Ollie Ollerton - SAS Hero on Overcoming Trauma & Unlocking Your True Potential

Full transcript: Ollie Ollerton on London Real

3:48 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ollie Ollerton, the Special Forces soldier, TV star, author, and motivational speaker. You were an original member of the hit TV show SAS, Who Dares Wins, where you inspired millions with your insights on leadership, mental toughness, and overcoming adversity. You are the best selling author of five books, including your autobiography, Breakpoint and the personal development guide Battle Ready. You served as a Royal Marine Commando in Northern Ireland in Iraq, then joined the Special Boat Service and spent six years touring the most hostile environments in the world doing hostage rescue, counterterrorism and Homeland Security. You’re one of the first UK Special Forces soldiers to openly share your struggles with addiction, crediting ayahuasca as a key factor in turning your life around. Ultimately, you believe that man’s greatest challenge is overcoming our inherent survival instinct and that only by focusing on the here and now can we reclaim our potential and start living authentically.

4:49 Brian Rose: Ollie, welcome to London Real in Dubai.

4:51 Ollie Ollerton: Thank you for that introduction and thank you for inviting me here. It’s a pleasure.

4:56 Brian Rose: It’s my pleasure to have you survival instinct, talk about that. Everyone has it.

5:01 Grandma has it, I have it, everyone walking down the streets has it. It’s not something that’s talked about very much. We’re all taught to meditate and all these other things, but you’re kind of one of the first guys that I’ve seen kind of trace it back to a survival instinct. And I’m curious, you know, what do you mean by that? You know what?

5:19 Ollie Ollerton: When I I first had my kind of crash and burn at sometime after being in special forces, I wanted to understand how the operating system works. I can’t understand, and I hate saying this word, but I couldn’t understand why I’d gone from hero to 0 in 10 years. I’ve become the opposite of what I was in 10 years. I could be the laziest. Person you can imagine, and then I could be the most energetic person you can imagine. And I thought, what, what, what’s going on there? So I started to do loads of research. I actually put myself into a, into a boot camp. I locked myself for three months away in the house, which is was the basis for the book battle ready. And over that three months, I focused on three things, mind, body and nutrition.

6:06 Now, in that time, I switched off the news, didn’t buy any newspapers. That’s not changed since by the way, and I was the most important project there was. And it was. So important for me to get an understanding of how we’re wired, understand the operating system. People know how to use their phones better than they know how to, how the system works.

6:26 And the only education we have is our siblings, our parents, our environment, our schooling, and the intentional programming that’s out there, societal programming. So really I wanted to get to grips with that operating system, understand that survival instinct because I’ve had my back against the wall a couple of times and really understanding that that is a default program when you understand this is I think is the, the, the, the battle. OK, this is my opinion. We have this.

7:01 Survival instinct. That survival instinct is only interested in our evolution, you know, wants to keep evolving the species, etcetera, etcetera. Then you have your soul that wants to experience, wants to grow, wants to expand, wants to do all these great things. Do you think this here, this survival instinct that wants to just evolve the species wants me to jump out of helicopters, ride fast motorbikes, go to war zones? No, this survival instinct wants me to sit in a corner, eat food and procreate, which sounds quite interesting for some people, but you get bored of that after a while. So we’re in this constant battle. If we don’t observe that, if we’re not aware of that, then we are.

7:45 And the majority of people are on this planet, unfortunately, the laziest species on the planet and the only one that knows it’s going to die. So it was really important for me to get a grips on that. And this, I feel is where so many people are trapped because we are constantly driven towards that survival instinct because you can be controlled when you are, you know, and whether it’s intentional or not, you can make those opinions for yourself. But the fact of the matter is creative entrepreneurs don’t help society function.

8:18 You know, when you look back, you know, I, I look back on all kinds of aspects and understanding that some time ago, you know, the whole schooling system was designed to create factory workers, you know, and that whole programme, when you look at that, you know, I looked into what we used to do, you know, I got to a certain age and I just went, what is this? I just didn’t understand the purpose of it at all. I was good at school, but all of a sudden I just felt, I can’t understand why I’m doing this.

8:45 It seems a waste of my time. And when you look at it right, the schooling system, what did we do back then? We went from 45 minute to 45 minute to 45 minute break. Then we did exactly the same thing in the afternoon. And then you get this gender argument of people saying, well, women are better at multitasking than men.

9:02 Anyone that multitasks is 60 or is 60% less productive because you need to be into flow to really achieve anything spectacular, spectacular in life. Any entrepreneur, any gold medallist, anyone that’s done really well, they’ve found a passion outside of that schooling system and they’ve focused on it, you know, outside of school, even when they’re in school, they’re focused on that. They’ve stepped outside of the system and you look at our traditional old way of evolution, you would have a family of blacksmiths, that whole family where a whole line of blacksmiths would train in that art, train in that skill.

9:43 But now we’ve lost all of that and we are, we’re all lost. The whole of society is lost because we’ve. Created this factory. Worker people think they leave school. They never leave school.

9:54 And I know I’ve kind of digressed a bit there because it’s about the survival instinct, but the whole system is designed to keep us locked into that survival instinct. And when you’re in that survival instinct, you can’t create, you can’t grow.

10:07 Brian Rose: It’s powerful, powerful to think about. Reminded me of a quote from Mark Twain. Never let your school get in the way of your education, which is kind of funny at 1st.

10:15 And when you look into it further, yeah, you realize your education has nothing to do with school. We’re meant to constantly learn our entire lives. If anything, school gets in the way of that.

10:25 Ollie Ollerton: Definitely. But they don’t leave school.

10:27 You know, a lot of people so institutionalized that they leave school and they find a new headmaster. A new headmaster is in a business. They don’t actually leave that safe bubble. And that’s the thing, you know, when it comes to your survival instinct, we’re trapped in that unless, unless you’re aware of it. And this awareness for me changed my life. Because your mind wants to do what it did yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. Because as far as your mind is concerned, it’s kept you alive until today.

10:54 Doesn’t care if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It just knows that it’s familiar, it’s safe. So we’re caught in this habit loop and to break out of that. And then I’ll talk from my personal experience here. When I was drinking and I was drinking heavily, I was caught in that. It was mayhem.

11:09 It wasn’t. I was in a ill state of mental health. I knew the right path moving forward. And I knew it was good. For me, and I could say to myself, doing that would be great. For me, it’s going to be awesome. Just do that.

11:21 But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy because your brain just goes please do yesterday, please do yesterday. And that is really the concept of my business. You know, it’s break point, pushing into short term discomfort for long term gain. You have to go through the short term.

11:36 Brian Rose: Have you seen that quote about the bison now?

11:38 Ollie Ollerton: Oh, I love this quote.

11:39 I actually put it in my presentations now. And it’s got Anthony Hopkins, which is is a great narrator and not a bad actor as well. And he talks about the bison, the bison being the only one of its species that turns into the storm. When it’s faced with it, it sees the storm, it turns into it and it goes charging straight through because it knows on the other side it’s going to be short term and it’s going to be on the other side where it’s calm. As opposed to running forever as it chases them. Exactly.

12:10 Trying to escape the storm, which is the rest of the animals. Do you never escape the storm? So you’re forever in that constant pain. And when that relates to us as humans, when you procrastinate, when you go the path of least resistance, easy makes life hard, you know, and the, the, the bison just typifies that so well. And that really is the concept of, of break point. It’s stepping into short term discomfort for long term gain. And it’s just being aware of this. Once you’re aware of it, it’s absolutely incredible. And it’s also another amazing thing. I, I mean, I’m always, every day is a school day. I haven’t got enough life left to, to, to think and know all the answers.

12:50 And none of us should have. But it’s interesting to know that your programming starts very early in life. You know that zero to seven, around about zero to seven is where all the coding is put in. And This is why the Jesuits have been telling their flock for 400 years. Give me a boy until he is 7. I will show you the man because they know. That all the stuff.

13:12 That they can program someone in those years creates the adult later on in life. Those programmes are so hard wired that by the time you’re about about 32 or 30s in your early 30s, you’re 95% programme, 5% creative ability. And that creative ability, the 5% is the one that wakes up on a on a Friday, right Monday, all changes. I’m going to start looking after myself. I’m going to start investing in myself.

13:36 I’m going to buy all the equipment this weekend, the new trainers, everything else. It always starts on a Monday, doesn’t it? It’s this is my last weekend, you know, of drinking and debauchery and everything else. Monday morning they set the alarm for 45 minutes before they’re going to get up, do this workout. The alarm goes off Monday morning.

13:54 What’s the first thing we do? Snooze. Because what’s happened there is the 95% tap you on the on the shoulder and said, hey, I don’t think you remember how we do things around here. And especially when you’re stressed. This is how the system is designed, isn’t it? It’s designed so you don’t have to think. You know, a lot of that programming is subconscious exactly the same way that you used to drive, you know, you learnt to drive a car first day, absolute mayhem I’m never going to be able to do this year later. You’re driving down the road like some kind of, you know, Ayrton Senna thinking you’re a master. You don’t even know how you’ve got to your destination. And that’s basically because you’ve done something so much that your body’s learnt to do it better than your mind ever did. And really for me, I know it’s this is like a lot of bits and bobs and information, but it’s just awareness of this, awareness of the operating system. And once you’re aware of that, you can work with your strengths as well as your weaknesses and stop faking perfection, which the majority of people do on ego ground. And most people, unfortunately, are just living kind of a photocopy of the previous day, and that’s based on the 95% of their programming.

14:57 And they can never really get out of it. And they don’t even know they’re doing that. They think they have free will, they think they’re making choices, but it’s just that program on repeat.

15:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, 100%. I also honestly believe that.

15:08 Ollie Ollerton: And I think This is why there’s this. I’ve always been quite intrigued. About the level of the level of. How we idolise celebrities, and I truly believe that’s because we’ve been, how we’ve been programmed to believe. We lack any kind of power.

15:30 We like any kind of self worth. So we idolise something external of us. I think it, we’ve been programmed to believe everything. Our power, everything is outside of us. I mean, look at the Bible for God’s sake.

15:40 That’s a typical example of that. But we don’t believe or we don’t understand the power of who we are. And I don’t fully understand it at all, but I do know. That. Some of the information things I’m learning now about the power of who we are, about energy and everything else and frequency vibration, all this that and the other makes more sense to me than the narrative that we’ve been fed to think that we’re just lumps and meat and gravy walking around.

16:05 Ollie Ollerton: Eat. Sleep, work. Repeat. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

16:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. And then the programming to seven. I think we both know Doctor Bruce Lipton. He was on my show many years ago and I didn’t expect it was going to be probably one of our most watched episodes ever. I just thought this guy was going to come in, maybe talk about epigenetics and genetics, and all of a sudden he was talking about a lot of things.

16:25 You’re talking about the programming and everything. And then you had children and my boys are now 7 and 8. So it’s quite relevant to me because rise around the cut off time and then to watch them as kids, they just open up a hard drive when they’re born and they’re taking everything in. And, you know, they’re growing up in London and OK, the Queen’s over there. She’s more important than the rest of us. OK, I go to school, I do this, Daddy does this, this does this, I’m this.

16:46 And yeah, they’re programmed to think that they’re you’re this person in the world and then you go to school. And if you look at the Victorian system, I mean, it was basically like, we have this industrial revolution, we have all these workers and we got these pesky little things running around. What are they? Oh, they’re kids. Let’s put them in here and make more workers.

17:02 And then thanks to the British Empire, we exported that to the world. And so most people are walking around these program beans. And then, as you said, with your survival instinct, people take advantage of that, from marketers to, you know, to people like Fauci, to people like all these other people can basically. Yeah, Governments, yeah. Corporations, they can pretty much make you do anything they want you to do by tapping into that unless you’re aware of it, right?

17:29 And unless you can say, OK, my survival instinct saying this, but I can bypass this if I want. And I think that’s a lot about what you talk about.

17:38 Ollie Ollerton: Well, the first step is awareness, isn’t it? Because if you’re not aware of the program, then you are the program. And here’s another thing for me as well, which is something else I’ve started stepping into again, I’m a Jack of all trades, master of none when it comes to this stuff.

17:54 But you know, when it comes to sound frequency, it’s really interesting again, I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s one familiar trait every time with these certain organizational person that changed all this some time ago, I think it was around the 1950s that we used to, I didn’t even know there was a governing body for sound. You know, there’s some kind of governing body for sound. And in the 50s. Or should we go back to, first of all, the, the, the human resonance of the Earth is 432 and that’s the frequency that is harmonious to us as well. We’re the same as as Earth.

18:26 And when when we’re in tune with that, it’s quite harmonious to the body. Now, for whatever reason, not in the 50s, they changed that to the 440 Hertz, which is everything. You know, it’s your phone, it’s your wireless. Do they call it wireless? Anymore that made me sound really old, but anyway, you know, all your instruments and everything is now 440 Hertz, which is very disruptive vibration and frequency to all your cells. So it’s just interesting and then I’ll look at this, right, our kids.

18:53 You then stick a set of headphones on these kids with that frequency going into their straight into their head, and then they’re listening to rap music. They’re listening to this kill this, you know, all this aggression, violence and everything else. And then we wondered why there’s a problem. Right. You know, so I think you know, again, I’m no expert, but honestly, it’s as clear as day to me what’s going on.

19:15 Brian Rose: I’ve heard this narrative recently that a lot all of our pop music and music is just the frequency itself is just jamming our our heads and our souls.

19:23 I’ll talk about on top of everything else. That’s trying to It’s a toxic world, isn’t it? And so if people are watching or listening and they can maybe be aware that their survival brain is stopping them from living the rest of their life, they’re stopping the fulfillment. And all it really wants is for you to procreate before you get to the grave. That’s it.

19:41 And, and then when in fact, if you want to live this amazing, fulfilling life, if you want to move humanity forward, move even your future generations forward, and then you have to realize that you both have two separate interests. And so be to be aware of one is the only way to get to the other. And then it’s like, OK, what are the tools to do that? And then I guess there are many many tools.

20:00 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, I think first of all, like I said, awareness is the first thing, isn’t it?

20:04 And at the end of the day, so many people don’t know if they’re in prison because they can’t see the chains, you know? And this is the thing. It’s just the fact that they’ve got to understand that stress is the biggest killer, right? Whatever the disease is about 90% of hospital visits or doctors visits are stress related. So really it’s, it’s understanding the triggers of stress and everything else. I always come up with this story, this analogy, right? And that is you imagine you’ve seen, we’ve all seen the shows, the, the wildlife shows.

20:33 You’ve got this gazelle and it’s having a nice drink by this in the Serengeti. It’s chewing on the grass, having a great old time, beautiful hot summer’s day. There’s a line approaching in the undergrowth and then all of a sudden the gazelle gets a sniff and the gazelle is Mach 10 up the hill. The lion starts racing after it and then drifts off because it’s run out of energy. Now the gazelle is not at the top of that mountain going.

20:57 I can’t believe he’s just done that. I’ve chipped a hoof and starts, you know, that gazelle is back there chewing the grass, having a drink. It’s learnt how to use that stress response, bang up when it’s needed, bang down when it’s needed. And this is a lot as well when it comes to our special forces training. They, they taught us that, you know, this is how we’re trained. But The thing is, the way humanity is, is we are triggered exactly the same way in modern society as we as we were back those in those primal days.

21:26 And we can’t let it go. And when you can’t let it go, you’ve got one thing, your boss, your Co worker, your kids, your wife, whatever it is, you know, switches on that stress or comment on Instagram, you know, and before you know it, you’re up here. Then you read the listen to the news, you turn your phone on in the morning. Before you know it, you are constantly on the state of stress. And the next thing you’re starting to breathe shallow. You’ve got this cortisol response firing up, which means you’re in fight or flight mode constantly. So you’re constantly in this, this survival mode and there’s two things, right?

22:01 And you’ll agree with me, I know on this two things that will get your attention regardless of what you’re doing, and that’s sex and death. Sex and death. And what’s the media all about? Sex and death and a few bits thrown in there to, to distract you from me. It’s just sex and death. So you know, at the end of the day, if you’re actually in that survival mechanism, that survival stress state all the time, then all of a sudden you see something that could threaten you, bang you straight onto that. And that’s why you get the shocking headlines and this that and the other and everything else. And you know, if you’re constantly belt fed, you talked about tools before.

22:35 One thing I’d certainly say to everyone is switch off the news app. Don’t allow that to be the first thing you see as soon as you wake up in the morning. That 30 seconds is absolutely imperative. You imagine when you wake up as well when it comes to your survival instinct, you’ve been asleep for 8 hours. Say you wake up, you get a boost of cortisol straight away and the mind wants you to remember everything that threatened your life the day before. We haven’t got the threats as much anymore per SE, but we have got all the problems.

23:02 Your mind is addicted to problems, you know, and This is why we’ve got it. We’ve just lost our way, you know, when it comes to things like goals, the subconscious mind is a goal striving, goal getting machine that stops at nothing till it gets what your dominant thoughts focus on. Now, if that’s predominantly negative, which it is, which it is 60 to 80 thousand thoughts a day, predominantly negative, if you’ve got no control over that, then you are just going to be driven to every single problem and you’re walking around in a state of stress you can never create because you’re in that survival mechanism. You want.

23:32 Don’t want to upset status quo. And look at the UK now. It’s so frustrating because everyone is just happy with average. You know, as long as I’m doing OK, as long as I’m just doing average, that’s brilliant. And life is not about that.

23:46 Brian Rose: That’s weird that you put that right in at the end. Is that related to the fact that people are getting stressed all the time?

23:54 Ollie Ollerton: The. Average, the average I just, I just find that people I I think it’s a byproduct of being in that survival mechanism because you imagine someone, you imagine someone that. Isn’t right because. That’s a break.

24:04 Brian Rose: Average is a break from survival. Well.

24:06 Ollie Ollerton: The thing is, no average is survival because you don’t take any risk whatsoever. If you’re trapped on an island, you could be on this side of the island, Ships crashed, you’ve made your way to the island, they’re over the mountain. There could be a habitation, there could be a village, anything. But you won’t go up the mountain because that could risk risk your life even further. It could threaten you even even more.

24:25 So you you keep control of this little area around you. Do not step out of it. And that’s exactly how people are. You know, they don’t want to upset the status quo. Just get your job and allow that just to pay you enough to get by and pay your bills and everything else. We live in a, you know, and then people. Are just a slave to the.

24:40 System, you know, and we’ve, I’ve been there. We’ve all been there.

24:44 Brian Rose: What else can people do besides not turn the phone on first thing, Not checking the news? What are some of the other things?

24:50 Ollie Ollerton: I mean, first of all, one thing for me is not drinking.

24:53 I mean, that was the superpower for me. You know, when I stopped drinking, I realised what a cage that had kept me in a cage for so long. It was like I had this. It was, it was like Stockholm. Syndrome, you know, drink was my captor, you know, and I absolutely idolised this thing that was keeping me trapped and keeping me stressed. I had no money.

25:14 Brian Rose: But, you know, if that was a friend of yours, you’d have ditched him a long time ago. I’d certainly hope.

25:19 Ollie Ollerton: But yeah, the thing for me is right. And now I’m really starting to look deep into the cellular health of who we are. You know, I’ve now realised I’m taking a lot of information in now, but we think I can go for a run. That’s going to be the answer to our fitness and our mental health.

25:34 We think we can just do a bit of mindset stuff and that’s going to be the answer to everything. We think we can just maybe just eat a little bit better. It’s more than that, has to be a lot more than that. And really when I went into that house some time ago, I focused on those three things, mind, body and nutrition. And I truly believe that if you take one of those away, you’re missing a big piece of that pyramid. So really, you know, I’m so addicted to learning about our water.

26:00 Now. Water is a big thing for me. It’s like, well, for us all 75% water and we don’t care the quality of the water that’s going in there. The majority of the water out there is absolutely floored. It’s dead. It’s dead water.

26:13 And then you get in all the fluorides and this, that and the other, the pipes are corroded, blah, blah, blah. You’ve got. Microplastics. Microplastics. You’ve got pharmaceuticals in there that you can’t get rid of. You know, it’s toxic.

26:25 Brian Rose: And that’s the one thing, isn’t it? If you, if you had to not do, if you had to be the one thing that you have to change in your life.

26:33 Ollie Ollerton: And this is what I say to people, start drinking water. Good quality water, bit of Celtic salt first thing in the morning, stay away from the coffee for 60 minutes and reach. That then affects your circadian rhythm. It allows you to wake up properly and then get you exercise and start doing stuff that takes you away from the everyday monotony of yesterday.

26:54 You know, it is a simple process. And a lot of this stuff is free. I mean, you’ve had Dave Asprey on here. Has he been on the show?

26:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, Yeah, many times he’s been on the show.

27:01 Ollie Ollerton: So, you know, a lot of the stuff and all this knowledge in a, in a world of knowledge, you not knowing about stuff is pure ignorance. You know, there’s so much information out there. But The thing is, it’s what you what you choose to believe, isn’t it? Because if you have that sort of a lot of people. Don’t want to hear a different narrative because it’s too much energy, it’s too much of A upset to their.

27:22 Day-to-day for them to, you know, if you tell them something, this cognitive dissidents will just go no. And it’s like I’ve tried to tell members of my family, you should not be having all this low fat stuff and all this. It should be, you know, it’s this is the stuff that’s really making people ill. But you can’t change them. They’re so set in their ways. They’re so set in that program.

27:42 So people, you know, and they say the, the, the student is only ready. We no, no, the teacher will only appear when the student’s ready. Some people will never wake up.

27:51 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about the drinking, because it’s something that affected both of us for a long period of time, and it’s something that is literally part of the culture in Britain. I noticed, not that it’s doesn’t exist in America, but when I moved to Britain full time in O2, I realized that it was just woven into everything of the culture.

28:09 I’m in the city, people are drinking during the day, and that didn’t really happen on Wall Street where I was. And it was just so inherently part of the culture somehow. And again, maybe that’s back to the programming. And then you go even further and say, OK, maybe it’s part of other people using it to control. But you had it really early because you grew up in a town where there was really a brewery where they would pay you, I think in beer. I mean, you’ve gone through an entire journey. I’m just curious how you look at alcohol, how it’s part of the human narrative and condition.

28:39 Brian Rose: And then what did you learn?

28:41 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, no, it’s been an interesting journey with the alcohol in 14 years old when I took my first drink and I lived in that town. Well, it’s a brewery town, you know, everyone in my family drank, and I just had this relationship with drinking. And I, you know, I will say hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but it never won any awards. It’s great for reflection and it’s great for them to start choosing how you’re going to move forward in the future. But for me, for drinking, I think this is a big problem, right You a lot of people, first of all, they haven’t got a drinking problem.

29:17 They’ve got a problem that causes them to drink and they start that relationship very early with drink. And that’s to mask an emotion. You know what I mean, isn’t it? That’s what we all do it because societal pressure as well. You know this. We must all do this.

29:31 You’ve got parents and let him have his first drink. All this stuff, it’s sort of, you know, it’s.

29:36 Brian Rose: Yeah. We grow into. It, and you’ve said it before, you have a bad day, have a drink. You have a good day, have a drink, somebody dies, you have a drink.

29:43 Somebody’s born, you have a drink, I mean.

29:45 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, and I believe it stems from there because we’ve used it to masculine emotion. So we’ve relied on it for that emotional fix. But then our minds gone, well, can we use it for that? Can we, can we use it for sorrow? Can we use it for happiness?

29:58 Can we use it? And really what you’re doing you, you’ve it’s really corrupt. It’s putting up a smokescreen. So any kind of problems, any kind of issues, confidence as well. You know, This is why so many adults have got confidence issues.

30:11 Why have you got confidence issues? It’s because you’ve never actually dealt with the problem and that is the emotion. You’ve never there’s, you’ve always had a drug to deal with the emotional deficit of your confidence. So and that was certainly the case for me. I built a person that I rented a personality through drink, you know?

30:31 Brian Rose: The fun guy? Yeah.

30:32 Ollie Ollerton: And I was, and you know what, after not drinking of, I was thinking about this, I think all all day long. But I was thinking about this just recently. I was thinking I’m a total contradiction to who I made myself through drink, you know, because I I made out the drink made me a real extrovert. You know, I was the party guy, this, that and the other take the drink away.

30:54 I’m a totally different person. So you realise how much you’re fighting against the green of actually who you are. And that for me, you know, when I stopped drinking, which was sometime I, you know, I had, I got to a point where I crashed and burned and started thinking about suicide. I never attempted it, but the fact I. Was there was a wake up call for me?

31:14 Brian Rose: How old were you?

31:15 Ollie Ollerton: 43 OK. 43 So you know, and I realised how much, how damaging it was for me and it had, it had to go, but I forgot the point of what I was saying, the point of what I was coming to. But it was, I used it for that emotional.

31:31 Brian Rose: Oh sorry, you were the extrovert guy.

31:34 Ollie Ollerton: The Extrovert.

31:35 Guy. And then suddenly you take that away and I’m not that extrovert at all. So you’re fighting against the real person, the real essence of who you are. And when it got to that point, I was so petrified because again, going back to the survival mechanism, I didn’t know who I was in the future. I had no idea who Ollie Orton was.

31:53 And you know, it’s and and that was, you know, when the survival mind if uncharted territory moving forward. It’s terrified of it. It wants to do yesterday. It wants to do. Please do.

32:04 Yesterday. Please do yesterday. Please do yesterday.

32:06 Brian Rose: Oh man, I love that line. So everybody watching should know that when you wake up tomorrow, your brain is begging you, please do yesterday.

32:12 That’s all it wants because it knows what happens. It knows you made it through yesterday. We’re going to make it through today. And anything out of the ordinary, it’s going to reject, even if it’s you’re going to get a billion dollars, you’re going to meet the greatest person you ever met. You’re going to do this. It’s no, let’s just do yesterday. And so now you have this unknown of if I stopped drinking, I don’t even know who I am anymore. And you did it because you had an important project, I think on TV, right?

32:37 And so you stopped drinking for that. And when that was over, your mates wanted to be like, let’s go grab that drink. And go back. And you had a that’s an amazing, powerful moment that could have taken your life one way or the other. And you said no, I’m going to stick this.

32:49 Side

32:49 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, you know, that wasn’t that was the incredible moment because it was the first time ever I didn’t allow the program to take over because that Ollie, come on, let’s go and get smashed. Bang, here’s a drink. But it was the first time I took a breath. And what I did by taking a breath is I took it from the subconscious mind and put it into the frontal cortex to analyse whether I wanted to do it or not. And then I made the decision. I feel great, I feel amazing.

33:13 You know, I’m going to give this a go. And I would go back to the drink because I thought I’ve controlled it now and everything else. So I did 2 1/2 years and then I went back on the drink for for eight months and then it was just going the same way. But you know, whenever I talk about this, everyone thinks, well, it must have had a big problem. It wasn’t that. It was the fact that even when I had one drink, it just sent this mind into fuck it, just fuck it.

33:39 You know, I always sort of creativity, productivity, dreams, everything. Nah, just fuck it. Just leave it. And it just put me, you know, have another drink, have another drink. It was never just one drink. I drank to get drunk and it was, I found it so destructive. And then when disruptive and then when I actually managed to get in control of it and I actually met me for the first time since 14 and it took a bit of cold Turkey, obviously, you know, a bit of pain to get to that. But when I met me, I actually started to like me for the first time in a long time.

34:14 And then I’ve got to the attitude now where I’m like, I would not corrupt this now, I would not create that chemical imbalance. Because here’s the thing, I’ve, I’ve studied and met people that have told me a lot about drinking. It’s like we’ve got this misconception that when you have a drink, you’re all jolly and you’re all happy and this and the other, that’s the drink. It’s not the drink. The drink is the depressant.

34:36 Your body is injecting chemicals into your system to level the balance. And the joy you feel is your body’s reaction to the poison or to the depressant. It’s not the drink that gives you that. And then we also think, well, when I’m around people, I’m a lot more sociable than everything else. You take the drink away, you’ll find that still there.

34:54 Because in community, we thrive. Our energy starts to really interact. If you were the right people, that is. And it’s not the drink, you know, it’s this, this misconception, it’s the drink. And I just feel, I feel personally it’s, it’s, it’s like I say, it’s keeping people trapped.

35:11 They don’t even know they’re locked in the cell.

35:14 Brian Rose: It’s yet another component that keeps you locked up in your box. Yeah. And another tool that has been developed by us that keeps us in there. Yeah. Absolutely.

35:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. I’m seven years sober now.

35:25 Ollie Ollerton: Well done.

35:26 Brian Rose: I don’t go to meetings or anything like that. Never did I just funny enough I did one of those self-imposed, I’m going to take January off 7 years ago. It’s got very British thing to not drink in January and I was just decided to do it.

35:41 And then at 30 days a friend of mine said OK, let’s have a drink. And I was like you know what, I’m going to keep going. And then I just kept going. Now I had tried to stop for 20 years. I drank every day for 20. Some years I was functional, whatever the hell that means, but it was just something I couldn’t control. And I was just, I’m supposed to be a smart guy, right? And I can see how destructive it is. And I remember being so embarrassed to go back to that corner shop and get him to give me those 2 bottles of vodka again.

36:09 And here he was looking at me across the thing like, you’re such a loser. Look at you. You look at you and just sending me those bottles. And I was just like, Jesus, I hate this.

36:17 Ollie Ollerton: And that’s your perception, isn’t it, Of what you think he’s thinking, but you’re thinking that about yourself.

36:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, totally. Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Like he even knows who I am. But yeah.

36:26 And I am thinking about that myself. In our last film where we talked about what we did in 2020 and getting censored, there’s a moment where I’m thinking about maybe going back to drinking and I’m remembering that guy and how I can’t be that guy anymore. And people can understand how I’m feeling in that, in that moment. And I couldn’t figure it out. I think Ollie, because again, my mind just said let’s, let’s do yesterday.

36:50 I also felt really disconnected from the world and drinking was a way of getting away from that feeling. I also felt really hard on myself, which was probably the world being hard on me and his way getting away from that. And it was just my way of detaching. And yet it’s just, why would you want to be numb to the world? Exactly 1 of my guests one time said that people drink because they can’t handle reality. And if you don’t like your reality, then change your reality, but don’t become numb to it. And that’s something that always resonated to me. And whenever I wanted to drink that first year, whenever I had a tough time, I thought, wait a second, you know you’re going to have a drink because you can’t handle reality. Are you really so much of A pussy you can’t fucking handle reality?

37:30 And I would push myself and flip it on me and be like, no, you can handle it. You’ve handled much worse. And if you don’t like your reality, well, go fucking change it. And so that just kept me going. And honestly, always one of the greatest accomplishments of my.

37:43 Ollie Ollerton: Life and I think you can’t actually, you know, you can explain. You can tell people that haven’t done that, haven’t gone there, haven’t tried it. You can tell them stories with so much emotion, but they will never understand unless they try it themselves. Do you know the real truth behind prohibition?

38:01 Brian Rose: I’d probably gas, but go ahead and tell me.

38:04 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, this is something that blew my mind, but it just makes sense to me. Prohibition wasn’t about people. You know, we’re going to stop this deadly chemical that’s on the streets and, you know, because it’s it’s, you know, so disrupted to everyone’s health. It was the fact that people start to use it for fuel, OK? You know all the alcohol, it was this. Sustainable fuel that they were using in their lamps, they were using in their vehicles.

38:27 And that was why prohibition came in, because they wiped that all out because the pharmaceutical, not the pharmaceutical, sorry, got there on the brain. The patrolling companies were losing revenue, you know, and that’s, you know, do you think the people at the top were like, we’re not drinking either? They were. They were all. Getting on it, but they were clearing out and making sure that was stamped out.

38:47 Brian Rose: It’s interesting. And then also it’s weird when you have these prohibitions, then all these people get involved that have their own interests in mind. So let’s be honest. I mean, the bootleggers made a ton of money, and then someone has a crusade to crusade for. And then all these people come in who actually it’s better for them when there’s a prohibition. People are comparing that to AI now because AI comes up and they’re like, oh, no, we have to ban it. Oh, we have to control it.

39:09 And you got the bootleggers coming in saying, Oh yeah, yeah, I control that. Meanwhile, they’re making money in the back or they’re drinking themselves.

39:16 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you have to definitely analyze all of those things and find out what were the parties doing what you know, but it’s it’s worth thinking about.

39:24 Brian Rose: And it’s been so normalized in our culture.

39:26 They say if alcohol was created as a drug right now, it would be schedule one and banned in the world, carcinogenic. Yeah. And all the, you know, deaths, more deaths come from alcohol than heroin and fentanyl and any of. That

39:39 Ollie Ollerton: well, I think yeah, no, absolutely. And it’s, I’ve known people that work in sort of, you know, you’re the Priory in places.

39:46 Like that and. Well, that’s a bit of a posh one, but you know, and they say that the worst drug out of anything is alcohol. You know, heroin, cocaine, everything. The worst one is alcohol and. Getting off it is hard as well and then it’s so normalized and social and but I mean, I love going out sober and when you see people drunk you realize how stupid you used to be.

40:10 Brian Rose: And I don’t. I just can’t even imagine ever going back. And I never will go back. I’m never going back.

40:16 Ollie Ollerton: No, and I used to, you know what I used to at one point I used to be a little bit embarrassed and you know, or get myself a non alcoholic 1 so no one has questions. I won’t even have an alcoholic looking one now because I don’t want people to think that I drink. I want I wear that like a badge of honour now. And I’ll tell you what, one thing for me, the biggest thing for me, forget the alcohol, is the fact something had control of me.

40:41 I was alcohols bitch. I was money’s bitch. I was pornography’s bitch. I was drugs bitch, everything, you know? And if you’re not in the in control of any of that, I’m not saying everyone’s got to stop totally any kind of addiction, but you’ve got to be in the driving seat. And when you’re not in the driving seat, you’ve got a problem.

40:59 They’ve got a big problem, so for me, breaking the chain. Of, of, of being in control, put myself in control, then allow me to understand that I can do anything. And now I can, you know, some people like I’m, I’m doing sugar at the moment, so I’m breaking sugar. So since the 6th of jam, no sugar, but I know I can do it. And a lot of people are like, oh, I can’t stop coffee.

41:19 I can’t stop. You know, first of all, you’ve got to have a purpose for doing stuff. You’ve got to assign purpose to the discomfort of doing stuff. Otherwise you’ll never do it. You’ve got to understand your why, so as long as you can understand that you can do it and that that pain is very short.

41:31 People don’t understand. But people aren’t prepared to step into the short term discomfort generally with everything. It’s the same with drink. You know, I’ve got people. I did the dry jam thing in 2024.

41:43 For a massive group of, well, big group of people. And then we did the 10K race at the end of it. It was brilliant and this year I was blown away, Brian, because I had so many people. Not, not hundreds, not but quite a few people that would Instagram me that I hadn’t heard from all year round saying it’s been a year. It’s been a year since I did this, that Dry Jang campaign with you and it’s been incredible.

42:07 And all I can see is like my life has changed. I want to thank you so much. And that, to me, is the best. Paycheck in the world,

42:13 Brian Rose: that’s amazing. Yeah. When you have control of your life and it’s not that hard, it’s super empowering.

42:17 And you’re like, what else can I do? What else can I do? What else can I do? And people have the control. It’s it’s not as hard as you think it is. It seems like it would be in the beginning, it might be. And then all of a sudden you get on. Isn’t it?

42:28 Ollie Ollerton: If you’ve done something continuously for days and days and days, you know, it’s all, you know, in the past, you know, you’ve got to imagine as well, like if someone say 40 years old, you’ve spent 40 years refining that habit, refining who you are, refining the programme. And it’s not going to happen overnight. Change is not going to happen. And we are not wired to embrace change. We’re just not for the reasons we’ve talked about. But if people could just, I think we, you know, we’ve created a society that has been programmed to cry before they feel the pain.

43:04 Do you know what I mean? So we’re in this weakened society that they don’t want to step into any discomfort. You know, I heard someone this morning. What did I hear? I think it was at the airport.

43:15 Someone was saying, oh, I was watching something on the plane and this is in a church. And this guy was saying, we were it’s it’s humanity’s purpose to suffer. And I started thinking about that. And I thought because initially you go shut up, but then I thought in some respects I believe that’s true because to the nervous system, when it knows you’re struggling, it knows you’re pushing into some discomfort, it knows you’re evolving, you’re growing, you know, So I do feel there’s a bit of truth in that. And I feel in the absence of that, this is where we have the issues.

43:54 You know, I really, I believe, you know, I used to demonize the comfort zone and you’ve seen it on Instagram and everything else, you know, comfort zones, there’s no growth. There’s a purpose and a place for the comfort zone. There’s a time when you can sit there, watch Netflix, There’s a time when you can sit there, eat some crap food, this, that and the other. But you don’t set, it’s not for residents. You don’t set camp up there.

44:14 It’s where you recuperate, you regenerate and then you go again. But people have. Set. Up camp there, you know what I mean? And they won’t step out of that.

44:22 Ollie Ollerton: And you know, it’s, it’s certainly my mission since getting on that show and getting the exposure, I want to wake up as many people as possible to that to their potential.

44:31 Brian Rose: You said you went from hero to 0 before you locked yourself, you know, away for three months and got back to the basics. What did you mean? Where had you gone?

44:39 Ollie Ollerton: Well, for me, over a period of time, I mean, I was always drinking when I was in the military.

44:44 It was just a thing. You know, you used to go and do stuff. You used to come back. Don’t show emotion, just get on the lash Did show emotion. Shut up and get a beer down your neck.

44:52 You know, it was that kind of alpha male environment.

44:55 Brian Rose: They had a place for emotion, right? You said the military doesn’t allow you to talk about your feelings, so you become the biggest pressure cooker. It’s like the biggest boys club in the world, the hardest gang. You’re not encouraged to talk about your emotions, so you do crazy hard stuff and then drink. Yeah, right.

45:10 Ollie Ollerton: Absolutely. And that’s you work hard, you play hard, you know, and certainly that.

45:14 Brian Rose: That kind of such a nonsense phrase. Isn’t it? Playful about poisoning yourself.

45:19 Ollie Ollerton: Then you go on a three day binge, you know, you like work for a few weeks, couple of weeks, you go away and then you come back three day binge.

45:26 And then that’s a very, you know, that that created my sort of program of how I used to drink, how I used to relate to drink, you know, so by the time I actually left, I was doing a lot less work than I was in the military. So I was playing a lot harder, you know, so those days, and I used to like 3 days before I used to start going your weeks disappearing away. And, you know, it used to be this constant thing of drinking on a, you know, you start on a Thursday night for a couple of warm, we used to call them warmers in the butts. And that was a term that we used on the on the ranges about the bullets going into the butts.

45:59 Anyway, OK, I thought I better explain that. Give me something very different. Yes. And then you Friday, you’re out Saturday, Sunday and then Monday, you just pulling yourself together. You you still pickled from the weekend and you’re not back together before, you know, around Wednesday you start getting a bit of clarity.

46:21 Thursday comes around back on again. And that was constant. And like we mentioned before, the sleep, sleep is the best weapon you’ve got. You know, this whole, you know, back in that day, Oh, sleeps for pussies. And you know, you’ve got plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead to do all this Bravais, the biggest load of shit you’ve ever heard, isn’t it?

46:37 Because that is where you recuperate, regenerate. And it’s so important to get that sleep.

46:41 Brian Rose: When you drink, you might think you sleep. You don’t sleep, you know your brain is still extremely active and it’s not actually sleep. And that’s why when you don’t sleep, you feel hungover. And I, I’m working on my sleep, but I still have nights where I don’t sleep and I wake up and I get flashbacks to being hungover.

46:57 It feels the same to me. It’s terrible.

46:59 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, yeah. It’s not a nice memory, is it? No, Yeah. So basically that was me and I, that was I then when I left the military and I said when I left the military, it was like, because I, I’m one of the first, I don’t hear many people saying this, right?

47:11 But when I left the Special Forces, I left because I, it, it didn’t connect. I went from the Royal Marines, which was this dream of mine since I was about 14 years old, joined the Royal Marines and then that wasn’t enough. So I went for the Special Forces, got into the Special Forces, got there and then realised this isn’t it. I don’t know, it’s something, something was missing, something didn’t feel right. It just I didn’t feel like I was in the right place and I didn’t know what that was.

47:36 Brian Rose: Why? I mean, you were, you wanted to push yourself for maybe we will talk about maybe why you wanted to do that later, but you wanted to be the best of the best. You wanted to push yourself. But then when you finally got there, like so many things we wish for it, you didn’t actually want to do it. You didn’t find the work fulfilling. Just didn’t.

47:53 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, I just didn’t. The perception in reality, OK and for me, 14 years old, I created so much I’m I’m well, we all are. I’m so creative when it comes to visualisation there I find it very. Easy to do and we all are. That’s the point, you know, before it’s stripped out of us through the schooling system.

48:12 But I thank God I left it 14 So I had a fair bit of creativity. So for me, I’d made that vision so strong in my head and it was like a constant thing for me when I was like at school. And I went, I can’t be bothered with this anymore. This is what I’m doing and I truly believe that was one aspect of it. But I have got another theory on it and that goes back. A lot of people know the story.

48:32 My first memory of life on this planet was the chimp, 10 years old. We should talk about this, yeah. 10 years old at the circus, found myself in a place I shouldn’t have been. They were just setting up and found this baby chimp. And for me, I was so infatuated with chimps because of Tarzan. I was watching Tarzan every single day. It was the summer holidays.

48:53 So that was like a little piece of Hollywood for me. I went into it and this is enclosed enclosure, green grass. It was beautiful, just as chimps out in the middle. And I was so compelled on my own, 10 years old to go and see this chimp. Before I knew it, I stood over it. I looked down.

49:12 It looked up at me with these beautiful big brown eyes. For a moment we connected. It sounds weird, I know. And then it’s picked something off the floor and it started passing it to me and I was like, I’m not going to touch that. It’s disgusting, right? But I didn’t want to break the serenity of that moment. So I was taking the food from the chimps hand. I was sliding it down my cheek, just turn it over side. And it was it was a beautiful moment. My it was time to seal it.

49:36 It was so beautiful. And it was just me, the chimp, blue sky, nothing else. But then the serenity of that moment was broken, almost like a fighter jet cutting through the sky. It was that severe when I heard this roar that I’ll never forget. And in the shadows behind the chimp was something moving that was clearly Mummy or Daddy, which was making its way to me at Mach 10. This massive 50 kilogram chimp.

49:59 I didn’t get a chance to weigh it, but it was fucking big. Bigger than you. Bigger than me. A lot bigger than me and then, you know, I I couldn’t move. I was in this I was the deer in the headlights.

50:09 I couldn’t move. And then this thing pounced. It must have been from 24 over the chimp in front landed on my chest. Pin me to the floor. And then the first fist hammer fist straight down into my chest and it knocked everything solar plexus knocked everything out of me had nothing left. And then it was fist after fist and it was like a drummer in a rock band.

50:28 I was the drum and I just, I curled up. I just wanted it to end and whatever was going to happen, I was just defending. I wasn’t going to do anything but just defend myself. And in that moment I then could start feeling, I felt the flesh being ripped from my arms and I realised this thing was was then biting me. And I can remember looking through the cracks in my hands or through my fingers and seeing blood and everything.

50:52 This thing was mental and I went somewhere I never knew existed in that moment. I’d never been there before. I’d had no reason to go there and they had tapped into this inner potential. And I honestly heard this voice that said it doesn’t end today, Ollie. And that just gave me enough courage to retaliate.

51:11 I managed to get my knee up to my chest, smashed out, connected with the chimp, knocked it to the floor, managed to scurry across the floor and I was watching this chimp get. Back to its. Feet. It was pointless, you know, This chimp was even angrier than ever. Teeth are showing.

51:25 And it came at me at Mach 20 now to finish me off. And just as it got to me, it was an inch from my face before the chain caught it. You know, I managed to get up in absolute state of shock, covered in blood. The whole place erupted. My brother finally turned up, bless him, and that was that was my first memory, my first proper memory of life on this planet. It was that moment and I learnt three things in that. As I look back, I learnt three things which would help my journey moving forward.

51:53 And that’s first of all, regardless of your situation, you always have a choice, always. Secondly, that was my first break point and that’s why my business is called break point because it was stepping into short term discomfort for long term gain. It was short term discomfort was fighting A50 kilogram chimp as a 10 year old. The long term gain of that was the fact I’m here today to tell the story. But the third? Thing was tapping into that inner potential, knowing that we have got more than we’re led to believe a lot more. And I would then use that to get through Special Forces selection twice and then from the brink of suicide later on in my life, it was tapping into that knowing that this is not the best guide or mentor, especially when your life’s on on the line sometimes.

52:40 Brian Rose: Would you?

52:41 Brian Rose: Consciously tap into that, or just deep down inside you think you knew you were capable of that.

52:46 Ollie Ollerton: Looking back, this is how I figured it out, OK. And like I said, you know, I wasn’t, I didn’t do a debrief afterwards with my parents say, you know, this is what happened. But they say. Always that trauma isn’t what happens to you, it’s the fact that you don’t process it too.

52:59 Although maybe. No, no. But this, this is another thing with trauma and the fact I, I honestly believe we’ve got this system, this innate system that allows us to, to lock away the intimate trauma. So in that moment you can lock away the intimate trauma and push it away. And that helps us.

53:15 It’s a tool because it helps us get over the short term. It doesn’t mean you can leave it locked away. You’re supposed to go back to it because as being us, we don’t go back to it. And I never went back to it. And that was the meaning for the ayahuasca.

53:27 So going back to your question, this was my first experience of life on this planet. You imagine that 10 year old boy after that attack. I got in so much trouble as a kid, ridiculous amount of trouble. We came from a decent family. There was no reason for me to be doing the things I was doing. But I got loads of in loads of trouble with the police, everything.

53:48 My brother and sister were very different. I was the the black sheep and I was looking for danger everywhere. I was looking for this fight, this battle, always looking for this, this mayhem, chaos. And that’s why it was like a natural thing for me to go in the raw Marines. Then I’d find it there, wouldn’t I? I’d find it on the battlefield.

54:05 Brian Rose: Why were you looking for that? Were you trying to recreate I’ll? Go back to that.

54:09 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, yeah, no, I’ll go back to this is my theory. But so I went to that. I went to the Royal Marines and then that wasn’t enough for me. I came back from Iraq and I couldn’t handle life as a peacetime soldier.

54:18 I wanted to be at the shop and realised it was in the Special Forces, went for the Special Forces, got there and again, felt flat and dissatisfied. I then came out of the Special Forces 11 years service and then I was like, I’m never going back to a war zone. Three months later I was in the war zone, pulled back in again. Then spent four years as a mercenary in in Iraq, contracted mercenary, whatever you want to call it, which was the most disruptive and threatening part of my career really, because the drink, the the bullets and everything else and Valium I got involved with to handle the anxiety and everything else. And but then I got there and again, I didn’t find what I what I was looking for.

55:02 That’s why I drank so heavily and everything else. Then I left there and it was right. I’m going to start property investment. I’m going to get, I’m going to read, I’m going to change who I am. Property investor.

55:14 Yes, this is great. Then I stumbled across the Grey Man, which was the organization that was rescuing the kids from child trafficking. So pulled into that which would turn out to be the best, amazing, most amazing thing ever. Now anyway, after that came to it crashed and burned because we got those manhunt throughs out the country. We had to escape.

55:35 I managed to get back to Australia, crashed and burned there. Suicidal thoughts, all this kind of thing. And then I realised that we’re programmed to believe everything’s an external fix, aren’t we? Happiness, success, blame, everything’s external. We, we believe that.

55:53 And it was the first time ever I took responsibility. It’s the first time I said, yeah, these things have happened to you and that’s life, isn’t it? Everyone has hardships, everyone has trauma. These things have happened. But I’m here because of my choices and I’m the person that can do something about it.

56:08 I was, I took responsibility, took ownership of all that, all that stuff. And then it was when I was forced into that corner, it forced me to look within. And I started thinking about suicide. It’s forced me to look within. And it’s there that I realised that the answers were hidden all along.

56:24 If you want to change the energy of your situation, your environment, it doesn’t start out there. This thing where you say, well I’m going to go there, it’s going to be a fresh start. I’m going to start a new job, it’s going to be a new thing for me. I’m going to start a new relationship. This one’s broken. If you haven’t done the inner work, once the honeymoon period’s over, you’re back to that. And I realised that in this moment, I also realised in that moment the battle I’ve been hunting for wasn’t out there. So we then interpret what’s going on internally by searching externally, and this is what I’ve been doing, going to battle the battle war zone, this, that and the other never finding it or being satisfied is because I was looking in the wrong place. Wow.

57:06 Brian Rose: Wow, A lot of people in special forces are in a similar situation. I think so, but they, they won’t admit that, right?

57:12 Ollie Ollerton: I think a lot of people in general forget the special forces. I think people in general, you know, this internal trauma, the trauma of, you know, the trauma of just growing up. You know, this is another thing because after all I’ve been through and there’s a lot of people with, you know, you look at them, they’ve got like 11 limb left and, and you know, for me, looking at that, I was like, why do I deserve to have mental health issues? What gives me the right?

57:35 And I laugh at that now because of the chimp attack and, and just life, you know, it’s and I say this, there’s no checklist, there’s no criteria. It’s relative to every single person. You know, you are your own barometer. There’s seven days in a week. If you’re not feeling good, most of that, most of those days, you need to do something about it. But you know, this is the thing we think, we think the, you know, the military don’t own PTSD. You know, it’s trauma and we go through these things and you don’t need to checklist, you don’t need criteria. You know, again, you are your own barometer. And that was a big realisation for me. I started to, to figure all this stuff out and, and realise that I am extremely and humbled that I managed to get through special forces selection and the things I’ve been able to do. But I truly believe, you know, we start off in life and we all get distracted.

58:26 We go on this lesson that has to be off our path. We have to learn these things. And it was, if it wasn’t for that child rescue in Southeast Asia, I’d have never jumped back onto this path. And some people get so distracted, they go and go and go and never come back. They never realised. But for me, I fell over that opportunity. I never got paid for that, but it was the best return on investment ever.

58:51 And that’s when I understood the power of helping others. There’s no better power than that. It’s the first time in my life that money went in the back seat. There was no money. There was something far more powerful.

59:03 Brian Rose: And you were helping others for the first time in your life directly. Directly right in your country. Is one thing, but you were there for you.

59:10 Ollie Ollerton: Seeing those kids, seeing those kids and seeing, you know, we’d rescue, rescued them from villages and then to see those kids knowing they were going to be sold into that sex slavery brothels on a fishing boat that would go on a one way trip. They’d be used, abused and thrown over the side.

59:25 To see them in the orphanage in the morning as they’re going to school in their uniform with a little satchel holding their friend’s hand as they walk into the sun. That’s the best paycheck. Ever. And understanding the power of helping others, of course. We’re meant to feel good helping our fellow human, aren’t we?

59:41 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah. This is why there’s so much division in the world and we were all fighting against each other. Do you know, I think I might have heard this from Bruce Lipton, but do you know the true meaning of the word competition?

59:54 Brian Rose: Tell me.

59:54 Ollie Ollerton: To strive together. We we changed it as a society.

59:57 You can actually look that up on Google and there’s two people that win in that. There’s the person with the knowledge, person without the knowledge. This person has the gift to pass on that knowledge to this person. And this person then gains from that and we rise together. Now you look at everything, our schooling, everything. It’s all about being first.

1:00:13 It’s not about teamwork. You know, there’s team sports being played, but it’s really all about being 1st. And we’ve created this battle against everyone. You know, when it comes to social media and everything else, there’s nothing social about it. You know, it’s all I’ve got more followers than you and.

1:00:27 You know, when you go into business, you might have had this as well, People that are not truly your friends, but they’ll give you support until you start going past them, you know what I mean? Then the energy starts to change and this person says, oh, he’s really changed. He’s not. You’ve really changed, but it’s like people don’t support each other. We don’t collaborate. And it should be collaboration over competition with everything.

1:00:52 And this as a collective is what we need to do with society. We need to start working together. We need to start collaborating, not competing. But if you look at it. Like addicted to football, addicted to all these sports, which is all about beating people. Everyone wants to beat each other at work, everyone wants to beat each other at sports.

1:01:10 And I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a little healthy competition, but that’s the dominant force beat the other person.

1:01:30 Brian Rose: It’s fascinating because when you look at our media and our social media and before that MTV, you know, it’s all glorifying, you know, the winner, the one with the most stuff, the one that gets the most and does the most. And and yet that’s like the least fulfilling way to live your life. And the best fulfilling way to live your life is to be in service to other people.

1:02:33 And that narrative has never talked about, but that’s the only way to be happy. And it sounds like that was the trigger for you to getting sober, to getting every all these things that you know you’ve done. And all this knowledge is that first spark was being of service in a big way to these kids. Without that, you might have drank yourself to death, or who knows where the hell you’d be.

1:02:53 Ollie Ollerton: Definitely, definitely. It was an epiphany for me and you know, it’s and now I am just so dedicated to learning, to understanding and evolving and there’s so much, so much that we don’t know about ourselves. And I’m uncovering stuff everyday.

1:03:05 Brian Rose: Elliott Holst was on my show many years ago and he said just when you think you’ve solved your shadow issues, that’s when you find your real shadow issues. And so, yeah, it’s never ending the story. I think it’s a dangerous place though, isn’t it? When you think you’ve got all the answers and you know everything, that’s a dangerous place to be.

1:03:23 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, that’s when you get hit by something you don’t see. Yeah.

1:03:26 Ollie Ollerton: Because, and you’re not this, we haven’t got enough life left to learn the secrets of life to secrets of us, the universe, whatever you want to call. It

1:03:34 Brian Rose: your story’s really interesting because, you know, when I was a banker in the city before I started the show, it was all about competition. It was if you make a dollar, that’s a dollar I can’t make. And it was all about me, me, me, me, me. And Brian wanted to make as much money as possible, and that was my only metric. And then at 40 years old, I look around and on on LinkedIn, I’ve got the greatest profile in the world. Everybody wants to be me.

1:03:56 I’m making all the money. I got the the duplex flat and shortage. Meanwhile, I’m drinking myself to death every night. And I got no friends, no family. And so I realized I actually took a meditation course because I was doing martial arts and I thought this would be cool.

1:04:10 And three weeks later, I quit my job as a banker and basically started London Real and through starting London Real and for the first time really being of service in some way and like, you know, talking to people and promoting their ideas, that led me on my whole journey to sobriety, to fatherhood. None of that would have happened. And so I what what happened to you really resonates with me. And I remember a couple of big moments, Ollie. The first one was when Joe Rogan invited us to his show two years after we started. And I didn’t understand that because here’s a guy who’s got a media channel here we are talking about very similar things, ayahuasca and, you know, consciousness and all this. Why would he have us on?

1:04:52 Because we’re clearly competition. And yet Joe showed me that, no, we’re all in creation and we all win when everyone’s successful. And that was a big thing. And so I used to have this joke of like, I, I’d have to completely rewind my brain for London Real. I call it peace and love in London Real.

1:05:09 We all we, we, we, we try to shut down our old competitive instincts. And I remember our tagline was putting the BBC out of business was my tagline, which is kind of a joke because you can’t put the BBC out of business because they’ll put you in jail if you don’t pay your TV license. And then I remember one time the BBC called up and I was interviewing Daniel Pink, who had a book called to sell as human. And they said, can we interview him at your studio before you interview him?

1:05:31 And every bone in my body wanted to tell them to totally fuck off. And I said, no, the London railway is we don’t do that anymore. So I actually invited him over. I regretted it, but I invited him over. But I mean, this has been on the journey of trying to not go back to those destructive instincts of compete. I had a guy on my show named Eve La Rossi, who he was, he was this guy in Switzerland who built this jet powered body suit and he used to fly this thing, flew with Dubai. He’s an older guy.

1:05:58 And I remember in the show he said, Brian, I’m never in competition, always in creation. And so like these are important lessons and that are ignored by mainstream and maybe always will be because we have this culture of one way of doing things. But that’s not the way to do things. It’s not the way to one last thing. Is every single guest on London Real that I respected and admired. At the end of a 2 hour conversation, Ollie would say the same thing to me.

1:06:27 They would say from Dorian Yates to Sad Guru to everybody. At the end, they would say we are all one. And the first time I heard it, I was just like, that’s just a weirdo. That’s a weirdo. They were all saying it at the end.

1:06:41 What does that mean? It means the same thing, you know, And I was starting to string these things together. I was getting my first education in my life in my 40s. I’m still learning. But all those lessons were there, you know, with the opposite of what we were being taught, you know, anywhere else.

1:06:57 Ollie Ollerton: I think that’s the thing, you, you have to spend your time on learning what you’ve been taught. I’m learning what you’ve learnt because everything is an inversion and I think everyone watching as well. You know, it’s not a case that you have to go and leave your job.

1:07:12 You don’t have to then hand your notice in and think I’ve got to go to start something new. You imagine the majority of people that get up on a Monday morning and the first thing in their heads are I can’t believe I’ve got to go back to work. I’m doing this to pay the bills. I’m doing it to pay the kids schooling fees, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. All they have to do is think about what they’re doing in the service of others. If you work for an insurance company, look at the thing you’re doing in service of others. If you’re working in a coffee shop, look at the way you’re serving others.

1:07:41 And it’s just that change of frame of mind that can shift everything, you know, because if you’re just focused on paying the bills and that’s the that’s the driver, you were going to have a quite a soulless life.

1:07:51 Brian Rose: Well, we’re all here to be of service. It’s a weird narrative because it almost sounds like a weakness, like I’m a waiter or something.

1:07:58 Ollie Ollerton: Another, There’s nothing wrong with that because that’s service.

1:08:01 Brian Rose: But if it’s such a powerful observation, you know, one of my guests told me that one time I was like, why are we here?

1:08:07 He said. To be of service, it’s like, damn, I haven’t really thought about that, but that is why we’re here, because we are all one Organism and yet everything that we watch on Instagram tries to separate us as to individuals. This person has more and they’re winning and you’re not. And then we start comparing. Comparison is the. Is the root.

1:08:27 Of all of joy, the deeper joy and development and everything else.

1:08:31 Ollie Ollerton: So yeah, it’s just a change of frame of mind. And, you know, it’s so important as well that we choose what we think. You know, it’s like because the words of the mind create the reality that we that we see. And this goes back, you know, to that coding, you know, like that zero to seven, because if you had an overbearing father or this that bullied at school or and everything else, once you’re in a situation where you’re challenged, you take a risk or whatever, those messages come back. And it’s about as start to use language that we want to hear. It’s about being the dictator and not the dictated, you know, and it’s just that language in the mind. As long as we can start to stimulate a different conversation up here.

1:09:09 We’ll see a different world.

1:09:11 Brian Rose: So when you go back to the chimp incident, have you made peace with that? Are you grateful for that to a certain extent? Like how do you wind that all the way back? Because it’s created the man you are.

1:09:24 Brian Rose: It’s taking you on the journey that is taking you on.

1:09:27 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, One thing for me about that situation was the fact that I realised it’s interesting because when it comes to trauma, I actually every time until I went to ayahuasca, I look back on that and there was no noise. Whenever he leaved it in my head, there was no noise. It was just me finding a. Chimp and I realised that that no noise was no emotion.

1:09:45 And that when I went to do ayahuasca, I actually went back to the to the chimp. I went back to the boy. I actually went, this sounds crazy for those that don’t know it went to you, Brian. But I went back actually went into the chimp. So I looked at me with my, I looked at me, the young boy over my baby.

1:10:05 And then that did something amazing for me because it made me have a sense of compassion for the chimp. It didn’t come looking for me. I find myself in its enclosure and it did what any mother would do. It would risk anything to protect. It’s young and there’s two things I learnt from that situation. First of all, it took me away from being the victim and give the majority of people a chance.

1:10:26 They’ll snap your arm off when it comes to being a victim, won’t they? They’ll love it. So really for me, it took me away, it made me something bigger, it made me a bigger part of that whole dynamic. It took me away from being the victim and it made me a lot more compassionate, not only for the chimp, but it made me more compassionate about the people that are close to me in my life, my wife and the pressure I apply on her and around her son, my stepson, you know, so it taught, it made me realise and I thought after doing ayahuasca, I, oh, I’m, I’m cured, you know, you think, well, I’ve done that, I’m cured.

1:10:57 And it wasn’t until two years later I thought, well, I’m not really good with compassion. And another thing I heard when I was on one of my journeys is stop fighting. Stop fighting. And that’s not in wars and stuff like that. I realised since that chimp, I’ve been fighting everything, every system.

1:11:14 When I was in the military, I was a pain, an absolute pain to my hierarchy. I did my job, I could shoot straight, I could swim fast, but stop fighting. I was fighting every system. I’m all for putting up a fight, but when it’s at the detriment to your evolution, positive evolution, you need to do something about it. So I then realised afterwards it never healed me.

1:11:37 It told me exactly. Where to look? So now very often I’m telling myself don’t fight, and a lot of the time I take a breath and be a lot more compassionate because I know I struggle with that.

1:11:49 Brian Rose: So let’s zoom way out. Why ayahuasca? You’d already, I’m guessing you were sober before you went there.

1:11:56 So you had, you know, figured yourself out to a certain extent. Why ayahuasca? Why do this? Why go there? When did you go?

1:12:03 Ollie Ollerton: I think that I feel the universe chose that for me. OK, You know, I came back from Australia, had a girlfriend when I moved to Australia with, with a girlfriend who was a psychologist, saved me a fortune. But she, you know, we’re still on talking terms. And when I came back to the UK, she discovered ayahuasca. And she said to me, she said you should try ayahuasca. I think you’d really find to benefit from that. And it’s amazing how the universe works. And all of a sudden, because my brain was switched on to that, I started to look at a few things on Instagram. Next thing I’d like to post.

1:12:39 And then I got a message from this organization in America called the Heroic Hearts Project, mainly veterans that they were using this plant medicine to to really heal these veterans. And the guy Jesse said, hey, mate, we’ve got a retreat coming up at Sultara. That’s where you Indy. Yeah, amazing. I didn’t know any right there. Got a retreat current up in in Sultan, would you be available for it?

1:13:05 And I went, let me check my diary. Yep, available of course. And he said you won’t be available next week as well, would you? Because I’m in London, looked at my diary. I was going to London and that’s where it all rolled from there.

1:13:16 Brian Rose: When was that?

1:13:17 Ollie Ollerton: That was 2000 and 22,000 and 19.

1:13:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, OK. Wow. So you met him, and then you went.

1:13:24 Ollie Ollerton: I met him went fourteen other veterans from all over the world with some horrendous stories and it was so funny. Not so it’s funny when I look back because I was stopped drinking. My life was great and I was like what? What’s my intention? And I was I was making it up. I went to see the shame and he said, what’s your intention? Why you’re here?

1:13:44 So I just went, I just don’t want to push the push the self destruct button again in my life if something bad happens. And he went, OK, and then I’m just getting up off my off the floor. No, it was this. I was just getting up and I went, oh, by the way, there was this thing with the chimp when I was 10, but that’s all gone. And there’s shaming just sat there.

1:14:02 He went. He just smiled because he knew, he knew. And what they say is, as you know, is it goes to where it’s needed, not where you want it. And that night I went back and met me as a 10 year old boy, and that emotion that I’d switched off, didn’t hear and locked away, I heard it all. Every moment of that attack, I’ve got to say it wasn’t comfortable, but it was something I needed to do. That first ceremony went right there. Well I went to the chimp 1st and that’s when I learned compassion and everything else.

1:14:28 Brian Rose: You went straight to the chimps perspective on your first ceremony.

1:14:32 Ollie Ollerton: Chimps perspective. And then after the after that one, I thought, oh great, I’ve dealt with that. What’s next? And then the second, second exposure to it.

1:14:40 I was going down this sort of corridor this round.

1:14:42 Brian Rose: You’re in the Maloca.

1:14:43 Ollie Ollerton: The Maloca, anyway.

1:14:44 Brian Rose: Is it Playa Blanca the the main place in Costa?

1:14:46 Ollie Ollerton: Rica. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:14:47 Brian Rose: It’s gorgeous. Amazing. Isn’t that beautiful?

1:14:49 Ollie Ollerton: And it was almost like these doors were slightly open and I could have chose each of these doors for different aspects of my life. But then I was pulled to this one where the door opened and as the, the darkness cleared at the bottom, I could see myself again at the circus. And I’m actually going down this corridor with my nails scraping down a chalk walk.

1:15:08 And I don’t want to go back because I knew what was happening. I was, you know, I thought I’d got away with it and I was going back to relive the attack. And I went back to, I actually went into the boy again. And then the attack played out. And I can remember now for the first time ever in my life, I remember that.

1:15:25 And it was like I, I felt every emotion. I was screaming for my mum, screaming, you know, a little boy being attacked, being ripped apart. I was so terrified, screaming and everything. And then all of a sudden it stopped, froze. And I heard this voice go what would have happened if you hadn’t have fought back that day?

1:15:44 And then all of a sudden, I lay on the floor, closed my eyes. And as I opened my eyes, my wife was there. Her face was right here and her blue eyes, beautiful blue eyes. And I looked at her and I said, don’t worry, come with me. And then we, we died, we drifted off.

1:15:59 We’re no longer physical body. We were went into the spiritual world, into the spirit world, whatever you want to call it. And. The sounds and everything, the colours and everything. It was just, I didn’t want to come back. And I was in there and I was like, I’m, I’m never going back. I’m never going back.

1:17:06 And then I heard a voice say they need you. And I came back into my body and it was quite interesting because I thought I’d been there for like hours, you know, they keep you, they keep me quite controlled in there, don’t they? Yeah. And I woke up and I was like, bang, I shot up onto my feet and I went to see one of the, the guys helping out. I went, I’ve seen it.

1:17:24 I know what it’s all about. It was like this discovery and I was like, I’m going and I shot off and went to my accommodation. It was only three hours in. I have about an 8 hour. I shouldn’t have done that.

1:17:35 And then I went back to my room and then I had water, which then ignited the Ayahuasca again in my room. And then all this stuff started coming out. It’s incredible. And one thing I did right down, which I, I love this and it really typified my journey was pain screams the loudest when it’s dying. And this is what we do at all of humanity is the same.

1:17:56 And it’s like a relationship, isn’t it? You know, it should end. But once it starts screaming, all you’ve got to do is turn around and give it a hug and it, and the screaming stops and you end up throwing yourself into that. But what you’ve got to do in those moments is understand it’s the birth of something new. And this is what we should embrace.

1:18:13 You know, when I actually was in Australia and I knew things were changing, my world started to fall apart and initially I was in shotgun. Oh my God, this is bad. I’m going to lose my job. This, that and the other. Everything was crumbling because I had this desire to do something different. And then I had to take breath and understand it was falling apart for a reason.

1:18:33 Allow it to fall apart and embrace the birth of something new. So some amazing, amazing things in that experience and.

1:18:40 Brian Rose: So you were kind of dying along with your wife, and then you came back because they need you to be back. And that’s why you live that day as well. Yeah.

1:18:49 Brian Rose: And yet even though you process this in the ceremony, you also realize later that it’s not all done and dusted and wrapped up in a nice little box. You realize that. Well, how was the integration process after those next few months after you had those?

1:19:03 Ollie Ollerton: It’s interesting you come away from that and you are a changed person in those short term, you know, initially you’re a very changed person, but then society dilutes everything. You’ve sort of you’ve learnt and grown, you know how you’ve grown and, and you’ve evolved.

1:19:18 It kind of society then dilutes that. But really, you know, it’s, it’s just understanding. It was only, like I say, two years after that when I actually realised I wasn’t healed right, It told me. Exactly where to look.

1:19:31 Brian Rose: Did you go back for more ceremony?

1:19:33 Ollie Ollerton: But I don’t feel I need to.

1:19:35 Yeah, you know, I’ve had the opportunity to.

1:19:37 Brian Rose: But you had a reminder 2 years later that you have to keep working on. This issue,

1:19:41 Ollie Ollerton: yeah, yeah. But I think there’s, you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to think that there’s receptors in your body for the ayahuasca. So that means you should be able to get there without the medicine.

1:19:52 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s what I say about every receptor, you know, And it makes sense. Yeah. Look, a lot of people have opinions about ayahuasca, and I’m sure people will be watching saying, oh, well, therapy is fine or you don’t need these drugs and medicines. But I mean, it’s an incredible tool to get you to places that, you know, you might have never gotten to your whole life. And maybe there will be an experience one day that will simulate that. But those receptors.

1:20:17 Ollie Ollerton: But with ayahuasca, you know, sometimes you’re assured to go there and get what you need, not what you want, you know, like you said.

1:20:24 Brian Rose: And then also, you make great points. Just because you saw it doesn’t mean you’ve processed it. The hardest part of ayahuasca is doing the work afterwards. You’ve seen something, you have amazing information you wouldn’t got anywhere else.

1:20:37 But man, you better put in the work, which means meditate on that and then try to steer that ship. You’re going to be frustrated when you get back home because no one else has changed. They don’t want you to change you. Changing is difficult and then you have to put in the work. It’ll feel like you’re not making any progress. But I found after like a year, when I look back, I realized, OK, I actually am making some progress, but you got to keep putting it in every single day.

1:21:03 I weirdly enough, when we started London Real, we started talking about ayahuasca right away and I had my first ceremony about 6 episodes in. I was terrified because I thought if I talked about that back then, nobody was talking about psychedelics on the Internet. And I actually thought that if Bank of England saw that I could never work in the city again, that was like, because I didn’t know what I was doing and people were like, you’re going to get arrested. You shouldn’t talk about that.

1:21:27 I mean, all we do nowadays, people do like live videos where they’re taking 10 milligrams, 10 grams of psilocybin. But back then, nobody was doing it. And, and I remember being scared, but I did it and it was, I just, each episode helped me a lot. Then I didn’t touch it for five years because, as you know, it’s not something you want to just go do every weekend. You know, there’s nothing fun about it for me.

1:21:52 It always takes me to really dark places and she takes me to the woodshed and gives me a good old beating. And so then I went back to make the movie in Sultara and I needed to push then to go. And then that was a big, big ceremony. And then I went back again. Last year I was.

1:22:07 Ollie Ollerton: Going to say you’ve been recently haven’t. You.

1:22:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, I went actually, I went in December and I went a year before that. And that was the first time I actually pushed myself to go. And I just hadn’t been for I think five years, Ollie. And I just thought, you know what, I just need to get back there. And I remember I was talking to my martial arts teacher before I went and I said, you know what, I’m going to go to create the man that I need to be in a few years time.

1:22:34 That’s what I meant, that like the leader I need to be, the father I need to be, and that guy has to go down there because that’s the only way I’m going to become the person I need to be to serve the people around me. And that’s how I did it. It was pretty powerful. And then I went a year later and I must say, Ollie, it returns a little diminished. I don’t know if a year for me is enough time in between, but it definitely has these subconscious feelings as well.

1:23:01 I can be with my kids and sometimes be really present afterwards. I can really feel gratitude, not just practice gratitude in a journal. Big difference between.

1:23:10 Ollie Ollerton: I’ll tell you what there is is one thing and you see these people that have, you know, like I went to a judge of Spencer thing in Spain. It’s a three day event, loads of meditation.

1:23:21 It was brilliant and there was people there and it was like some people are like showing off because they’ve done it 6 times. I was like, yeah, why have you been six times? It’s the same thing every time. And this is what people end up doing, this mental masturbation when it comes to, you know, therapy and stuff like that. And like you said, Brian, you have to put the work in. It’s not about, you know, like constantly going to these things, looking at YouTube videos, reading books, going on courses.

1:23:46 If you’re not putting in the work, it’s it’s you’re not going to get the most just.

1:23:50 Brian Rose: A distraction, just a distraction.

1:23:52 Ollie Ollerton: It’s just like drinking and porn and everything else.

1:23:55 Brian Rose: I agree. And look, I would never judge anybody on how they do their medicine. But when I hear you’ve had 88 ayahuasca ceremonies and you’re going every two weeks, I’m thinking really. And maybe the same with some of these personal development things, it’s like, what are you doing? And they’re good questions to ask because you got to put the work in.

1:24:12 Brian Rose: And yeah, and those issues don’t really, they don’t go away. You just get better at them. Like you said, fight, stop fighting. And I’ve got issues with me and how I parent and my relationships and I just got to keep shipping way out of every day, surrender, and then go back sometimes to get a reminder I’m so. I’m so happy you got me fired up to go back, really.

1:24:33 Ollie Ollerton: You know, it’s been what, 6 years for you?

1:24:35 Brian Rose: 7 years, Yeah, probably. There’d probably be a benefit there.

1:24:38 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, no, I think definitely I was supposed to go to Portugal recently. But I think really for me, I mean, there’s nothing like going to the jungle in, you know, in Costa Rica or go to Peru, you know, that’s when you’re in the heart of that jungle.

1:24:51 It’s, it’s, it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? You are connected. You are part of it. And that’s when I can, I can remember this one time. It was absolutely incredible because everyone’s doing their journey and it’s, it’s a madhouse, isn’t it it?

1:25:03 Brian Rose: Can be a little crazy.

1:25:04 Ollie Ollerton: In there, it can be a little crazy, but I can remember everyone when I think it was the second one and everyone, you know, it’s like 8 hours, 6 or 8 hours in and we’re, you know, everyone was starting to, to, to wake up. I can always remember this. It went really quiet in this room in the Maloca and they’re not. It just took one person that said I love you. And then every person started saying it and it was this incredible connection all the way around the room that just, it was just amazing just to hear that it’s just like it was just this connectivity I’ve never felt before. It was, it was So when you, when we talk about we’re all connected, you know, we literally are, you know, not, not by matter.

1:25:47 Brian Rose: And they say set and setting is really important for any kind of a psychedelic experience. That’s one thing ayahuasca has really well and, and sultana as well. They got, first of all, you got the Shapibo shamans. This is something they’ve been doing for a long time and they know what they’re doing. You got the medicine you know that they make. And then the whole ceremony, it’s all done really well. The facilitators are are really good. So when you’re in there, you know, I mean, we’ve all everybody has the I took mushrooms in Amsterdam story and I have one of those too.

1:26:16 That’s not the way to do it, but you want to be in a place where you’re taken care of, there’s ceremony involved, you’re with a bunch of people with great intentions, like you said, and it can really change the experience. So, yeah, but again, it has to call you, which is interesting.

1:26:31 Ollie Ollerton: The people there always say they never try to tell people to do it, but it plants a seed for me. I was listening to a Joe Rogan experience with Mark Aubrey Marcus in my flat in London, and that’s the first time I heard it mentioned.

1:26:43 And then it was 18 months until I actually had my first ceremony. But it planted a seed and I went and followed it like you did, and it took me to where I needed. It was a calling.

1:26:54 Brian Rose: So definitely you just moved to Dubai permanently. What’s this new chapter in Ollie’s life and why?

1:27:00 Brian Rose: Why leave your home country? Why leave the United Kingdom?

1:27:04 Ollie Ollerton: Good question. You know what, looking back and I’ve got the maturity to be able to back this up. I have this 10 year cycle and it’s interesting that 10 years, 10 year old boy got attacked. But when I look back, you know, everything is 10 years with me. Around 10 years, there’s a change, there’s a move we have. I have to do something.

1:27:24 So really, when I was in the Uki came back in 2000 and 2014 and you know, I then stumbled. Across the show, which was. A gift in itself which changed my life.

1:27:39 Brian Rose: That gave you a huge profile.

1:27:42 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, you gave me the platform.

1:27:45 Brian Rose: And you hadn’t been in in media before at all, so this was a completely new thing.

1:27:49 Ollie Ollerton: You know what, I came back and this is the interesting thing because I locked myself in the house because I had to change the blueprint of who I was. I realised that I wanted to help people and broken people break people. So I didn’t want to be one of those people that wasn’t authentic, you know, So I had to change me from the inside.

1:28:03 Brian Rose: So you decided to lock yourself in the house alone. You just came up with this idea.

1:28:07 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, I just. It was the only.

1:28:09 Brian Rose: 14 It’s not like you watch some YouTube video about someone doing it.

1:28:12 Ollie Ollerton: No, no, no people. Forget like back then, there was no nothing on YouTube. No, it was none of this stuff, inspirations or anything.

1:28:19 Brian Rose: So you just came up with that?

1:28:20 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, but I think it was I did what my usual model, right, was this, go and get some money, go and do this, get a credit card, get a loan. I was trying to change matter with matter, you know, all the way through my life. And for the first time, whether you, you call it divine intervention or whatever you want to call it, all those avenues were blocked for me. So when I came back and been away for 10 years, no one knew who I was. I couldn’t get a credit card, I couldn’t get any money.

1:28:44 And it forced me to then go into that house and then look into all this stuff called meditation. I had nowhere else to turn. I just had nowhere at all. I had no money, no nothing. So that was my only option.

1:28:55 So I started doing the meditation, started doing the visualizations, all these things that my peers would. Still to this day laugh at me for. And I pushed through that, pushed through the barrier of me thinking there’s a thousand person audience around. I just kept on with this desire to create this thing called Break Point, which was my business now, every single day. Didn’t know about the TV show. It was 2014.

1:29:19 Didn’t know anything about the TV show Before I got there. I met up with my best mate, one of my best mates, Foxy, who I served with, who was also on the show. And I told him about this dream about having this business called Breakpoint, where we would get these corporates and we’d put them through the hardest selection process in the world based on special forces selection, so we could really tap into who they truly were beyond the facade of who we pretend to be. And I had this whole business model. And then I’d bring in the veterans that would be the support staff to put them back into the community that they loved and missed.

1:29:52 And I had this dream every single day. And I put myself there each day as if I was there, used all of my senses and I lived the moment. And I also had another visualisation every single day that I would be on stage talking to hundreds of people. And I put myself there in those situations, although I never had it in that moment, I felt the expensive watch on my arm, the shoes on my feet, the shirt on my back. I lived those moments. It was incredible.

1:30:19 At the end of three months, nothing was happening, nothing at all. And I dropped to my knees, I kid you not, in this house. And I said please give me something. I wanted the phone to ring. I want something to happen to validate me doing all this work.

1:30:33 Nothing happened. And then two days after that I get the phone call from Foxy who said, hey, you know that idea you’ve got for break point, Would you do that on national TV? So the model that we saw on Channel 4 SAS is the visualisation I’d have every single day. Wow. Up until that point and people can say, well, that’s just coincidence. I don’t believe in coincidence.

1:30:53 I took myself to a different vibrational state. The person that entered that house was broken and I changed the energy of who I was.

1:31:01 Brian Rose: Have you done that before? Had you heard about people doing that?

1:31:04 Ollie Ollerton: No, I kind of. Fell into it.

1:31:06 I fell into it. I fell into someone. You meet people for a reason, right? And the first, one of the first sort of acquaintances, if you want to call it that, I met when I came back to the UK. This is interesting because she put me onto a guy called Karl Harvey who ran this group. He had an e-mail database.

1:31:21 It was all about this sort of empowerment, self empowerment. And this was really new back then, you know. And so I started looking at that and I was engaged in that. Then that guy, Karl Harvey then pushed me towards a guy called Vishna Karni, who then started the sixth phase meditation. So I did that every single day. That was part of the sixth phase meditation, and that’s what got me onto it.

1:31:44 And then I did that for the three months, got the TV show, and it’s so interesting, you know, all that happened to me, Everything changed. It was incredible. And then ten years after that, in that house, 10 years to the day, I would stand on stage in Estonia for Mindvalley speaking about that experience. Wow. 10 years to the day.

1:32:05 Brian Rose: Wow, what does Vision say when he knows that I. Mean you must get a lot of people that

1:32:09 Ollie Ollerton: I think it was a bit of a shock because I actually went to Soho House where I first met Vision and I first met Carl Harvey. The two guys that really got me to this stuff. They had no idea about who I was or anything. And you know, they’re actually on the invite.

1:32:23 They’d seen I was, Carl had seen I was coming. Oh, is that special Forces guy off the telly? I’ll sit next to him. So he came in, I met Vision, I said, told him a little bit about the story and then Carl Harvey came in, sat next to me. I said, mate, you have no idea how you how you changed my life. And it was just it blew him away. Wow, it’s incredible.

1:32:42 So again, 10 year cycles and you know, call it coincidence. We’re so happy, aren’t we? Are so easily just push this stuff away as weird. We push this stuff. Away as coincidence and now if anything happens in my life, it’s not saying everything is a situation that that’s something.

1:32:59 There’s more to it than meets the eye, but every interaction, every time I connect with anyone, I always ask myself, what’s the meaning of this? You know, we really embrace, you know, the program, really. You imagine a lot of people that go through a hard time and they go, I just want to forget that it’s the worst thing you can do. Because that’s where we learn. That’s where we grow, don’t we? And that’s where we evolve.

1:33:23 And it’s so important that we use all the I’m not, I don’t say that I’m totally unique and there’s no one like me, not at all. We’re all the same. I bleed and breathe just like everyone else. But The thing is, I am very conscious of the experiences and things that have happened in my life and how I connect them all and how I now allow all that past to create my future. And I think we we’ve all got the ability to do that.

1:33:45 Brian Rose: OK, so 10 years, but you could go to America, you go France. Dubai, of course, your question.

1:33:50 Ollie Ollerton: So Dubai was an interesting one because again, things started happening and we would like we rent houses back in the UK because we like to jump from place to place. We’ve moved about four times in 10 years in the UK and we’ve tried different, you know, down South. We went up to Shropshire, then we came back down to Somerset and then something happened where there was going to be a change.

1:34:13 Like the guy that we rented the farm from, he was going to sell it. So we thought there’s a change here. So we thought. What does this mean? What does this mean?

1:34:21 What does it mean? What’s the opportunity? Yeah. What’s the? Opportunity to look left and right, don’t just look forward.

1:34:26 It’s not just a linear thing. And that then started as looking around and then a friend of mine that’s here that I’m actually a business. He’s my business partner now. He’d moved here some years ago, so we we ended up on the phone together talking about opportunities and stuff. He actually bought Loaded magazine.

1:34:45 Do you ever remember that?

1:34:46 Brian Rose: I remember it.

1:34:47 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, So we bought Loaded Magazine. So I was doing some stuff for Loaded Magazine. So he’s over in devices and I was looking from the house.

1:34:53 I was looking, it was miserable outside. I was looking down this zoo call. He’s on his balcony, the sun’s out, he’s got his shades on. And I’m like, what am I doing? He’s like, you need to come here. And I thought my wife had never embraced that. And then a few months later, a really good friend of mine, Jimmy Narain, who’s actually staying at my house now, who’s a digital nomad who travels all over the world, came to stay with us.

1:35:18 And I left him with my wife in the kitchen talking while I went out and did something. Before I knew, I came back and my wife said, why don’t we go to Dubai? And my wife is the kind of person that will say something, but then she’ll procrastinate on that and then find 100 reasons why not to do it. I’d book the flights by the next day. Just to make sure.

1:35:39 Just to make sure.

1:35:40 Brian Rose: OK, but obviously she convinced you too.

1:35:42 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, no, she can. She was the catalyst. She was the catalyst for Dubai.

1:35:45 And I was like, wow. And then I started thinking about Dubai and then also why Dubai then? I mean, what does it mean to me? Because I looked at Portugal, I looked at all these places and honestly now sat here from the perspective of someone that lives here after being here for a couple of months. It is just incredible.

1:36:01 You cannot replicate what’s going on here or you, you cannot compare to this to, to the UK. Now if you met 5 people in the UK, you’d be struggling to find one that’s an entrepreneur, you know, you’d be the, you’d be the, the odd one out there. 50 maybe, yeah. Exactly. You come here and you can’t just cruise here.

1:36:19 You can’t come and live off the state. There’s, you know, your back’s against the wall. First thing for me, and we both said this one day we woke up in our farm in Somerset and we went. I feel like I’m some really tired and I wanted that kind of passion, that passion I had when I had nothing. I wanted that back. I wanted my back against the wall to be able to come out and really start to evolve my business and stuff. And for us, this is absolutely incredible. We’ve been out here and you meet people, everyone’s hustling, everyone’s doing stuff and it’s just incredible. The opportunity and just the energy and it’s always important for us.

1:36:54 You have the, you have the worst house on the best St. We are now the worst house on the best St. It’s a great house, by the way. But you know, the analogy of that all the that’s a metaphor. The worst house on the best St.

1:37:06 Means we’ve got massive room to grow. But when you know everyone in the UK wants the best house on the worst St., you know keeping up with the Joneses, the best double glazing, the best you know, What Car have you got on the drive? The worst house on the best St. Because then you’ve got room to grow and this place you know you’d never be the richest.

1:37:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, I got a buddy in crypto who’s got a Bugatti and he posted something the other day when he was parked and he went by and showed some of the other cars and he said in Dubai there’s always somebody with a bigger one. Absolutely, yeah.

1:37:38 Ollie Ollerton: So we’ve got some good businesses. We’ve got some old stuff reignited, we’ve got some new businesses launching. We’d go into the health and Wellness space. We’ve got an amazing platform launching in May where you get a, we’ve got the patent to actually have a digital twin on your phone of your anatomy with your bloodshed DNA report and everything we can then you can then look if you’ve got any ailments, you can pre cancers, everything a whole lot. So I know there’s a fair few other companies doing a similar theme, but we’ve got the digital twin. So that’s really exciting.

1:38:07 And, and yeah, I’m probably most excited about that and anything else, few events, fewer expeditions planned. And, you know, I really believe there’s a lot of people here that A, they’re wealthy, probably not healthy, and B, they are yearning for some kind of adventure, you know, especially in the world of AI and everything else, you know, where it’s just making it is to I, I, you know, one thing about AI and there’s a lot of people scared about AI should be scared of AI. Be scared of yourself.

1:38:40 Because if you’re not willing to adapt and change and use that tool to the best of its ability, then you will suffer. But The thing is, all these tools are absolutely amazing because it’s going to give you the bandwidth to do other things and be more creative and do your core skill. You know, that’s the beauty of technology. But if you use technology to be lazy, then it’s also it’s double edged sword. And this is how it works, doesn’t it? You know, you can use all these technical advances to really advance you and allow you to grow. It gives you the bandwidth to be able to go off and do loads of stuff.

1:39:11 Ollie Ollerton: But it also allows you to fall into the space of being absolutely lazy and doing nothing.

1:39:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, so, and I agree with what you say about Dubai. I always tell people that what I say is if if you look around Dubai, at the next 50 people, you see everybody is here intentionally. They moved here because they want to be here and they’re all doing something proactively to make their future better. Now, you could argue that the building worker doesn’t have the conditions he should have or the cabbie this OK. But they chose to be here because it’s better here than in Sri Lanka or it’s better here than in Pakistan. And everybody here is building their dreams. And if you talk about are you going to come back next year? They want to be here next year.

1:39:50 Now take a look in London and go look at the 50 people you see. Immediately, most of those people are phoning it in. They don’t want to be there. They’re getting a check to be there. They’re dragging their feet to be there. And it’s just that vibe.

1:40:04 It just starts to drag at you. And that’s why I love being here because everybody is just on it. And again, if you want to hustle and do business, great. If you want to go on the beach, great. And I just think the energy is infectious. I think the vision of the leaders here is incredible. I mean, the audacity to do what they’ve done. And that’s infectious.

1:40:23 It pushes you to think even bigger. And the safety, the inclusiveness, just everything is on point for me, you know, And I also, there’s no politics. And it’s just a beautiful thing. Like when I just got here, you know, the first week, even recently, it’s just like, I don’t have to even hear about all the bickering. And then they said this and then she said, and they said, not that I try to engage with that anymore, but I mean, I recently ran to be Mayor of London, so I was still kind of watching it a little bit. It’s just like there’s no bickering here, which has become theater, but here it doesn’t exist. You got people with a vision for 20-30, fifty, 100 years, their families connected to the vision, their children will have that vision and they’re executing. And guess what?

1:41:06 We don’t need to bicker about it and talk about it. And we can actually just focus on doing our vision. It’s something incredibly powerful about that.

1:41:15 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, no, 100%. And you see, you know, between now and 2014, that massive opportunity and that’s a massive opportunity for us. You know, it’s, I find that the UK has a very odd stance on entrepreneurs and small business and it’s almost to some degree you look at it and think, are they doing it on purpose to push out the small business for the big corporations and everything else?

1:41:37 That’s that’s certainly a question. But you know, here, there’s what, 5% oil now? You know, it’s not, there’s no longer the oil state where it gets its revenue, it gets its revenue from business, It gets its revenue from tourism. And what are they going to do when it comes to the entrepreneur? They’re going to make sure that there’s the benefits to make them grow, thrive and really evolve and grow with the place.

1:42:01 And that also, which really shot me is the health and well-being here. It is incredible. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought you come here, there’s, you know, the health and Wellness is not going to be like the UK. You could be doing something every single day. Health and Wellness, fitness, well-being, mental health, everything is absolutely, absolutely. It’s being exploited in a positive way. Yeah, yeah.

1:42:26 Brian Rose: I mean, in London I can’t, you know, go wakeboarding in the morning. I can’t, you know, take these long walks. I can’t get the sun. I can’t get any of this stuff here. It’s just like de facto. Just in 20 minutes.

1:42:37 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, it’s, it’s got like so much going for it in that sense.

1:42:41 Brian Rose: What about Britain? What’s the future of Britain, by the way? The entrepreneurship thing, coming from America, when I first got there and I would read the newspapers and I could start to just, there’s a tone in the newspapers and the underlying culture that successful people and rich people are bad, they did something wrong. There’s something suspicious. Oh, and his business made £100 million last year. Oh, look at him.

1:43:05 He must be doing something wrong. It’s this tone that’s in the papers. And it’s just like, ultimately it’s, it’s a socialist state, not as much as Europe, but it is. And for some reason it’s just not encouraged. It’s not good for them. Now, America, I recently had a little bit of that too, but it’s, it’s America’s default is to celebrate the the winners and the entrepreneurs.

1:43:27 But in Britain and in Europe even more, there is this tone and I think it’s maybe getting worse, you know?

1:43:33 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, 100%. That’s where you’re talking. It’s down from the top and that’s that’s trickling through to every individual, you know, in the UK. And I think it’s, I think that I’m not sure what’s going to go on with the UK. I find it a shame because I love the UK. It’s a beautiful place, but you know, the weather is just horrendous and the people wear the weather on the face. You know, there’s and it’s just, I feel that you, there’s limited opportunity there.

1:43:58 You know, you are the net worth of the five people that you spend the most time with, as they say. So where do I want to be? I want to be here. And also the fact at the end of the day, this system is a salt battery. We need some.

1:44:09 And in the absence of that, you do get mental health issues, lack of vitamin D and everything else. You know, this, I tell you now, if they actually, if everyone started taking vitamin D and K2 in the UK, the mental health issue would start to decline, you know, But there’s, there’s, there’s a lack of sun, a lack of optimism, a lack of desire to be wealthy. And it goes back to the one thing I said before about everyone’s just happy with average just get by. Yeah, yeah.

1:44:37 Ollie Ollerton: And I think it’s going to get worse. I. Think it’s got a break before it, you know, I think it’s going to seems to me like it’s going to get you look at America. This is how I see it anyway. You know, that had to really break and really fall apart before they can put it back together.

1:44:53 And, you know, it needed that to transform. And, you know, hopefully we’re going to see that happen. I just wonder if, you know, the UK is a few years behind that.

1:45:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m not so optimistic. You know, America did have some lows, but I also think it was pretty lucky that we’ve now had a turn around and hopefully it will come back with Britain and Europe. I just, I don’t know.

1:45:18 I just see it slowly sliding. And it’s a place that was brought up expecting, you know, checks from the government and the National Health services and these kinds of things. And I just don’t know how they’re going to turn that around. I don’t see a leader like a Trump arriving in any of these places to be embraced. So look, I love London, you know, I, I will always love London. It gave me everything.

1:45:38 You know, I came to London to get off drugs and get sober and I made a career and I ran to be Mayor of London. And I looked at all the services and I thought about serving 9 million people. And, but everything there is just grinding, grinding to a halt. And you know, I, I, part of my job would have been the tube. And I mean, there’s stations in the tube that haven’t been clean since 1965. And, like, the infrastructure is just grinding down. And like you said, all the wealthy people are leaving and they don’t seem to care.

1:46:04 And so I don’t know what’s going to happen there. And, you know, you and I are voting with our feet. And I think maybe that’s the kindest thing we can do. Maybe, like you said, the last bit of pain is the is the worst. We’re literally saying this doesn’t work for us anymore.

1:46:18 And maybe that’s going to be some kind of a lesson. Maybe. Maybe it will break so. Time will tell.

1:46:24 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, time will tell, let’s say the least.

1:46:27 Brian Rose: What is next for you?

1:46:28 Brian Rose: Because you’ve got all sorts of things that you’re doing now,

1:46:31 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah. Well, for me, I, I always believe that I’ve got to do a challenge every year and it keeps me at, you know, there’s a lot of business to be done and I need that activity. We all, we all do, but I need a challenge every year. So just the other day I put in for an Iron Man. So I’m doing that in Italy in September. So I’ve got that focus on doing that. But for me, it’s, it’s really, it’s the business, you know, really starting to do these businesses that really are a service to others and to do more of what I do. I mean, I love doing my talks.

1:47:02 I’m doing loads of corporate talks. I get so much energy in that. And as I said to you at the start, I really feel like everything I’ve done in the past is to, it’s to deliver me the person I am today. It’s and I thrive so much from helping others. You know, I’ve just got back from the UK, actually from Scotland and then went down to, to the Midlands to do talks.

1:47:25 And I just get so much from it. And I do see this. And regardless of how the UK is in humanity in general, I see this real yearning. People are wanting something different, people are wanting change and once they allow themselves to, to drop the ego, you know, I’m talking men mainly here, but drop the ego, drop, drop there. That sort of self critical nature.

1:47:49 I feel that underneath that there’s a real yearning tip for change. So I’m hanging on to that.

1:47:55 Brian Rose: If people resonated with anything today, what do you think would be a great next step from here?

1:48:00 Ollie Ollerton: The next step, what for individuals, I think really the first thing I’d say to anyone who’s awareness, you know, start thinking about what you’re thinking about and that’s where it really starts. Start to use common sense, you know, and start to really understand that some of the advice we’ve been given in the past isn’t probably the best advice and just to question things anyway.

1:48:23 You owe it to yourself to do that. We have a duty. I feel that we have a duty as a human coming to this planet. You know, at the point of evolution, we were one of 1,000,000 that made it through. And then the universe says, when you actually get to this Earth, please give me what you’ve got. Are you giving it the best you’ve got? And the answer lies with you, not on your external world. You know the answers lie within to collaborate, thrive, and enjoy life.

1:48:53 Brian Rose: I love it. How can people follow you and learn more about all your good stuff?

1:48:59 Ollie Ollerton: Ollie dot Ollerton on Instagram, break Hyphen point.co.uk on Google And yeah, if you type in those two mediums or or platforms, then you you’ll have no choice but to see me.

1:49:11 Brian Rose: I love it. Ollie, thanks so much.

1:49:13 This. I think your IP is really unique and I’ve talked to a lot of people, but this, this whole survival concept is really important. And it’s hard to believe, but everything starts from there. And if you can acknowledge it and then be aware of it and then maybe try to control that that person from running your life. And instead you get to run your life and it that’s where all the salvation is right there. And that can save humanity and every individual on top of that. And so really powerful lessons from you. And I appreciate you doing the hard work on yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t have come up with all this good stuff. So thank you.

1:49:46 Brian Rose: And it’s nice to know you’re in Dubai as well.

1:49:48 Ollie Ollerton: Yeah, because I’ll be here a lot more as well.

1:49:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, good, good. And it’s been a pleasure. Thank you. So much thank you.

1:49:53 Ollie Ollerton: Appreciate that. Thank you so much. Also just want to thank Web Three TV for having us and we’ll see you next time. Take care.