London Real - The Debut

Full transcript: London Real on London Real

0:13 Good afternoon and welcome to London Real. My name is Brian Rose and joining me in studio today is my co-host and cohort Mr. Nick Gabriel. Nick, how are you? Brian, I knew you were going to ask me that and I was wondering what I was going to say. I’m pretty good.

0:31 Pretty good. Yeah, last week when you asked me I said I was the best I’ve ever been. This week’s up there but not quite at that height. It’s a strong statement to say I’ve never been better. Exactly. But it’s one that I hope to say more and more in the future.

0:45 I hear you man. So what’s been happening with you? You know I think this whole Steve Jobs being dead thing has kind of sunk in the last couple days and I’m just thinking about it today and seeing him in the papers and stuff and it’s just like I’m thinking about the effect that him and Apple have kind of had on my life and like everyone’s life and it’s pretty intense. You know it’s going to sound cliche no matter what we say but the guy was a visionary and the thoughts I’ve been having regarding Steve Jobs is just how powerful thinking differently can be.

1:19 You know in any industry or field of endeavor like it’s those people who they make that decision consciously or unconsciously to decide to go against the herd. And it’s difficult man. That’s a very difficult thing to do like moving in the opposite direction to the stream because people ridicule you and people think you’re you’re being arrogant and it’s a hard thing to do. It is. I mean you look at some of the things he accomplished. I mean Pixar Studios for example I mean it took four years for him to crank out Toy Story and no one means before we forget.

1:55 In 1995 there weren’t all these animated movies that hadn’t really kicked off yet and he like stayed the course and they were losing money in order to make that picture which made something like 390 million dollars worldwide and ended up selling it later. But yeah I mean people were constantly I think telling him he was wrong. I mean a startup company computer company calls it Apple. He doesn’t call it you know intelligence computing or something like that.

2:20 Well to be fair his next computer company was called Next T or something was it? Yeah it’s Next. Next with a capital X T. Capital X T. I don’t know why the capital X T. We actually had one of those computers when I worked at the first National Bank of Chicago in the mid 90s and there was a Next there because it was built for kind of like a medium type platform not just it wasn’t just a PC a personal computer it was more for like almost academia computing.

2:42 So I remember seeing it and I was like well but yeah. Yeah. Speaking of personal computers I mean I’m just looking at your new your new 27 inch iMac. God damn. When I walked in today I it shows how far we’ve come.

2:57 I remember my first computer was my mom and dad bought me I think it was called the BBC micro. Wow. It’s like this weird British computer. I don’t know how they got hold of it. Yeah.

3:10 It was kind of like. Did you guys have the Commodore 64 or the Amiga. We had while there was the VIC 20 first and then the Commodore 64 came out 64 bits or bytes or whatever processing speed as opposed to you know two gigs now. And then for me was the Apple two plus was the next one. But you had the BBC BBC micro.

3:29 It was called program it. You could I mean I couldn’t because I was just too busy playing video games and I think it was that Commodore 64 was like the first computer that wasn’t just video games. You could try to do other things. It wasn’t like made with joysticks. It was maybe the keyboard and you know.

3:46 Yeah. But what just the point that’s driven home to me is how the pace of technological progress is just it’s it’s approximately 25 years ago that I had that computer. And I’m just wondering if I compare that to this thing that’s sitting on your desk now what are we going to be looking at in 25 years time. I just think it’s going to be unrecognizable. Yeah.

4:12 Which is a wonderful thing. Right. No idea where the ship is going. It’s an exciting time. I mean I went bought this thing and I was just like you know what I thought.

4:19 I could take this and change the world like somebody grabs a big iMac and they’re like OK you can go do whatever you want to do now. And this thing is just going to empower you to do whatever. Man that is so interesting you said that because when I walked in and I first cast my eyes on this thing. I am I mean sitting sitting at your desk there you look like the captain of the Starship Enterprise. But you’ve got this huge screen in front of you.

4:45 Yeah like your headphones on and you have it’s jacked into the Internet which is basically I mean it’s the access point to pretty much every piece of knowledge available to mankind. You could pretty much take over the world with this fucking thing. It’s insane. It is insane. And it’s funny because my web access went out last night and without that it’s just a block sitting on your desk.

5:03 It is. I mean there’s not much you can do with it. You forget. I mean like what am I going to do. I mean I don’t play games on it.

5:09 So without being connected it’s all it’s useless which I guess is a metaphor for us as people. Oh I like that. I like what you did there right. But yeah it’s just leaps and bounds. Funny you said 25 years ago so 30 years ago when I was 10 years old we got an Apple 2 plus computer in my house and I remember it vividly.

5:27 And it was just like wow it was a pretty good sized box had a disk drive and had a cathode ray tube green screen. And that was like I started programming then and that like took me through my years programming but I used to have his fifth grade or sixth grade. I used to have a friend who was 11 who would come home and sleep over and my mom’s boyfriend would pay him to teach him how to run spreadsheets to run his business. So as an 11 year old kid teaching this 40 year old dude he was paying him 20 bucks an hour because he didn’t know what the hell this big thing was and this kid was like oh it’s really easy you just do this.

5:58 And it was a spread the first spreadsheet like an Excel spreadsheet. And I remember thinking man this is crazy you know talk about it. And I’m always my very first girlfriend her her grandparents were in their 90s when I was dating her and they used to I mean they were pretty jacked on technology. I used to use email and Internet and I always used to think like what must go through their minds or when they reflect on what they’ve seen like the advent of the motor car advent of the airplane.

6:31 You know the telephone Internet like what an amazing amount of change. And I’m wondering what will happen to us in the next 10 20 30 40 50 years. Will we be able to even cope with the pace of technological change. I mean you’re a you’re a big Twitter guy. I know you like Twitter a lot and follow it.

6:51 Yeah. I mean I like to think of myself as pretty I.T. Savvy I mean I’ve done a little bit of coding and a bit of Facebook and I Twitter like it took me a while to learn how to use it. OK. Do you know what I mean. It’s like where’s kids like eight nine ten years old already on Twitter.

7:10 It’s just it’s mind blowing. It’s the old joke of you get on the grandpa needs needs you to set the clock on his VCR. I remember that when I was 10. It was like you know there’s this there’s this guy named George not George Freeman. I think it’s someone another freedman.

7:24 He has a book called The World is Flat and his whole argument is that technology the way it is right now the world is actually flat because you know a guy in India can have the same job as a guy at the BBC. You know a phone bank because the world is so flat because technology. But he’s saying as we get older if we can’t adapt to these new technologies like you’re saying Twitter and Facebook we almost kind of become a little less relevant. You know and it’s just keeping on top of that curve because you have to kind of innovate yourself as a person. Otherwise you’re kind of useless.

7:52 And we’re seeing it now these kids go to law school now they used to be told OK you spend four years in college three years a law degree and you will have a profession for life and you’ll become partner when you’re 50. And all these things and these kids are getting out of law school and they’re like where’s my job. And it’s like well it’s not there anymore. That’s interesting. When you said it broke to mind I’m playing a video game at the moment called Deus Ex Human Revolution.

8:15 And if you look for the TV spot it’s the theme is evolution. And there’s a voiceover which says I’m paraphrasing or something along the lines of Darwin said the organism most likely survive to survive as the one most adaptable to change. So it’s nothing to do really with the fittest or the strongest. That’s those are advantages but it’s the one that can adapt most quickly. And that’s a difficult thing for a human being adaptation because as we spoke about last week we like our comforts.

8:48 It’s anti-human. It’s anti-human. And I said to you a few days ago sometimes the things we in fact most of the time the things we least want or the things we least want to do are the ones that are best for us. You know like I think we were speaking about relationships right. You know when someone’s been in a relationship for a long time and they’ve become comfortable.

9:12 Sure. You know they know that they should end things and go out and experience new things so that they can grow as an individual because the relationships become stagnant. But man it’s difficult. You know it’s going to I think you mentioned this is going to be a hurdle of pain that you have to overcome. Yeah it’s like a pain threshold. Do you have to get over that in order to experience all these new things I guess that you could potentially get with someone new.

9:34 But yeah it’s tough. I think we do that. I mean even leaving home for you or for me I mean actually when you were probably younger you probably wanted to leave home. But it’s hard to walk away from those almost like creature conference of a friend or a girlfriend. I don’t know how do you do it as a human.

9:50 I mean do you have to write something on the wall that wake up every day and said put yourself in uncomfortable situations today because even the most motivated guy likes comfort. So how do you how do you keep from falling in that trap. You know Brian that’s something I’ve I’ve been looking at in my own life for a long time. You know comfort. For example today I was I just did a workout with some friends in the park this morning and the very final exercise we do is called the restless bridge where you bridge back and put your nose on the ground.

10:21 And it’s an incredibly uncomfortable position. And while I was doing it I mean our goal was to hold it for a minute. I had my friend timing me while I was doing it and I was timing him while he was doing and at 30 seconds man I wanted to quit. I seriously I just thought this is so painful it’s so uncomfortable I got to quit. And then I just made the decision no push through the comfort zone you know push through that pain barrier and I managed to make it to a minute just barely and afterwards man I was euphoric.

10:56 Yeah you know I mean it might have been the endorphins from the the muscles working or whatever whatever it was but I noticed that a lot in life you know when you you do the thing that you’re most afraid of. And the reward is like the confidence and that that that pleasure you get from having mastered yourself to some degree. And that’s the thing that I’ve always admired about you is you seem to be the guy who kind of goes out looking for that thing.

11:23 You know the thing that scares you the most. Yeah it’s hard. I mean I always think that I don’t but I get the biggest rush from putting myself in unknown situations. I think there’s scientific evidence whether it’s endorphins or something else that gets secreted but you do it’s like this human in this slightly unknown semi controlled situation like you know you know you’re going to go into this place. I mean for me it’s like when I go to a new dojo in a new city like you know you’re going to go in and roll jiu jitsu but you’re not quite sure what the guys are like.

11:50 You might get a little more of an extra beating than you thought but it’s probably going to be okay but we’re not sure so let’s go and it’s like afterwards you get this huge. It’s hard to describe there’s nothing really like it. You know I think it’s the human experience from my own perspective and my own paradigms and my own belief. Human experience is on a meta level your soul going and doing something very uncomfortable. Does that make sense?

12:20 Wow expound on that. So look man this thing we’re all going through the human experience and it’s not easy sometimes. You know you said it the other day you’re like this is hard. Life is hard. And it’s like that scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith says to Neo the first matrix we designed was a complete failure because it was a paradise and people just rejected it.

12:47 My personal belief at this point is that the human experience is just your soul or your higher self playing a very very complex very difficult very rewarding game. And you’ve talked before about how you have a theory that of all the experiences in the universe you said something maybe you should say better something about the human experiences the most. There was a guy called if I’m not mistaken his name was Mallon Thomas. I remember listening to a podcast of his and he died in the 80s he had brain cancer and he was pronounced clinically dead.

13:30 He was dead for approximately an hour and as he died he started moving towards the light. You know you always hear about people moving towards the light. And he is just going towards the light. He said stop. I want to know what’s going on.

13:44 Stop. And the light took the figure of Jesus Christ because that was the religious archetype that he could most easily identify with due to Judeo-Christian background. I’m sure if you’ve been a Zen monk it would have taken the form of Buddha or if you’ve been a Hare Krishna might have taken the form of Krishna who knows. And for the next hour this Jesus figure proceeded to give him a tour of the universe. And he went and visited different civilizations and different dimensions and saw a whole bunch of different mind blowing things.

14:21 I want that tour. Yeah. I mean who wouldn’t. And one of the things that he said and I still to this day every time I relate this to someone else I get goosebumps is he said that the human experience is legendary throughout the world. Legendary throughout the galaxy.

14:34 Legendary. Legendary throughout the galaxy is one of the most incredible games a soul can play. And man that’s just fascinating to me. You know it’s funny how we were saying earlier that life is hard. And I think you and I talk about this a lot.

14:49 Like we’re you know we’re in probably the top 10th of the top 100th of 1 percent as far as Western lifestyle and comfort. And you know we don’t have shells going on around us. Our kids aren’t dying from cholera. But yet the human experience seems to kind of level all that stuff out and then find new ways to either explore or be to be saddened or happy or enlightened on the back of that. Yeah.

15:13 I really have thought along those lines myself. I agree with you completely. One of my favorite spiritual teachers John F. Demartini he says that happiness and sadness are prevalent or apparent in similar ratios. In palaces and slums you know it’s true.

15:34 It’s true like everything you get there’s a price you pay for it. You know like so sure some guy might be born a prince or the son of a wealthy father or come from a wealthy family. But and have everything given to him on a silver platter. But you know there’s a there’s a price you pay for that he might not experience the same kind of growth in the same kind of rewards as someone who’s born a peasant. And he has to work for everything he needs in his life.

16:02 And it’s fascinating because we have a we have a material first kind of view of the world the Western world. And so it’s always like you know let’s get more money more stuff who has the most stuff kind of thing. But it’s hard when you think back that everyone’s kind of living their own little human drama or experience. I read something earlier where they went and interviewed a guy that had lost both legs in Afghanistan. Someone who had won like 50 million dollars in the lottery and someone else had some major life event and they talked to him a year later.

16:28 Now like how’s your how’s your life changed. And they’re all kind of like you know what I’m cool now. You know and the guy the guy lost his legs called it his alive moment. He’s like that’s the day I became alive when I lost my legs. Yeah.

16:39 And he’s like that’s whole new perspective about what’s important to him. And it’s like you know he doesn’t wish it didn’t happen. And the person that won the lottery they’re like everything’s back to basically where it was. You know I still have the same problems and challenges in my life. I just have money now.

16:52 You know and so it then you know I don’t have to work and so that brings its own challenges. But it’s hard to realize it when you’re in it. Yeah. There’s something a friend once said to me had been reading a book and one of the main premise of the book was the five best or the five biggest breakthroughs in your life will come from the five worst events. And that’s true.

17:15 Very interesting huh. Very interesting. I was looking at my life and thinking about it a few times. I was at my lowest points you know and that’s when things became clearest to me. And those are the moments I’m most proud of.

17:30 I look back and I’m like wow you were really down in the dumps. And like every day after that is a is a is a victory day. And but I forgot that I had to go through all that mental suffering just to kind of now look on it. What do they say pain plus time equals comedy or something like that. But you know but like and I know all that to be true but yet when I when I experience pain now in my life I’m never thinking oh this is going to be funny someday.

17:54 You’re going to grow because of it. But what is it something Joe Rogan said the other day he said if you’re not growing you know you know a human always has to grow. Healthy things grow. Plants grow. Trees grow.

18:07 Of course they do. Yeah it’s it’s the way it is. And the problem is growth requires discomfort and it requires the facing of your fears. That’s why people stay stuck in the same job that they hate for 20 or 30 or 40 years. It’s because they’re afraid to move out of their comfort zone.

18:26 And I’m not speaking like this high and mighty duties who’s you know mastered that. There’s many times in my life where I’ve been too afraid to take the next step and push through. We spoke last week about that book called Courage by the Guru Osho. Yeah. Just give a quick background on Osho just biography man.

18:47 It’s my understanding that Osho was an Indian mystic that became very popular in the West in the 70s and 80s if I’m not mistaken. He was the author of several books and there’s actually a center dedicated to him in Puna, India where you can still go if you want to learn more about him. His books are incredible. I’ve only read two of them. This one called Courage that I just mentioned.

19:15 And that one’s all about moving towards the new. And he’s saying how if there’s a very interesting story that I really appreciated. I was just reading this book for the second time yesterday and he said he was he was mentioning another mystic who said he sees these people who are so afraid and he finds it hysterical because they have nothing to lose. And that blew my mind. Wow.

19:41 You know what I mean? That’s strong. Yeah. One of the things I found is when you’re growing you’re changing and the people in your life that you have relationships with many times those people don’t want those relationships to change. And so they get uncomfortable when you change.

19:56 I mean I felt this a lot. I mean I left I worked in the city for nine years. I left in January because I quite simply wasn’t enjoying it anymore. And finally was just like let’s get out of this. But it made so many people uncomfortable in my life.

20:07 And after two and three months are like Brian what are you doing? What are you doing? I’m like I’m not doing Jack. And they were projecting all their kind of insecurities on me as if maybe they were in my position. It was really weird.

20:19 And I think when you grow it’s uncomfortable for everyone because those relationships are in a constant state of flux. And I think a lot of people one time one person said to me something he said Brian a relationship is like a story. It has beginning a middle and an end. And most people in life can’t accept that and they want it to just stay the way it is. That is so powerful.

20:41 It’s scary to think about. That’s something that I had to accept about relationships and love is yeah I really was. I kind of believe that fairy tale like you know I was going to find my princess and settle down and we’d love each other till the end. But I’m starting to understand that love is love doesn’t work that way. Love is an energy that flows.

21:01 Right. So what happens is most people they find what they might be love it might not be but they think of it as love and then they try to latch onto it and hold on to it. And label it and contain it and package it. And then the polarity of that energy will change and it will turn into something else. It’ll probably turn into hate by the other person.

21:20 Well by you or them. You try to hold it too tight. If you try to hold it at all. There’s no holding. There’s no holding love.

21:28 I quote you on that. Yeah it’s a bumper sticker. I wish I could say it was my own theory. But one of the ways this became most clear to me is I was sitting at I was in Mendocino in California and I was sitting on the on a bench on the coast just looking out to see you was with a good buddy of mine. And I looked on this bench and there was a love heart carved on to that was Steve for Jill or whatever it was.

21:55 And I realized that is the predicament man. It’s that’s the problem with with our warp notions of love. It’s trying to make something that’s ephemeral but it’s very nature into something permanent trying to carve. And that was a symbol of it right because they were trying to make that last forever by carving it into something. But it’s not static.

22:15 It’s not at all man. Only you could see a heart carved on a bench and see the grand ramifications of that. But you see the classic story of a boy with his first love in high school or in college and the world the girl is everything to him and his his whole this whole love is almost defines him. And he’ll call her and tell her you’re my everything and I could never live without you and you see guys do that because they don’t know any better. I think that’s a natural human thing and you just see how that most times that destroys itself because it just gets to the point where you don’t have an identity I think anymore.

22:51 And the thing that the girl liked you for in the very beginning the fact that you’re an individual and independent and you had your own path. Once you leave that to start following her and you make her the focus of your life she will lose attraction for you because you’re not the same as you were in the beginning. Exactly. It’s a crazy game. It’s a very crazy game.

23:12 But the only one in town. I had a real big realization when I left New York City about nine years ago. I was in a relationship before then and it broke up before the World Trade Center came down and later looking back on it I realized that one thing like one thing I always remember is that you can’t love someone that doesn’t love themself. And I didn’t love myself back then. And so how can someone love you if you can’t love yourself?

23:38 And it’s something I used to think about and it sounds so simple but it’s true. So on that note in one of Osho’s books, the other book I read, it’s called Love, Freedom and Aloneness. That title is powerful. Very, very powerful. What he’s saying is similar to what you’ve said.

23:59 So love actually comes from within you. And his whole theory is that by going inwards and finding yourself and finding that true source of all love, which is the eternal cosmic godhood. Once you feel that and only once you feel that, once you recognize it within yourself, are you able to give love? Because what most people are actually experiencing when they say they love someone is they’re just wanting the feeling of being loved from the other person because they feel so empty inside.

24:31 And if I look at my previous relationships, man, that was it. That was it. Totally, that was it. Gosh, you just kind of want that that echoing effect that you just kind of wake up and I love you, boom, okay, they still love me, it’s good in the world. We can continue with our day.

24:46 I think there’s a lot of that happening out there. Well, I guess there’s probably not many truly enlightened people walking around. But yeah, that’s strong. Gosh, man, we should give a relationship advice or not or not or theorize it. Relationships are tough.

25:00 I noticed that with me, man, I mean, my last relationship, I am you’d ended pretty badly for a lot of the reasons we’ve just discussed earlier. And even now, like, I’m starting to feel that that my heart is is starting to open again and I’m ready to maybe love someone again. But man, I don’t want to take the risk because God damn, I don’t want that pain. Even though I know that pain and pleasure come in equal amounts and that that will probably be the price.

25:30 If I want to have a relationship of a similar depth, I’m going to have to pay that price. Can you expound on that pain and pleasure? What is your theory as far as those two things, man? This has been one of the most difficult things for me to accept in my life. And that is, you know, the universe is a is an entity that’s it’s balanced.

25:53 That’s one of the very fundamental characteristics of this universe is that it’s balanced. There’s light and dark, hot and cold, you know, matter, antimatter. We could look at these economies forever, but that’s nature of existence. And a human life is a reflection of that, you know, every, every event, every occurrence, every relationship, every thing in your life has or will bring into your life an equal amount of pleasure and an equal amount of pain, whether or not you can see it.

26:29 Again, this is another. It comes back to John F. Demartini. That’s where this where I stumbled upon this concept. And the more I started to look at my life, the more I was able to recognize, you know, every time something cool happened, it would invariably be balanced up by something not so cool related to the cool thing or just some other thing.

26:50 Yeah. I mean, related to it. Well, I guess it could probably not be related to it in some instances as well. But and this was very, very, very difficult for me to accept because until then I’d always. The problem for me is that ultimately then your life becomes a zero sum game, which no one wants to accept.

27:11 But I guess the way we could look at it is, you know, the Western mindset or at least the capitalistic mindset is it’s about accumulation. Right. So if we’re always accumulating stuff, then, you know, you eventually your life could be looked at as a I mean, if your life’s successful, you have a profit. If it’s not successful at the end of it, you have a net loss. Right.

27:33 Whereas that’s starting to understand that’s not what life’s about. Life’s about the experience. It’s about the journey, not the destination. And very difficult for me to accept that because it meant a complete change in my paradigm, a complete change in the way I looked at the world and my life and where it was going and what it meant. Well, you’ve been brought up in this, you know, like you said, material first world and whether you subscribe to it or not, it doesn’t matter.

27:59 It’s been ingrained into you to where you probably don’t think twice when it comes to, you know, a situation where you want to get more or not. It’s like more is always better. Right. But I think as you get a little bit older, you’re realizing that maybe there’s a bit more than just the accumulation. This is the right journey.

28:18 So the older I get and the more I go down this road of looking for spiritual knowledge and knowledge about myself, you know, I wouldn’t consider myself a Christian by any stretch. You know, I originally, during my youth, I came from quite a religious, I had quite a religious upbringing, but I turned my back on that in my early twenties. And now it’s strange, it’s come full circle. And when I read some of Jesus’s quotes or some biblical quotes and scriptures, a lot of them are starting to make a lot of sense to me now, like I’m paraphrasing, but there’s that one which is, do not store up riches for yourself on earth where, you know, like they can rot and be stolen, et cetera, et cetera.

29:02 Rather store up riches for yourself in heaven. And what I think that means is there’s not an actual heaven where we’re going to go and all sit in a fluffy white cloud one day if we’ve made the right choices. It’s heaven to me is when you recognize the divinity within yourself. And I think that’s what people like Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and these masters, they’ve realized that we’re playing this game and that this is all an illusion, you know. And yeah, I just found that interesting.

29:34 His whole philosophy. I mean, it’s funny, you sometimes get caught up in religion and you look at like Jesus’s life and story and the Bible and then you look at the institution that’s kind of overtaken that. And if you try to separate the two, if you look at some of his theories that we’ve built, I mean, our timeline is 2011 because that’s after he died, you know, how he just completely changed the course of the Roman way to this Christian way of turn the other cheek and all these concepts, which are, I think, innately inhuman, right?

30:01 I mean, humans are greedy. Humans are violent. Humans are vengeful. And he just came up with this doctrine out of wherever, nowhere. You know, Muhammad did the same thing in the 600 A.D.

30:12 Where I’ve got a different way of looking at things and everyone gets on board. It’s fascinating. Osho speaks about how when these masters are alive, their guidelines are given to their followers through the way they live. They show their faith by the way they live. And then what happens is after they die and their light is gone and the followers are all confused, they have to start developing a system and initiating rules and steps to follow.

30:46 And, you know, I think if Jesus were alive today, he wouldn’t be in the church. That’s the last place he’d be. Where would he be in Silicon Valley? Who knows? Maybe he’d be sitting here talking to you on the…

31:03 That’s a crazy thought. So you were talking earlier about your training. Can you tell me more about, you know, you and training and I guess, you know, jujitsu? Yeah, man. I mean, for me, what my training is starting to…

31:21 You know, when I was a kid, I was never a very physical or never very athletic kid. Real? Yeah, not at all. The opposite. Yeah.

31:31 I actually had a muscular disorder. I was like… I was a pretty weak little kid and then I went to occupational therapy and corrected it. At what age? Man, this was young, like three or four even.

31:44 Wow. And so originally when I started working out with weights and doing martial arts and all that stuff, it was as a kind of a self-development, you know, like trying to better myself, which is another erroneous thinking pattern that we’ll talk about in a short while. I really want to hear your thoughts on that, self-improvement. What did he say in Fight Club? Self-improvement is masturbation.

32:07 It’s mental masturbation. And he said self-destruction. Yeah. We can talk about that later too. But now, for me, training all kinds of physical activity is…

32:17 Man, the strange thing, it’s like a celebration of life, you know, because just thinking about this the other day, like movement is life. We’re on this physical plane for a reason. You know, there’s a very cliched statement now, which is we’re not human beings having a spiritual experience. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience. And I really believe that.

32:41 I believe that our soul comes to this physical plane to experience this dense, you know, realm that we’re in. Right. And we’re in these incredibly strange bodies. Fragile bodies, right? Fragile.

32:54 Fragile. And for me, being physical, working out with weights or doing yoga or breathing or doing martial arts or whatever, what you’re basically doing is being more human. Wow. That’s a very interesting way to think about it. Yeah.

33:12 Which is quite an opposing view, I would say, of the way most people walk around thinking about the physical. Oh, how do you look at it? You know, I was always about my brain since I was a kid. And I was programming when I was 10 and I was always into science and I was really I was into getting good grades and study, study. So for me, it was always about my mind.

33:30 Mine came first. Science came first. Body came second. Religion third. Humanities.

33:35 I didn’t care. It was always about science and then later capitalism money. So for me, it was always just my body was a vessel to contain my brain, you know, to my brain to get that. And then about 10 years ago, it just started training hard and I just flipped completely to where my brain couldn’t work unless I had, you know, gone through the physical. But the way you talk about that had strong.

34:00 Yeah. It’s something I think about more and more. I was just having a discussion with my buddy, Mike Margaritas. This morning, he was the guy I was working out with. And Mike’s a pretty good martial artist as well.

34:12 And he, one of the things my very first martial arts teacher shared with me and instilled upon me is the, when pressed upon me, is the importance of your breathing. He calls the breath the ladder to God, right? And, you know, your breathing pattern can tell so much about your mental state. It’s so incredible. One of the things he told me was that human beings, we are the only mammals that unconsciously hold their breath.

34:46 Let’s say somebody of yours gives you a Friday, jumps out from behind the door and surprises you. The first thing you do is you go, and you hold your breath. And as soon as your breath is held, your structure becomes rigid, right? Tensing, preparing for combat, whatever. There’s actually the worst possible thing you can do, right?

35:03 If you frighten a cat or a dog, it will never hold its breath. You know, it might raise its hackles up and prepare for combat or whatever, but it’s not going to hold its breath, it will keep breathing. And Mike told me something interesting today. He said, one of his Kenpo instructors, he was saying how when you hit someone, try to time your strike for when they inhale, because that’s when their body is at its weakest. And the analogy he used, or the example he used is, think about it, when you are most traumatized emotionally, like you’re crying over an ex-girlfriend or something.

35:39 You’re breathing in all the time, you know, that’s how you cry. Whereas the opposite end of the spectrum, when you’re happiest, when you’re laughing, you’re hysterical, you’re exhaling completely. And I notice in meditation, it’s all about keeping level, even breathing pattern. Do you think about your breathing during meditation? I mean, initially, I focus on my breath, and if I find my mind is not slowing down, I always come back to the breathing, not to slow my breathing down.

36:16 But as you know, meditation is about not thinking. The art of fighting without fighting. Exactly. I assume what you said about the breathing patterns. I know in jujitsu you’ve talked to me about this two or three years ago, and it’s such a determination of how you feel.

36:32 If you’re stressed in the moment, I mean, I hold my breath. The other thing is when you’re choking someone out, the novices will hold their breath, right? I’d probably still do it. If I get up to a choke, I’m like… And obviously, the guys that have trained themselves are…

36:46 You’re tightening the choke while continuing to breathe, right? That’s tricky. Do you try to catch yourself? You don’t have problems, really, breathing. You know, I used to get stoned in jujitsu a few years ago.

37:02 What’s that like? It’s interesting. It’s interesting. I believe weed is an amplifier of your mental state. And sometimes for me, jujitsu is one of the most difficult things I can do, mentally, spiritually, physically.

37:16 And I remember I was sparring with my younger brother, Jason, and he had me in mount, and he does this thing where he’d put the kimono, the jacket of the kimono over your face so that you can’t breathe. This is Nick’s brother, Jason. He’s quite a bull. I’ve rolled with him as well. Very tough guy.

37:36 Feels like he weighs 200 kgs on top of you. But I remember I was starting to panic because it was very difficult to breathe in that situation, and there was this terror, this absolute terror, like, fuck, I can’t breathe. And I remember I could see this one little hole of daylight where his kimono was not covering. And I remember looking at it and knowing that if there was that hole where daylight could come through, air must be able to come through. So I looked at it and I breathed, trying to suck air through that little opening.

38:10 And that was the thing that calmed me down and slowed my mental state down. And I’ve noticed, again, coming back to that, how your mental state is linked to your breathing. I’ve seen it in so many different things, like I was in Australia a couple of years back, and a friend of mine took me freediving. And I noticed I’d never done anything like that before. And, you know, the sea was quite rough, and we were on the surface waiting to dive.

38:34 Did you have something that toes you down, or did you just go holding your breath? No, it was over the line. We had flippers on. Can you pull yourself down the line? No, there’s no line.

38:41 Okay, just go. You just dive down. And I remember, like, my breathing pattern was completely fucked. I was nervous and I was anxious. And, you know, then I did this first dive, and I went, I don’t know, not very far at all, but at the bottom when I ran out of breath, again, that panic, that terror set in.

39:01 And I had to control myself. I had to realize it’s just your mind playing tricks on you. It’s important that you can recognize that, and then recognize, okay, I have to deal with this, and maybe you can partially think, I’m going to grow from this. Whether it’s your bridging maneuver you did today in the park, you just recognize, okay, this is uncomfortable, but I’m going to get through it. And I know I can get through it because I’ve done this in the past.

39:26 And I think that’s really strong, just the fact, because I think a lot of people will just panic, freak out, and they will consciously think about it. But the crazy thing is, there might be a time where you can’t get through it. But again, coming back to Osho, that’s, he says, gamblers are the ones who are most alive because the risk and the danger, that’s what makes life worth living, you know? So fuck who knows? Maybe one day I’m going to be rolling stone or doing a free dive or doing a back bridge, and I’m going to push myself too far and pass out, or who knows?

39:59 But that’s the price you pay, right? That’s the risk. Yeah, we’ve all had injuries, and we probably forget all the great times that we had because we pushed it and didn’t get injured. But as I get older, I find myself, when I’m in a chaotic situation like this, like when I was directing my film a couple years ago, I was in this thing where it was just like, every detail had to be right. We had two days to shoot it.

40:20 Everyone’s calling me, you know, there’s like 30 people I have to get involved. And I was just in the middle of it, stressing, stressing, and I could actually take a step outside and was like, wow, okay, this is stressful, this is crazy. But I kind of enjoy the buzz of it a little bit, you know? Because you’re not going to have this time again, so just kind of enjoy it. And then I step back into it, and I was like, all right, let’s just deal with all this stuff.

40:40 But it’s nice to be able to do that and to recognize the butterflies. I think John Jones is the UFC light heavyweight said, it’s okay to have butterflies. He’s like, I just try to get them to all fly the same way. That’s a great statement. And if you don’t have those butterflies, then you know you’re not pushing it, are you?

40:56 You know, Brian, I’ve been wanting to ask you this for a long time. You know, you seem to me like a guy looking at you from the outside. You seem to be like a guy who’s got it going on, and you’re extremely good-looking as well. I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t think any girl’s ever told me that.

41:15 I wanted to ask you, what is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life? Wow, that’s a strong statement. Off the top of my head, I would say moving to London. Probably the first time, you know, I was 1997, and I just left New York with like a bag, and I just showed up to London to a new… Was it a bag full of money?

41:36 No, bag full of credit card bills. And I didn’t know anyone, and I can isolate myself sometimes, and I was working at a new company, and it’s a bit of a culture shock, especially back then, it’s maybe changed a little now. And I was just really alone, and I was just like, if you don’t have a friend you can just talk to in a person-to-person type scenario. It’s hard to really, I don’t know, communicate. Off the top of my head, I said that would be one of the hardest things.

42:05 But I look back on it now, and I’m just so glad, and there was all that growth and all these great people and friends and experiences I met. I said earlier, I left my job in January, and was like, okay, now do we go somewhere? I went to London because I had no money, and I had to get a job, and this was the opportunity. So I had to go, but on the back of that I did all this growing. So now I’m here, and I’m like, okay, maybe you should go to Paris, and just try to learn how to speak frog and do all that stuff.

42:33 But it’s strange, because I don’t have to go there. And so then part of me thinks, well, maybe you should have to do something, and then you jump in. I haven’t figured it out. There’s a guy called David D’Angelo, and he speaks of what he calls the throwing your hat over the fence moment. Oh, yeah, I love that concept.

42:54 Yeah, I think we spoke about it before. It’s really strong. It’s like if you want to do something and you’ve been too afraid to do it, or you haven’t been able to move out of your comfort zone, you’ve got to take an action, which is the equivalent to throwing your hat over the fence, which means you’ve basically got to climb over the fence to get your hat back. For me, the way I throw my hat over the fence is I tell people I’m going to be doing this, because I don’t want to look like an idiot and not do it, even though ultimately I realize that sooner or later I’m going to have to stop caring what people think about me as much as possible.

43:27 But still, this podcast, before we started doing this, and before I embarked on this journey with this next career as a spiritual teacher, I was telling people, that’s going to be my next career. That’s what I’m going to do. And when you throw your hat over the fence, it’s a lot easier to take action and move out of your comfort zone. Yeah, I’m a big fan. I think a lot of people throw their hat over the fence and don’t realize that that’s what they’re doing.

43:49 And when I heard you mention that David Dee talked about it, I was like, wow, because I do it all the time. And what I do is I’ll sign myself up for something, like that stand-up comedy class. It was like 100 pounds, and I just called up and I was like, I’m doing it. And now I know, I’ve got to show up, and I’ve got to at least go and try it. But yeah, that’s big, because it’s amazing how strong those personal relationships are with you for certain people you tell you’re going to do something.

44:15 You want to do it just to show them, right? It’s not only to show them, I think it’s I feel it’s a kind of duty to my friends as well, because I want to show them, fuck, I’m saying I can do this, and I can and I will do it. So you guys, I want you to see that you can do the same. That’s one of the ways I look at it. That’s interesting.

44:40 So it’s kind of inspirational at the same time. Then I know I’m not only letting myself down if I don’t do it, I’m letting my friends down, because I’m an example to them in some ways, the same way they’re an example to me in others. So that’s the way I look at it. That’s strong. Yeah, I think it’s like any, well, even you go back quickly to something like jujitsu.

45:00 I mean, when I train with you, I know that you’re not going to accept any kind of substandard performance. And I know I’m not going to either. So it’s like as tough as it might be when I know I’m going for an hour with you, I know that I’m going to get the real deal. So yeah, it’s strong. Just that power.

45:20 So tell me more about spiritual advisor. It’s quite a term. Well, I mean, I wouldn’t use the word advisor. I like the word teacher. You know, I’ve been on a long, long road, trying to find out more about myself.

45:37 And the human experience fascinates me. Where did I come from? Where did my consciousness come from? And where is it going? And why is it here, more importantly?

45:49 And I think along this road, I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of books and followed different gurus and teachers and been on my own path. And yeah, I like to think I’ve learned a few things. Sure, there’s a hell of a lot of stuff I don’t know. That’s part of the game, right? But I also know there’s other people out there that are maybe in a similar position to where I was a few years ago.

46:18 And if I can help them with that, then I’d like to do that. I think it’s something very powerful about being around someone who’s self-aware but still searching, but still looking and confidently going through life, being like, okay, I know I don’t know everything, but I know that I want to experience it. And I think just that frame alone can be pretty powerful for someone to be around, not comparing yourself to a messiah or something. But it’s kind of this learning by osmosis type of thing.

46:48 I’ve seen it more with little kids. I met my nephew and niece a few weeks ago and just them watching me and being around me, they kind of get a feeling for Uncle Brian and they’re like, okay, kids are maybe even like dogs and stuff. They know what’s on your mind before you think it, based on your body language. You can’t fake kids out, man. You can’t. They see right through it.

47:08 And they’ll call you on it, too. That’s the great thing about kids. They’ll just be like, no, you’re wrong. And you’re like, wait a second. Don’t you know who I am?

47:14 Don’t you know what movie I’ve been in or how much I make? And they’re like, whatever. So, equalize. And I felt it, too, and I did a mentoring program about six months ago where I had a 10-year-old kid that I spent a year with. Man, I was so impressed with that.

47:26 Yeah, that was another throw in my head over the fence. I was just like, okay, let’s sign up and just go for it. But I spent basically every week with him for a year hanging out with him. But the most important thing I did with him was not me telling him what to do or asking him how things were bad in school, but it was just like my posture and the way I treated people. So, we say hello to people when they walk by.

47:46 We say thank you to the guy at the store. You know, we have good manners and just the way. And he just like picks up on that. He’s like, okay, this is the way we roll. And if you ever littered or something, I’m like, dude, we don’t roll like that, man.

47:56 We don’t do that. And he’s just like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Shh. Put it in the trash. But I think that’s really powerful.

48:02 You know, one of my mentors, his name’s Steve, he always says, I mentioned it earlier in this discussion, he says, you show your faith by the way you live. And it’s a Latin term. I don’t know what the Latin is, but… I think that’s very powerful. That’s very, very powerful.

48:23 We can all talk. We can sit here and talk for 10 years and stuff. But if you’re not out in the world living it and showing what you’re about, it’s all pie in the sky, man. It is about walking the walk as opposed to talking the talk. And yeah, I think you get that presence for someone right away when you’re…

48:39 Apparently, you know, it’s my understanding that when you’re in the presence of a really enlightened individual, like a Zen monk, or I guess Osho would have been considered one of these people, that you can just feel that the environment around them is completely different. They’re radiating at a different level of consciousness. That’s strange. Oh man, I think that’s very exciting. Gosh.

49:06 And I mean, you know, I know we come from different backgrounds and we have different perspectives, and a lot of this stuff can sound a bit airy-fairy and a bit out there, but you know what it’s like when you’re in the room with someone who has a bad energy and when you’re in the room with someone who has a good energy. I mean, you can feel it. Yeah, instantaneously. Instantaneously, man. And I notice that the more I’m going down this path, the more perceptive I am of that.

49:36 Do you know what I mean? Like, the more I’m… Now I can instantly tell, like, if I meet someone, if there’s someone I want to be around or not. Okay. You know, I’m not saying I’m better or worse than them at all.

49:45 It’s just our energies might be at a completely different… or coming from a different place. Right. Do you also try to analyze your own energy in the room and what you’re giving off to other people? Oh, that’s a great question, but…

49:59 No, I would say no. I think that’s a good thing. Yeah, I should probably start doing that. For me, it’s all about my breathing, you know. Something I noticed is in a social setting, do you know how many people have to drink because they’re so uncomfortable with who they are?

50:15 Very much so, yeah. Yeah, it’s very interesting to me. And I don’t drink much, and I’m not claiming to be some weird teetotaler. I experiment with drugs, and I like a good buzz every now and then, but I’d go out with groups of people, and I don’t like alcohol. It’s never really been my thing.

50:35 But that freaks people out. They’re like, what, you’re not drinking? Come on, have a drink. I’m going to buy you a drink. Well, you have to have one.

50:41 You have to have one shot. It’s another projection issue, actually. Do you know what I mean? Because they see themselves through you. Like, I need a drink, I need a drink.

50:48 He doesn’t. That makes me uncomfortable, right? Yeah, yeah. Which brings me to another point. One of my major breakthroughs in the past couple of years is, you know, there’s a…

51:01 I don’t know where the concert comes from. It’s probably from some Eastern mysticism, but I’ve realized that the world is your mirror, you know? Everyone and everything in your life is reflecting back at your own aspect of yourself. And when you see someone and you say, ah, I don’t like this person, if you dig deeper and follow that down, very often you realize that the thing you don’t like about them is something you don’t like about yourself. Gosh, that’s heavy.

51:30 Yeah, but on the flip side, sometimes you see someone who you admire a lot and you follow that down, you realize the thing you admire about them is something that you admire about yourself. Or that you admire. You do admire about yourself. Yeah, which I think is very, very interesting. I’m going to have to think about that some more.

51:47 Yeah, sometimes I run across negative people and I just try to box them out of my life, but I usually try to think, you know, why am I finding them negative? And you know, it comes back to that energy in the room with people. Sometimes I’ll meet someone who I won’t like, you know, but in hindsight, I’ll realize that, fuck, that person probably had the most to teach me, you know? Like, in my jujitsu, when I’m teaching, I’m a martial arts instructor, that’s one of my careers.

52:21 When I’m teaching someone, a group of students, sometimes there’ll be a student that just irritates the fuck out of me, you know, for whatever reason. Maybe they’re incredibly like, gimpy and awkward, or they don’t listen, or they’re just rude or arrogant or whatever it is. And you know, one of my ex-girlfriends, her mom always used to say something, which was, sometimes when people are at their least lovable, is when they need the most love. And now I’m trying to catch myself when I make these judgments on people, like a student irritates me, or a friend is being difficult, or whatever, I think to myself, fuck, okay.

53:02 Firstly, what are they trying to teach me about myself? And how can I help them? Maybe they need something, maybe this is an opportunity for me to help them. That’s quite a bridge to cross. It’s difficult.

53:13 I need to work on that, I need to think about that. Because if you think about it, you’ve been that guy before, you’re in a bad place, you’re having a bad day, and you know what would be really awesome, is if someone was just a little kind to you. And that little kindness is multiplied by a hundred if you had it on a great day. A great day, something kind for you, you’re like, oh, thanks, but when you’re in the dark and someone lights a match, you’re like, oh man, that’s really strong.

53:35 I see it a lot in retail. If you go into a cafe and you want to get something to eat, and you see the guy standing behind the counter, and you can just see he’s had a shit day. This guy’s been standing there selling sandwiches to people for fucking seven hours, right? And he’s all depressed, and it happened just yesterday, actually. This guy, I made my order, and the guy was very curt, very abrupt with me, and my initial reaction was like, fuck him, bro.

54:04 I’m a paying customer, and then I thought, fuck, let me see if I can just help this guy out a little bit. So I said to him, yeah, a hard day, and he was like, yeah, it’s been a long day, and I was like, yeah, at least the weekend’s coming up, and we shot the shit for a little bit. And when I left, he had a big smile on his face, and the way you describe this, I think you said it’s about putting positive energy out there. A big fan of that. A big fan of that as well, Brian.

54:31 In all ways, and it makes you feel better, and it’s just like all that positivity is shooting out there, I just think. You know, I don’t believe in karma, because I think karma’s almost like a balance sheet. You know, I do this, so later in my life, something good will happen to me. I just think about just flooding the world with just positivity, and no matter what you’re doing, as long as there’s some positive angle to it, it’s justified, in my opinion. No matter what you do, if it’s dumb or whatever, if you’re a street artist, anything, as long as some people are smiling, it’s good.

55:00 And I need to do more of that. It was funny how you were talking about, you noticed the presence of someone with good energy in the room right away. The first thing I thought of was my grandma. She’s 92 years old, which is just amazing, the fact that she’s alive, and I can communicate with her, because just that alone, it’s like, man, you’re looking at a woman who’s almost lived a century, you know? I was hanging out with her in Arizona, and I had aunts around, and cousins, and she was just there calm, and she was just like, so Brian, how do you like London?

55:28 She’s like, wow, that’s really cool, you like it because of that reason. And she was like the only one in the room without an agenda. Grandma’s like, you know, she just doesn’t care. She just kind of wants to be, and it felt good. Eckhart Tolley, the author of The Power of Now, which, to everyone listening and watching, I’d highly recommend this book.

55:45 He speaks of old people being a lot more present, because, yeah, and he says the reason is they’re starting to exit this world, so they’re starting to feel a closer connection to the other world, the other divine, which is ultimately what being present is all about, is, you know, connecting with your higher self and connecting with the universe. So when you said that about your grandmother, it made a lot of sense to me. That’s interesting. I never heard it put that way.

56:14 Well, think about it. As you age, your physical capacity is going to decline. Yes. You know, you’re going to be less in the world. And the only thing you can really work on then or the only thing you have then is your presence.

56:27 Right, and now, because the past doesn’t matter, the future is massively uncertain. Yeah, because you could die tomorrow, right? Yeah, so then now, you know, and we’re so lucky we, in this day of medical care, that we have people in their 90s living around us. I mean, you know, 2,000 years ago, you wouldn’t have anybody in the hunter-gatherer clan probably pass 40. You know, even in some countries today, like in Russia, the average age is like 55 or something, so it’s quite a resource.

56:50 Man, one of the things I’m starting to understand is every day is a gift, you know. Every day of your life is a gift, man. You don’t have any, no one says you have the right to live to 70 and have a wife and kids in your own home and all these things we expect to have in the West. Like, every day you wake up, man, enjoy it, because it could be your last. You’re living on, if you look at your life through the filter that you’re living on borrowed time, man, everything becomes so much better.

57:27 Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think it does. It’s funny, Nelson Mandela said when he got out of prison that he said what he missed most was the little things. He missed being able to walk outside and go to the market and buy coffee and like all these little things which we take for granted just because he didn’t have his freedom. I think it’s important to try to think of life that way.

57:45 But as a human, it’s hard because you wake up every day and it’s hard to remind yourself that this is a great thing. Because we take it for granted because it’s there. It’s the human condition to do that. The thing that’s helping me not take those things for granted is meditation. The more I meditate, the more I notice those little things.

58:01 The other day I made myself a cup of tea and I’ve been meditating a lot for the past six months and I put a cup of tea down and as I put the cup down I saw the impact of me placing it down caused some ripples across the surface of the tea and I just was watching the pattern of the light from the window reflect on the surface of the tea as well and it was like two, three, four years ago before I started meditating I never would have noticed something like that because I would have been too busy living in the pictures and the words in my own head. Thinking about what you have to do. What I have to do or what happened to me, the story in the past or the story of the future.

58:38 Instead of being right here, right now. What’s becoming so clear to me, Brian, the thing we spoke about the other day is it comes from a movie called The Peaceful Warrior. That is that there’s always so much going on. There is so much happening. A lot of us, I know I’m one of the biggest culprits.

59:03 We spend so much time in our own minds that we’re not awake to reality. We’re not awake to what is happening around us. We’re not awake to what’s happening inside us in our bodies because everything is surrounding this cerebral interpretation of what you have to do, what you should have done or the present or the future in the past. For me, meditation is chipping away at that bad habit. The more I meditate, the more I’m uncovering the present moment and what it’s like to be here and now, experiencing what it is to be human.

59:38 Wow, that’s really strong. Can you give me a quick two-minute summary as far as how you meditate and what it brings to you and then we’re probably going to wrap this one up. Oh, man, for me, meditation is just learning to quiet your mind. My method is just sitting on my bed with my back against the wall in total darkness. I put an eye mask on.

1:00:07 I usually do it late at night when there’s no signs of traffic or trains going by and everyone else in the house is going to sleep. And I just start breathing and I watch my mind. And at first, your mind is going to regurgitate a whole bunch of stuff, relevant and irrelevant. You know, what you have to do this week or one of the things I’ve found quite interesting lately is it starts bringing up old memories, old memories from when I was like three, four, five years old, things that I had completely forgotten about.

1:00:39 And the way to deal with that is you don’t judge these thoughts but you don’t engage with them either. You just recognize them, you watch your mind and you guide those thoughts out. You just literally guide them out. And it’s difficult but after a while, your mind will start to quiet down and eventually you reach the, I think the Japanese word for it is mooshin, which is no mind. And that’s when your mind stops thinking.

1:01:05 Right, and how long does that last? You never know how long it lasts. You never know how long it lasts. Because if you’re timing it then you’re observing your own consciousness. Exactly.

1:01:13 But what you do find, what I’ve found is it only happens a few times a session. I meditate for 30 minutes a night now. If it happens three times in that 30 minutes, I’m lucky. It’s a great moment. It’s a great moment and I find that that little window of mooshin is getting longer and longer.

1:01:27 Or at least it seems to be longer and longer. And yeah, I mean, problem is most people don’t, they don’t have the self-discipline to sit down every night and meditate because they claim they’re too busy or they’ve got too much going on or they’re too tired. But I’d recommend to anyone listening, if they want to try meditation, make a commitment to 30 days. Every single night without fail. You’re going to take that time that you set aside for yourself in a quiet dark room.

1:01:58 First start with five minutes and then build it up by a couple of minutes each week. That’s good advice. And you’ll notice little things at first and then you’ll start to notice big changes in your everyday life. Yeah, I mean, I started meditating about a year ago, a little more, and yeah, in the first four weeks, big changes. I mean, first of all, I used to see crazy colors and images in my brain.

1:02:19 That’s all gone now. But yeah, I just started, I found I did it first thing in the morning and I didn’t need coffee anymore to wake up. I was already awake, which doesn’t make sense because it’s not sleep. It’s not being alive. It’s meditation.

1:02:32 It’s like a third state. I’m not dreaming either. I would argue that it is being alive. In fact, I would say it’s being… Not normal consciousness.

1:02:40 You say it is elevated. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I want to label it as a better… Well, actually, I would say it is a better state of consciousness. Like that meditative state because your mind is out of your way. And we spoke last week about the mind being a tool.

1:03:00 It’s just a tool. It’s not who you are. And what happens to a lot of us is this tool takes control of us and you start identifying with your mind. And that’s a problem, man. Wow.

1:03:13 We have to talk more about that in the future. We will talk more about that in the future. That’s strong. We’ll be talking about that. I’m sure we’re going to be talking more about meditation, jujitsu, life, love, etc.

1:03:22 And we’ll be doing this every week. We’re going to have some in-studio guests. And I can’t wait. Yeah. It’s been a wild ride, right?

1:03:30 It’s going to be great. It’s going to be London Real and it’s the journey, right? It’s all about the journey, Brian. Awesome. Well, thanks for being in the studio and I will see you next week for our next session.