dad had a bad day and he brushed you off. That's what happened. But you, what you want to realize is You made up the part about you're not enough. That's a story. Now you're 50. How do you like how that story is played out? You want a better life? You want a more peaceful life, a more loving life, an easier life, a more productive life, a life where you can manifest 10x? Let's make up something different. Like, hey, we're all— there's, there's been like over 100 billion human beings born on this planet since we've recorded human beings being born on this planet. 100 billion. And there's not one just like us. Couple may look like us. Even if you're an identical twin, you're not exactly like everyone else. We are extraordinarily rare by a factor of at least 1 out of 100 billion. And we made it, right? Our male part of us made a— we, we won the contest, right? Out of Hundreds of thousands of sperm. We're miracles, every one of us. And every one of us are loved, deeply loved by our parents. Even if our parents were horribly dysfunctional, even if they acted like they didn't love us. Yeah, even if they hit us, they love us. Why were they so dysfunctional as parents? Well, the extraordinary thing about this, Dr. Stillman, is this goes back generation after generation after generation, right? So if you're wondering why your parents weren't quite prepared or were a little off-kilter, well, let's look at their parents. That would be your grandparents. And we can all kind of get a sense about how off some of our grandparents were, like, whoa, they were a little different than we are.

We, uh, what we see in the back—

great-grandparents. Yeah, then great-grandparents, great-greats, and then great-great-greats. And all of a sudden you're back into the early 1800s, mid-1800s, where what we did as adults in the world is when we encountered people not like us, we weren't racist. We slaughtered them. We killed them all.

We've come a long way, haven't we?

Yeah, but the influence always there in the story.

Yes. Um, what we encounter a lot clinically is that people have these I am statements. They become— and I think people really don't perceive this, but it's absolutely true. People seek familiarity, not what they desire. So the people— and this is this difference between motivation and desire that you spoke about earlier— people say, well, I want to lose weight, I want to be healthy, I want to recover from this chronic disease. Okay, yes, but you got that because you did a laundry list of— and you know, the way that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said— says this, he says it a couple different ways. He says illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue, they developed by small daily sins against nature. When enough things have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear. He also said before you try to heal somebody, ask them if they're willing to give up what's making them sick. You could say the same thing about wealth. Wealth doesn't happen overnight. Real abiding, long-term— not I won the lottery, because most of those people wind up— I mean, there's a funny story about a, you know, a trash truck driver in, you know, the UK who wins the lottery, and like 9 months later he's back to emptying the trash bin, right?

Almost all of them.

It's really about fundamental behavior change is what it's about. Same thing with health and well-being. But what we find is that people have grown up in such a toxic 'I am' environment, and then they seek people who reinforce that 'I am.' 'I am not enough.' 'I am not worthy of love.' 'I am not worthy of safety.' And it's really interesting. I read a book once that focused on the things that would drive people out of a relationship, the adjectives they use to describe their partner. Were very easily synonyms for the things that attracted them to them. Oh, he was so exciting turned into he was terrifying, right? She was so sexy turned into she was so manipulative and, you know, just got me to do things I regretted or whatever. But these things are real because we see them coming back on patients, and patients have come back to us Because what you, you coach on in the book, and that you do a lot in your coaching I know, is about authenticity. What's authentic to you? And, and your point about this, this individuality is so important. And people— there's no like genetic test for this. I see patients chasing this a lot. Well, I want to know what my SNPs and my SAPs are because that will inform me as to my neurobiology. Well, I asked Doug Brackmann once, who wrote a book called Driven that you might enjoy, And I asked him, I said, you know, Doug, you wrote this whole book on the neuropsychology of the driven individual, and not once did you mention the genetic test that you recommend. And he said, the reason for that, Leland Stillman, is that the two genes that I wrote about are archetypes, but you can be negative for the gene for the archetype and still manifest it because of other genes, which is why we do a very— we do almost no genetic testing because we don't find it helpful. What's helpful is really getting someone into a deep, authentic relationship with themselves, which happens through time, silence, and most of all, getting away from the people who are trying to, to, to shape your reality with these 'I am' statements that lead you into being inauthentic. The guilt-tripping, the shaming, the gaslighting— we see these people clinically as people with typically psychopathy or narcissistic personality disorder. Whenever I have a patient who's not getting better, I start to play the 'where's the narcissist' game, because I can often find them, and then they'll come back to me if I've done enough coaching. Because I'll often coach around the problem. I'll start to describe what being in a relationship with one of these people— whether it's a boss, co-worker, colleague, spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, daughter, son, whatever— and they'll say, yeah, you know, I broke up with my boyfriend and that was the last day I had migraines. I got out of my toxic marriage of 15 years and all these problems that were blamed on mold, Lyme, Candida, leaky gut, autoimmunity disappeared. What I think so interesting about your book is— I mean, in addition to everything we've already talked about— your model of how the— how you can change this story and get in touch with your authentic self is so visual in a simple way, and yet is actually very compelling as far as the, the, the fundamental neurobiology underneath it. Do you want to talk about the, the infinite spirit and how you contextualize how people view themselves and the jars on the shelf, as you put it in the book?

Yeah. Well, you know, it's so easy to access a different story. That's why coaching is a big part of this because it's, you know, you can read the book, but then will you ask yourself, questions that a coach would ask you. And then you might ask yourself the questions. But what a coach also does, as you know, Leland Stillman, is I ask the question, but then I also hold the space for you to answer. So we very often will let a question sort of occur to us, but then we close the space down right away, right? We change the subject. When we're like in self-discovery. And so, but it's very simple really for a coach to inspire the infinite spirit just by asking the infinite spirit some simple questions like, who do you want to be? How do you want to feel? How, what kind of relationships do you want? What do you want to accomplish? What kind of impact do you want to have on other people? What kind of impression do you want to leave? How do you want to feel about yourself? And let people answer those questions. And what you get is a Michelangelo masterpiece of the exact life that person wants to live.

How often in that process do you find yourself asking people the question that we find ourselves asking them very often, sometimes so repetitiously that it seems boring, of what does that mean? We'll have somebody come in and say, I want to be healthy, and the first thing out of my mouth is almost always going to be, what does that mean?

Yeah, well, you're just asking for clarity because clarity in vision is power. It's like, you know, if you're watching a movie, like an actual movie on TV, and you're not clear what people are saying, or you're not clear what they mean by what they're saying, or you're not clear about the background or the movie set or the weather or the music or the back, if you're not clear, you just lose the impact of the movie, right? So, clarity is essential in inspiring the infinite spirit. So, if I say I want to be healthy, okay, what does that mean? Right? So, that is why you are just naturally inclined. You are a health Coach, right? You are a natural health Coach, a brilliant, gifted health Coach. You just don't even think twice about somebody says, I want to be healthy. That is okay. That is not good enough.

I can't do anything with that.

No, you can't do anything with that.

I want to be successful. I want to be wealthy. I want to be fast. I want to be slow. I want to be pretty. I want to be thin.

Yeah, you know, wealthy to some people is getting double Medicare payments, right? I don't know what wealthy means to you. You know, obviously wealthy means to some people $100 billion is not enough. Right? That's not enough. I need more. So we have to know, what do you mean? Like, what's the clarity? What's the detail? Let's dial it all the way down to the granular detail so we can actually film a movie of your life. Somebody says, I want to be healthy. What does that mean? I want to lose weight. Okay, what does that mean? How much weight? Is it really weight that you want to lose? Like you just want to be lighter on the planet? Or do you want to look better in your clothes? Do you want to be stronger? Do you want to be, you want to live longer? What does it mean? And so, when you get it precise, now we can do something with it. And when you bring this all the way back to, you know, the childhood story, here's, I think, the biggest fundamental problem in health is if I don't think I'm worth it, If I don't think I am enough, if I think I am small and insignificant, then I am going to tend not to do the things that I know I need to do to cherish this temple. And, you know, when it comes to weight loss, look at all the people in the world that want to lose weight. It is just about everybody, right? And almost everybody, if you gave 'em a little bit of help, little guidance, they could write a book on how to lose weight, right? You could ask 1,000 patients, "Do you know what to eat and what not to eat if you want to lose weight?" I mean, a big chunk of the population could answer that question. So if you wanna lose weight, is it best to sit on the couch or is it best to go get active? Can they answer that question? Right? People know what they need to do. That's not the problem. They just don't have a story that inspires them to do it. They have a story that, oh, it's too much work, or it's not going to work, or it's not— oh, and then they have these little micro stories, like, you know, they see an advertisement for Cheetos or ice cream and I'm just personal. It's not— I'm asking for somebody else, not me personally. Sure, you get it. Yeah, I see a Häagen-Dazs ice cream commercial, I go, oh, I think there's still a half a container in the freezer. This is a story I make up right then, right? I make up the story. Oh, that— oh, I will feel good. I'll feel good as a human being if I go polish the rest of that Häagen-Dazs. And it's just a little moment in time, right? It doesn't have anything to do with my overall health or my goals in losing weight. In fact, when it's over in 10 minutes, the Häagen-Dazs is gone. What harm is there? I make all this up.

So, what's interesting about that, Richard, is that there's— it's even so much deeper than that. To me as the clinician thinking about the neurochemicals in the brain. And your analogy in the book is that if you've got a negative vision, you liken it to a jar of vinegar on a shelf and every one of your visions is in a different jar. And so, if you want to get rid of a negative bitter vision and bitter vinegar is the perfect analogy.

Right.

And it literally is the perfect analogy because In very real terms, as your body's— as your urinary pH drops, you're actually going up and you're increasing your risk of death and disability. Very strongly correlated. Urinary pH is one of the key things I track in the practice for longevity, health, and vitality. It means that your mineral levels are dropping in your body. Bad sign. We fix a lot of that in the practice as part of the therapy. And as the pH drops, that's what's happening in vinegar. And that's what's happening as the bones soften and weaken and get more brittle. And as the bone, as the muscles, you know, waste away and as all the organs deteriorate. So literally people are being soured by modern life. A lot of it has to do with they have a story in their head that triggers the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that make them feel so bad. Going back to the I aming. I'm not enough. I'm not happy. I'm not this. I'm not that. And a lot of this, unfortunately, you know, a lot of the, the narratives in health and wellness are totally nonsensical and unscientific. Like, for example, this whole idea of, you know, major depressive disorder— you've got a neurotransmitter deficiency in the brain. Okay, I test— I've tested thousands of neurotransmitter levels. You can't give me a neurotransmitter panel and I can't pick out the depressed person, the happy person, the angry person, the sad person. The crazy thing is that's not 100% about their context in their brain, but I would say that overwhelmingly their mental state is actually more about the story they've decided to tell themselves than anything else. And this is about which neurons end up getting reinforced. Nerves that fire together wire together. This is Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton. There's tons of different books out there about this. This is not the world according to Dr. Stillman. I didn't make this up over my morning cup of coffee. It's very well established.

We can take any person that claims to be depressed— woe is me— they can claim to be clinically depressed and ask them a few questions and change their state like that. And before the state change, their body chemistry changes. So just actual conversation, which is converted to Visual movies change the body chemistry, change the state. Somebody's clinically depressed. I mean, I'm not a doctor clinician. I don't know about genetics, and I'm sure all of that may pay a— play a part, but that's not the chronic problem in our world with depression. I'm sure it's a percentage, but the big percentage is just people that constantly tell themselves a bad story. You know, if I ask you, Amy, um, tell me about the worst death that you've ever encountered in your family, or perhaps a pet. Tell me about the, the time when somebody close to you died, or a pet that you love died a horrible death, an agonizing death. Tell me that story, Amy. And Amy tells me that story, and I guarantee you she's gonna start crying. She's going to be depressed. That's so true. She's gonna be like, okay, now Amy, Amy, okay, now I want you to pivot and go conquer the world. I can't. I'm so sad. I can't even get up off the chair. Or I could ask Amy, and I could ask Amy right afterwards, okay, Amy, thanks for the sad story. Tell me about the most extraordinary thing that's ever happened in your life. Tell me about a time in your life when you were just 10-foot tall and could conquer the world. You were so happy and so elated and so excited and felt so powerful. Tell me about that. She speaks that story, they change. We just have hundreds of millions of people that are just wallowing in crap stories.

But a big piece of that, Richard, that I find very important for people to know is that a lot of the stories— marketing is storytelling— and a lot of the stories being told out there and a lot of the content I see being produced on social media today I have to say, it's, it's marketing masquerading as fact, science, education, whatever, entertainment.

Look at all the pharmaceutical commercials.

Well, back to the point about major depressive disorder, right? I mean, by creating a narrative that you tell yourself that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that leads me to feel sad, and the thing for me to do about it is take this pill to effectively rent my happiness from this pharmaceutical company for the rest of my life. Yeah, incredibly profitable story for the pharmaceutical company and a very impoverishing, disempowering story for the patient. So our focus ends up becoming— and this is something I had to learn to be sensitive to— I'm very keen as I'm listening to a patient for the first time What is— what little clues are they telling me about their internal story, about their internal state? Because we see it coming out with the staff, we see it coming out in their care. The most happy, optimistic, positive people who have the most positive can-do attitude get the best medical outcomes on a quantitative basis. And the reason I think this is so powerful, and that your analogy of this jars and vinegar analogy is really powerful is that at the end of the day, if you want to change this story, you have to start telling yourself a different story constantly. And as you do that, you're diluting this vinegar and it's just spilling out onto the floor and just let it go. There's a drain. It'll all get washed out. But what people don't, I think, understand is that yes, I can move the levers on their physiology with hormones and drugs and nutrients and supplements and inverted resets and coffee enemas and saunas and biohacking and ozone and hyperbaric oxygen and hydrogen therapy and magical thinking and meditation. But at the end of the day, if they're constantly marinating their brain and their body— and in a very real sense, the pouring of water into a jar is very, very real here because our glands are literal collections of cells that have inside of them little tiny vesicles that have neuro— neurotransmitters and hormones in them. And as those neurotransmitters and hormones are released, they actually change the pH of the body. They actually change the cells. This is why it's funny— yesterday I happen to be talking to my father-in-law about hunting and about how when he was growing up hunting, they all knew you have to break the bird's neck and you have to bleed it immediately Otherwise, these hormones and neurotransmitters literally change the taste of the meat.

Yeah.

And if those can change the taste of the meat, they're changing the chemistry, they're changing the structure, they're changing the way that it is. And that's why I've learned the hard way that if you try to get somebody better who's got a truly negative, dysfunctional, toxic story, they can have all the money in the world all the time and spend all the effort, and they are going to be just basically ramming their nose into the wall until you change that story. And I love your book because I think it's the single most concise explanation of how to actually do that work that I've ever found. Because pretty much in my book, everybody else either just focuses on the problem, which is nice but not helpful in the end, or it's some big convoluted, we got to do this hour-long meditation regimen 3 times a day and you have to sell your worldly possessions and move to the equator or become a monk or— and it's very impractical. And ultimately I find that that leaves people feeling defeated and just feeling like I'm broken and I'm hopeless and I hope that some combination of hormones and supplements will overthrottle my natural tendencies because I am broken. So that's why I wanted to have you on.

I'm sure, Dr. Stillman, that's what makes you such a unique and valuable health practitioner is you are a coach first. And you understand that before you can give somebody a regimen or a solution, like, you know, a, like a medical solution or a lifestyle solution, You have to address their internal story. You have to address their motive, right? Is it worth it to them? What do they want? And is it worth it to let the old story go? Because the old story is quite addictive. It may not be producing what we want long-term, but it is producing what we want right now.

That goes back to that idea.

Be lazy.

Yeah. It goes back to that craving of familiarity. And I found that people will rationalize telling themselves the story because it allows them to remain in the familiar.

Sure. Comfort zone.

Right.

Yeah, I think, you know, another key piece about this transformational opportunity is if this liquid in here, which is actually an antioxidant, but if this represents a story that's not leading us where we want to go, if it's not really serving us long-term, it maybe is serving our comfort zone. If this is it, that can be a finite story. And the vinegar analogy is we can put in a new story. We can just make up a new story and put it in, and we can keep putting it in. Like, I've done this demonstration many times. I won't do it in my office here, but if I had a giant pitcher of clean water, I can just keep pouring it in this glass and it'll start to overflow and the color will change. And by the time the pitcher is done, this is a glass of crystal clear water, totally different body chemistry, all created by a constant flooding of a new story. And that's a gift that we've been given, is the opportunity. We're the only living, breathing being on the planet out of millions of animals, species, birds, fish, whatever. We're the only one that was given the gift of creative thought. We're the only one that can choose what we think. We can choose in this moment to fabricate a different story that is aligned with our long-term best interests. We can just make it up. Cows can't do that. What can cows do? They can eat. Fart and poop.

They can run away from predators.

Well, yes, they can.

And give birth.

They can do that too. They have about maybe 6 things they can do, and their life is about repeating that cycle. That's it. So we decide to shoot them in the head and eat them. That's it. And that's the same case with Everything except humans. Humans have— if you look at, if you look at an anthill today versus an anthill a million years ago, probably looks pretty much the same. If you look at a human hill today versus a human hill even 1,000 years ago, doesn't look anything the same. We have the ability to create. Thought, ideas. And then we have the ability to manifest those, not always for good. Sometimes we create until we just wreck things, but that's the gift we've been given. We all have that infinite spirit gift to create, and all that the universe or God or whoever you apply it to, all it or he or she is asking of us is, hey, just create a story that's aligned with what you really want and tell yourself that story over and over again and align your life with it and make choices around it. And you're going to get massively healthier and wealthier. And happier.

Simply on that, on that note, I think it's remarkable how people— we often are faced with their health crises as practitioners at a time when living out of alignment with what they authentically want has driven them to a place where their, their body is saying no. You know, Gabor Maté's work, he titled his book When the Body Says No. After taking care of so many patients, he noticed that at a certain point they just— their— the body said no, in the sense that it would no longer allow them to continue doing what they were doing. They had to make a change. You know, Jim, our, our top coach, will say to people— he's got a lot of funny little, little interviewing techniques— but one of the things he'll ask people who are constantly running around, and he says that he's— they're running around with their hair on fire, which I think is quite funny given your book title. But he'll say, what are you running from? And it's remarkable what they'll say to him in response, uh, because a lot of them don't— they'll get— they'll then start to really pause and reflect and say, well, you know, I gotta do this because of this, I do that. And then we'll have a conversation with them with, well, did you— do you really want all these things that are distracting you from your wellness? Is this really worth the Is this juice worth the squeeze? And really, the squeeze in this sense is the consequences. And almost always the answer is no. I'm ready to slow down. I'm ready to change things. I have to have a conversation with myself. And we see profound things happening when people do things like forgive people who've really seriously wronged them, right? And all that comes back to changing the story, you know, because forgiveness is of course perhaps the most powerful story out there.

Gratitude also equally is profound. Yes.

I think one of the best stories you share in Mach 2 with Your Hair on Fire that I'd love to hear in your own words today is the story about how all this shook out for you when you went from being a struggling network marketer to, uh, really achieving profound success in the field and that ice storm that you drove through in Iowa.

Yeah, well, you know, network marketing is, is a sales job, a sales profession in many respects. It's different. It's actually more like, um, professional recruiting, because to become successful in network marketing, you're not only selling a product— that's actually the easy part— The challenging part is you are also building a sales team. So you're recruiting talent to your team. And so it's, again, it's just a sales function. And in sales, you know, all salespeople will tell you, you know, many are called, few are chosen. And you have to ask X number of people before one person is what I call leaning up against the door. You have to open a lot of doors. And some sales strategists and coaches will teach you how to open the door and reach through the door and grab people by the back of their neck and drag them through the door whether they don't want to come or not. But I've teach people just open the door and look for people that are leaning against the door and they'll have a tendency to fall in to whatever you're doing. But regardless, you have to ask a lot of people. And the people that don't say yes say no. And they say no in a variety of ways, right? Some people say no. Some people say no thank you. Some people say no and don't ever ask me again. Some people say no and by the way, you are really stupid for doing that. Yourself. Variety of ways to say no. All of those nos have the potential to feed a story that sounds like, I'm a bad person. I've chosen a bad career. People don't like me. No one wants to do this. I'm taking advantage of people. I'm a bad person. I'm going to fail. This is going to end up— I mean, all of those nos feed a bad story, right? And the story that I need to keep asking is a story that sounds like some will, some won't. A story that sounds like— one that I teach is it's kind of like looking for aces in a deck of cards. Right? The more you flip over that say no, which would be the more cards you flip over that aren't an ace, the closer you are to an ace, right? So the more nos I get, the more anticipating I get to the ace, the more excited I get, the more confident, the more inevitable my vision becomes. It could be that. But for most people, it is the more people who tell you no, the worse your story gets. So that is the epiphany that I had in doing this work. I had to get to a place where the more challenges I had, I was in control of my story, not my circumstances, not other people. That's their story. And, you know, up until I did that, I worked hard. I tried. I mean, this was me in business.

And that was 1979 that all changed, right?

In 1979, I went to work diligently. On my store. Hmm. And I took a set of circumstances that would normally spin a negative story. So without giving you the whole thing, a prospect called me. He wanted one bottle of my product that cost $15. If I sold it to him, I would have made $5. Problem is he lived 2.5 hours away. There was no like UPS or FedEx back then. If he's going to get a bottle of product, I have to take it to him. There was a major ice storm going on. This was in central Iowa, middle of February. So normally this is what my story would have sounded like. Guy wants another bottle of product. I would have said, one bottle, $5, not even worth me getting it to you. Oh, there's an ice storm. I can't drive 2.5 hours in an ice storm. What if I get in a wreck? What if my car breaks down? What if I get in a whiteout? What if I drive 2.5 hours to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he doesn't even show up? I could have easily spun all of those stories. But because I was so powerfully working on the habit of what I call in the book a green light story, this is the way I spun it. He wanted another bottle. I'm thinking, okay, are you expecting me to run you another bottle every month or every 2 weeks when you run out? It would make sense that I would be able to sell you a case More efficient for you, more efficient for me. Now it's starting maybe to become worth my while. This is 1977, right? So it might have been worth $100 to me. So I created that. Ice storm. This is the story I made up. If I tell him I'm driving through this ice storm, deliver his bottle, he'll show up. Right? Because he'll see the sacrifice and the commitment. I also made up that if I get there right before lunch, because I've driven 2.5 hours— I made this up— he'll offer to buy me lunch. I just made it up. I made up if I get to sit with him for an hour You know, there's nothing to talk about with the product. He already wants it. Here's your bottle, or here's your case. You made my money. Now we have 58 minutes to kill while we're having lunch, right? I made up in all that extra time, somehow, some way, I don't know how, I'm gonna get to tell him about the opportunity, the financial opportunity. He already loves the product. I just made all this up. Got in the car, drove to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, got to the Village Inn, quarter to 12. This guy is there, matches the description in the lobby. He says, "Are you Richard?" I said, "Yeah, are you Jerry?" "Yeah." He says, "Wow, you drove all the way here in an ice storm?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "You want to have lunch?" I said, "Yeah, sure, what a good idea." About 15 minutes into lunch, he says, is there any money in this product? I said, it'll blow your mind. Without hesitating.

Were those your exact words?

Exactly. And I didn't even hesitate. He said, is there any money in this product? I said, it'll blow your mind. Now people say Well, weren't you pretty broke at the time that you said it would blow your mind? I said, yeah, I was. Well, didn't you lie to him? No, because if he knew that I'd been full-time selling this product for 2 and a half years and I'm only making $300 a month and I'm driving a borrowed car, that would blow his mind. It also would blow his mind if he knew how much my partners that I was working with were earning, who were actually doing what they're supposed to do, they were making $10,000 a month. Hmm. Blows mine.

Yep.

Yeah. And he— oh, Jerry, I was literally making $300 a month driving a borrowed car. And a year later, Jerry was making me $10,000 a month. This is 1979, and I was driving a brand new Lincoln Mark V Collector Series, which you and I wouldn't even be caught dead driving today, but I was pretty darn proud of it. White with blue velour interior. And 3 years after that, I was making $40,000 a month. Not all from Jerry, but I parlayed the Jerry experience into more. Every bit of it, Leland Stillman, came from the day he called and said, I want another bottle of product, and I spun Greenlight stories on all of it.

Yes.

And had I spun the normal story, it would have been too cold, too stormy, too far, too little money. I'm just going to watch TV and feel sorry for myself.

And that is exactly how most people wind up in the modern world, getting overweight, sick, brain fog, fatigue, dementia, nursing home, debility, hip fracture, and then on the way to the morgue. And it is so easy conceptually, but it really does require up— require for people to show up and do the work, which is why we— I've at times felt so strongly about the need for, uh, commitment and accountability that I've considered cutting off the lower tiers of service in what we do, because when people don't really commit financially, they tend to not show up and really execute. And we, on the other side of that, you know, you can't have a team running around to hold people accountable for $30, $100, $150 a month. That's why the gym membership model is largely built around failure, right? They don't cancel their gym membership because they still haven't achieved their goals, but they don't show up, which is why the gym can have 10,000 members and only 10 active on the floor at the same time. But at the end of the day, when you're really thinking about success and results— and this is one of the other things you, you mentioned— is that you knew it wasn't about where you were, and you knew it wasn't about one drive. It was about steady, consistent work, because we always see that healing is not linear. And people will get this massive payout, 6 months, a year. I actually use the compounding interest analogy that you use, you know, the penny. And people who don't know, if you double a penny every day for 30 days, you have $5 million or more. If you double it every other day for 30 days, you have $163 and change, which is enough to buy maybe dinner at a nice restaurant for 2 people these days. And that's a really profound financial explanation, but the reality of it is the same example holds true in people's health. It's not like you— and I really mean this— the people who get out there and they do 3 10-minute walks every day get exponentially better results than the people who do it every other day.

So how about people that eat right, like eat clean fresh food? If you do that every other day but then the off day you eat burgers, fries, and Cheetos.

Cheat day.

Yeah. That's a net zero, right? You don't even get $163.80 out of that. You just neutralized everything.

Yes.

Compounding consistency is one of the most profound secrets to 10x-ing whatever you want out of life. And there is plenty of room for all of us to 10x our health, 10x our vitality, our immune system. We may not live 10 times longer, but, um, I think all of us would realize that an extra 2 or 3 years If that was awarded to us on our deathbed, if something or somebody swooped in on our deathbed and said, what would it be worth to you to get an extra 2 years or 5 years or 10 years? Worth everything, right? You're talking about, you know, people paying for coaching and healthcare. And, you know, they don't want to pay $100 a month or $200 a month or What would you pay on your deathbed for another 5 years? How about all of it? How about everything? But somehow 5 years earlier, 10 years earlier, either even $100, $200, $500 a month is unreasonable, inconvenient, too much money.

I think a lot of them are struggling with the, the reality that in medicine and health, as with network marketing, there's an element of uncertainty, and the compounding requires a certain amount of time. Yeah, for sure. And some of that is also about that just the simple reality that the human body decays. Every minute I'm working with less.

Yeah, right.

So speaking of minutes and working with less, it's been great having you. Thank you for joining us. I've really enjoyed this. I hope people have as well. I hope they really take to heart the ideas that Richard unpacks in the book. It's well worth a read. One of the things that most impressed me about it Richard, was just the sheer number of endorsements. You've got a who's who of success sports on the back cover and the inside cover for testimonials. And that's so— I mean, I feel like everybody with an opinion and a Tony Robbins course under their belts got a personal development book. I can spot it a mile away at this point. But yours is really quite different for how concise and hard-hitting it is. And I think it's— anyone who's trying to create something in their wellness should really read it.

My mission in the book and the work is to keep it simple, simplify it down so that the masses can see, hmm, I could do this. Because transformational development can be a big woo-woo $10,000 course followed by a $20,000 course. Followed by a 50. I mean, it can just never end, right? And yet it's really very simple. I hope you just do the— it's just like health, right? You can spend $50,000 or $100,000, or you can just do the very simple things and it will revolutionize your health. Thank you, Dr. Stillman. It's an honor to be on your show. Thank you, Amy.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you, Richard. Down the road.