Vishen Lakhiani - The 6 Phase Meditation Method: The Proven Technique To Supercharge Your Mind, Smash Your Goals & Make Magic In Minutes

Full transcript: Vishen Lakhiani on London Real

2:35 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Vishen Lakhiani, the entrepreneur, best-selling author, and motivational speaker.

2:52 You are the founder and CEO of Mindvalley, a personal growth education platform with more than 20 million students in 195 countries. Your first book, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, has been translated into 25 languages and reached the number one spot on Amazon while your second book, The Buddha and the Badass, topped the charts at the Wall Street Journal. Your mission is to bring Mindvalley into the global consciousness by impacting a billion lives across the planet.

3:18 You believe that by focusing inward, anyone is capable of achieving their goals and manifesting their dreams. Your latest book, The Six Phase Meditation Method, illustrates how to effectively use meditation in the modern world and unlock your hidden potential. Vishen, welcome back to London Real. Thank you, Brian. It is, it is such an honor to be here, and before we get started, can I acknowledge you for something, please?

3:45 So I was on your show six years ago, and you brought me in to talk about a project I was then creating called Mindvalley University. It was a conference where parents and their kids get to learn together, so the parents will be in one room, and the children were also in classrooms designed for kids, so kids as young as three get to learn with their parents. Now, it was a crazy idea, and you were the first person to acknowledge it and give me press on it, and I really wanted to thank you for that.

4:13 You brought me here on London Real to talk about that project, a project that many people said was crazy, it wouldn’t work, but you believed in it. You honored me. You put me on the show, and I just wanted to thank you for your kindness. I never ever, ever forgot that favor. Thank you.

4:30 I appreciate that. I appreciate that. I remember you talking about that, and I’ve seen you set up these universities and cities around the world, like Barcelona, and I saw that you bringing in with the children and you’ve always been on the cutting edge when it comes to education. So I appreciate what you’re doing as well and I hope we’re going to talk about gratitude as well today, because it’s so powerful, but I really appreciate. I remember you coming on the show in the old studio.

4:51 We had this amazing conversation. I’ve been to one of your AFS since and it’s always incredible watching what you guys are doing at Mindvalley. Thank you, Brian. So I can’t wait to talk about this stuff, and I want to get into the book, but I kind of wanted maybe to start and zoom out a bit, because it seems like you have had a connection to mindfulness from, from an early age, and for a lot of people that don’t know that, you know, guys our age, you know, we grew up without the internet, right?

5:18 We grew out without YouTube, and so trying to get these ideas into your head was not an easy thing to do. Very difficult. In fact, unless you knew an uncle, or you were in the library, or you happen to be in a certain location, and yet it seems like you had an early experience that probably shaped the rest of your life, and maybe stuff we’re going to talk about today. So I’m wondering if you could talk about your introduction to the concept of mindfulness, which back then was really foreign.

5:45 Absolutely. So what happened was, I was 14 years old, and I was a really insecure kid. Now, the reason I was insecure is because I had a really bad case of acne, horrible acne, and I was made fun of in school. Now, the interesting thing about our minds is our minds will manifest what we believe, and we know this about the mind affecting the body. That’s a whole concept called the placebo effect, right, where doctors find that what you believe about your health will be true about your health.

6:14 Doctors can often cause a healing from giving people a placebo, essentially a fake pill, but the patient’s belief in the pill and the doctor causes the healing. So when I was 13 years old, something awful happened. I happened to look in the mirror as I was brushing my teeth, and I noticed a pimple and I turned to an aunt of mine, because I was a kid, and I’m like, oh, I have my first pimple. And the aunt goes, well, congratulations, you’re a teenager, and guess what?

6:41 You’re gonna get more and more and more and more of these, and she was right. I believed my aunt because she was an authority, and before I knew it, my face was erupting in pimples. Now, I had acne for a really long time, for almost five years. I remember going to dermatologist getting injections in my skin, and it was horrible, and nothing would solve it, but the worst part was the lunch line in school, and I remember there was this one particular day. I’m standing in the lunch line, and I have this big white boil on my face, and the kid at the back of the line looks at me and goes, you’re disgusting, you’re making all of us here not want to eat, and the other kids started laughing at me, and that was brutal.

7:21 That was horrendous. Now, when I was 14, I was browsing through my dad’s bookshop, because I grew up in Malaysia, and in Malaysia back then there were three television channels, maybe four or five American programs that you could watch on any given day. No internet, so I didn’t really have that much to do, and I found this book called The Silva Mind Control Method. So as I flipped through this book, it was written in 1977, was a bike by a Texan, Mind Sciences pioneer called Jose Silva, and he had found that by getting people to relax, and to go into what is called the alpha state of mind, right, which is a slowdown of your brain frequency, you could visualize outcomes and self-hypnotize yourself to change habits or even heal.

8:04 So I was fascinated by this book, and it took me a while to master the techniques. There were no Silva method classes in Malaysia so I couldn’t enroll in one, so I had to read the book, try, read again, try. Now, the book was really an advertisement for his seminar. I couldn’t afford to attend the seminar, so I had to kind of decipher his techniques from his books, and eventually I figured it out. Right, when I was 17 years old, I had already had a steady meditation practice, and there I learned the technique from Jose Silva, which is where you sit down, you get into a deep state of meditation, and you visualize your body healing using a specific sequence.

8:42 I decided to apply that sequence to my skin and in five weeks, meditating three times a day for three minutes each, I completely healed my skin. I’d had acne for five years, chronic acne. I healed it in five weeks, around three minutes a day, three times a day, and I was shocked. So when this happened, I decided to, to go deeper into what can I do with my mind? The next thing I did was I ended up imagining and visualizing myself representing Malaysia in the U.S.

9:12 Open Taekwondo Championships, because I was a martial artist, and that happened too. Before I knew it, I was in the United States, the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center, fighting representing my country in the U.S. Open. That changed the course of my life. I now discovered that I could move towards goals.

9:30 I could have control over my body, and that set me up for what would later be the launch of my company, Mindvalley. Wow, that’s just, I’d probably just pause there, because a lot of people are listening to this, and they’ll be like, yes, I believe that’s true, and a lot of people are saying that can’t be true, because Western medicine and everything we’re taught as kids, and even in the mainstream, says that can’t, you can’t do that. You need a medical doctor.

9:54 You need a pill. You need this to do that, and yet we all know the placebo effect is real, and I remember there was a 60 Minutes episode, and they were talking about this, and it’s like, the placebo effect is there, and no one ever explains it. They just kind of go, oh yeah, that’s true, and, but like, we know that the mind is powerful in all ways, and as a kid, my experience was my mom, you know, I’m from California, so my mom was into some of these things, and I think she did the firewalk experience with Tony Robbins when I was a kid, and so she was always saying, positive thinking, Brian, but then I was into science, and science and computer programming always said everything is cause and effect, so I grew up in these two minds, version where I went to school at MIT and got an engineering degree, and everything was the science, but as I get older, I realize everything you’re saying is true.

10:35 You know that the mind is so powerful, and it’ll bring us what we want, and how do you usually get people to step over and say, maybe that’s a possibility? Well, at this point, it’s science. Okay, so I’ll share a really interesting study. This was done by a doctor called J.B. Moseley, m-o-s-e-l-e-y, and it was covered in the New York Times sometime around 2012 or 2013.

10:58 So here’s what happened. J.B. Moseley had a theory that the placebo effect was going to be able to help patients, not just with, you know, simple ailments like back pain, but with diseases that required surgery. So the disease he started to look at was arthritis of the knee. a lot of men.

11:14 He found, particularly, U.S. veterans, people who had served in wars and were now in their 60s and 70s, had a painful knee condition, arthritis of the knee, and it required going for surgery. So J.B. Moseley decided to do an experiment. He took 10 men who were veterans, and all of them were put under anesthesia. Now, eight of the ten simply had incisions made on their knee that were then bandaged up, right?

11:39 So when they came out of anesthesia, it looked like they had that surgery. Eight out of 10 had a fake sham surgery, two out of ten had the actual surgery. Now, at the end of this experiment, one month later, all 10 men, a hundred percent of these men, were cured of arthritis of the knee. So the eight men who had a sham surgery somehow believed that they had the real surgery, and their pain disappeared, and this shows that the power of our mind is not just for simple aches and pains or for healing skin.

12:09 It can literally heal aspects of your body that today might require surgery, and this baffled doctors, and so this has led to a lot more research in the placebo effect. Today, almost any medicine that is released anywhere in the Western world has to be tested against a placebo. It’s just, it’s mind-boggling that that can actually happen, and it’s still not really acknowledged by modern medicine. Well, at this point it is. Yeah, it is, almost, because no drug can be released without a test against a placebo, right?

12:37 But your doctor will never recommend this as a procedure. Unfortunately, in some healthcare systems, doctors are incentivized to press to over prescribe drugs in certain countries. That’s just where the economy works, but a good doctor knows that so much of healing has to do with a patient’s belief and trust in the doctor, but also in the patient’s own capacity to heal. Yeah. What kind of 14-year-old kid dissects a book that’s probably too complicated for a 20-year-old kid and then puts the practice into place for three years?

13:12 I mean, what were you like as a kid, because that’s intense? Yeah, well, I grew up with a slight case of Asperger’s, right? So because of that, I had difficulty connecting with people. I remember I had to read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People at least eight times before my 18th birthday so I could understand how human beings worked. But I was great at math, I was great at science.

13:34 I had this brilliant brain, and so I just had a unique brain. I was not, you know, typical, but because I didn’t have that many friends, I mean, I was made fun of. and I lived in a country where I didn’t have internet until I was 19. I didn’t have too many TV stations. All I could do was read the books from my dad’s bookshop.

13:54 My dad never went to school, he never went to college, but he self-educated himself by reading all the great works by people like Bob Proctor, Jose Silva, Wayne Dyer. They became my teachers because I had no other choice. There was very little to do. Wow, that’s fascinating. All right, so there’s a lot of your dad in you as well, that whole con, because if you’re around a parent that self-educates, then that just that that gets to be in your DNA, right?

14:19 It’s just, without even if it’s spoken, it’s like, oh well, Dad does this and so I can do this too, so I just wanted to be like my dad. Wow, all right, so fast forward you end up getting to, you go to Michigan, right? In Dearborn, right? Is that in Ann, in Ann Arbor, right? University of Michigan.

14:34 So I spent the summer in Ann Arbor working for Ford Motor Company, and they stuck us in one of the high-rise dorms for that summer, so I got a touch for Michigan. But what an amazing place. And then you go out to Silicon Valley, you’re working there for a tech company, and you realize that you’re having a stressful time, and you realize maybe this is the time I go back into meditation. Exactly. Okay, so when I was 19, I moved.

14:55 He moved to the US, and now being a teenager, going to an American university, I got caught up in the culture of university, which was getting drunk for the first time, you know, like cramming for exams doing other things that we shall not talk about on this show, football games, and I lost my meditation practice, right? I stopped. I just stopped, and it was tough. I almost flunked out of school. My GPA, I’m not proud to say, was 2.54, just barely passing.

15:27 And after I graduated, I moved to Silicon Valley. I borrowed 30,000 from my father, and I moved to Silicon Valley to attempt to start a small little software company. I had this idea for a certain type of community software. Unfortunately, my timing sucked. The dot-com bubble burst, thousands of people were laid off, then September 11 hit, and again thousands of people were laid off, and the economy was so bad that no one was hiring, so I ended up sending out my resume to any job I could try to find on Craigslist, which was the job hunting site at that time, and finally I got a job, but it was a dialing-for-dollars job.

16:04 I had to pick up the phone and call attorneys from A to Z in San Antonio, Texas, and pitched them on the company’s software. So it was basically cold calling, interrupting American attorneys in the middle of their day. And I can tell you it was an awful job, because Texas attorneys do not like being interrupted by salesmen in the middle of a busy day, and after one particular day, when I was told to f off maybe for the 13th time, I fell into a depression.

16:34 Now, I was not as deep into meditation then as I was as a 17-year-old, right, but I remember getting online because my life sucked. I was sleeping on a friend’s couch, sleeping on a friend’s couch. I had very little money in my bank account, and if I didn’t close the sale, I didn’t get paid. The economy was so bad there was no base salary. I got on Google, and I can’t remember what I typed in, but I was searching for hope, and there I see Silva Ultramind System.

17:01 It was the updated version of that old course I’d taken years ago, right? So I fly to LA. I take that seminar. I was the only person who showed up because they were not very good at self-promotion. I was the only person who showed up, so I had a one-on-one with the instructor, and I flew back to San Francisco and started working Monday.

17:21 Now, immediately I started applying one of the techniques I learned in that seminar. And here, I asked for you and your viewers to have an open mind. Okay. It was a technique that had to do with human intuition. So the technique suggested that if we can get into an altered state of mind now, you can get into altered states in four ways: breathwork, meditation, neurotraining, or plant medicine.

17:42 But this was through meditation, a very specific meditation protocol that puts you into the alpha level of mind, but then takes you deeper to what is called the Theta level of mind, where your brainwave frequency is four to seven cycles per second. The usual brainwave is 14 to 21 cycles per second, so you’re lowering your brain waves quite significantly, and when you’re at Theta, you know you’re there if you’re meditating, because your head kind of goes like that. You’re drifting off of sleep, but if you, but you can train yourself to be awake there, and when you’re awake there, you’re almost in this pseudo-dream state, and these insights and impulses come to you.

18:16 So what I would do is, now, back then we used the Yellow Pages. I’d have to go to the San Francisco Public Library, check out the Yellow Pages for San Antonio, and then run my finger down. So rather than call names at random, I’d run my finger down, go to the theta level of mind, and just listen within, and every now and then I’d feel an impulse and it’s hard to describe what that impulse was like. It feels almost like a little burst of joy in your heart, a burst of joy, a burst of hope, and as soon as I feel that, I would call that attorney.

18:46 And an interesting thing happened. Okay, so as a salesperson, I kept an Excel spreadsheet with everything. You’re logging everything, the number of cold calls you make, the number of times you get past the attorney’s assistant, the number of times the attorney gets past 10 minutes on the phone, the number of times they ask for a brochure, the number of times you close the sale. Everything is math. Now, without any other factors changing, just using that technique, running my finger down, listening to that voice within, I doubled my sales overnight.

19:14 So I started. I was thrilled. I went to my boss, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, I think they call it intuition, and my boss said, nah, that’s b******t, but can you keep doing it? Now I started going deeper and deeper into other aspects of personal growth create a visualization, for example, where you visualize yourself hitting your goals, and again I double my sales.

19:36 Another technique was something called subliminal programming, where you visualize the person you’re seeking to communicate with and you set a simple prayer or intention that whatever is best for everyone concerned will happen, and again I double my sales in a span of four months. I got promoted three times, and I went from lowly phone rep to Vice President of Sales. Boom, boom. And now you are back, and back on track, back on track. All of a sudden I was earning a decent salary.

20:06 I remember moving into my own apartment, getting off the freaking couch. That was a big deal for me and now the company sent me to New York City on the anniversary of September 11th. So September 11, 2002, I was in New York City, and I opened up the company’s office in New York City as a vice president. I was 26, maybe 27 years old. I was leading teams of men who were in their 40s, but I was able to do all of that because I trained my mind.

20:33 I stayed with that company for about a year, 18 months, then I decided to quit, become a meditation teacher, because I couldn’t get one thought out of my head. Everything I learned in college and hacked my education at the University of Michigan was great. Look, it cost me a lot of money, but nothing was as valuable as that one class that taught me how to go within, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, how was I the only person in that class? So I built a website.

20:59 I got the license from Jose Silva’s family and I did my best to explode these methodologies on the internet. I got reasonably successful. I started using Google AdWords to drive people to the website, and then I started selling out my classes, then I started selling out other trainers’ classes, then I started selling CDs. Now, this was 2003, 2004, and eventually, as I kept tweaking the website, it became the company that today is known as Mindvalley. But at one point you decided that you wanted to go all in on that, because I think you were making a decent amount of cash, enough to have your place in Hell’s Kitchen and in New York City, and you know you could have just coasted at that point.

21:37 And I’ve heard you say a quote that, you know, you’re not interested in people that are looking to build a career. You want someone who’s on a mission. Exactly. When did Vishen decide I need to take this to a billion people? Like, what clicked?

21:50 So I think that’s a really important idea here that I think might be useful too to your listeners. It is the idea of kensho and satori. It’s a Zen concept, and it comes from this idea articulated by the spiritual teacher Michael Beckwith. He says that we will grow in life based on two different ways of growth. One is satori, which is growth, true insight.

22:11 Insight is when you meditate. Insight is when you watch London Real. Insight is when you read a book, you get an insight that helps you grow. Most people, however, don’t bother with this. The vast masses of humanity don’t care about insight.

22:25 They are too busy running the hamster wheel, and when you are not, don’t have access to insight, you often grow. True can show, can show is growth through pain. So no matter what you want to believe, what often happens is that you end up in hospital. It’s freaking painful, but you come out of there with new ideas on how to take care of your health, or somebody breaks your heart. It is freaking painful, but you discover how you truly want to be in a relationship, or a business fails, and it’s painful, but you learn how to be a better entrepreneur.

22:56 Now, what happened to me was the forces of kensho and satori hit me at the same time in my company that I worked for in New York. The values of the company were not aligned with my values. I became the victim of racism. I remember another guy in the company, a senior salesperson, he had done some stuff which was unethical, and I reported him to the boss. He came to me, my, I had my team around me, and he told my entire team, if you quit working for vision right now, I will pay you 20 percent more.

23:33 I lost half my team that day. It was pure manipulation. When I confronted him, I remember his words: you’re not a citizen of the United States. You talk to me again, and I will rip your f***ing f***ing face off. I went to the boss and complained.

23:49 The boss said, not gonna do anything, he closes more deals than you do. Sounds like Wall Street, right? Sounds like New York City at that point. I decided, so that was kensho. That was the universe like punching me in the face.

24:01 It was horrendous, because I had to sit in that office, have my team have moved to him, and, okay, that’s capitalism, right? He was paying more, but that guy mocked me every single day. Every single day now. What happened was he got found out for over-promising on the phone. He was fired.

24:20 I stayed at my job. All those team members eventually came back because they knew that I was actually closing sales ethically, and I decided to, but I’d lost faith in the company’s leadership and management. I applied the techniques I’d learned. I quadrupled my quota in November 2003. I went to my boss, and I said, I quit.

24:41 I want the best salesman award that month, but I decided, but I wanted to do that for myself. I did not want to be a victim, so I won the best salesman award, quadrupled my quota. I then quit, and I said, listen, good luck to you guys. I need to start my own thing, but I didn’t know what to stop. And that’s where satori kicked in, and I’m sharing this so your viewers, as they reflect on their life, might be able to discern between kensho.

25:04 Sometimes a punch in the gut can be what you need to make a better decision in life, but you also got to listen to your heart and not just wait for those punches. I remember I was meditating trying to figure out what should I start. In one rainy day in New York, walking through New York in the rain, just, and I love walking in the rain because it’s almost meditative, right? The idea came to me. Why did I start a meditation website?

25:31 I’ve seen how powerful this is, but not enough people were doing it. What if I could help popularize it? So I took everything I learned in sales and marketing, selling legal software, and I applied it to selling meditation. Isn’t that fascinating? What did Steve Jobs say?

25:46 Connected dots in reverse, right? Things that Jobs said in his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address: You cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. starting to see your dots connect. I didn’t know about that.

26:00 You had, you know, optimized that website. No, 304. I didn’t know you had been in sales. Since this all now makes much more sense, is how you created Mindvalley. The meditation practice is a powerful thing.

26:11 I don’t think I’ve ever told this story, but the reason London Real exists is because of a meditation practice. Really? Yeah. So I was working in the city of London. I was very unhappy.

26:20 I’ve been here now, I think, 10 years, working at this job. I was making a lot of money, and that’s what I thought was going to make me happy all of my life. I was 40 years old, and I wasn’t happy, and as an MIT engineer I realized that my bank balance was going up every quarter, because they used to pay us pretty much a fixed commission in the city, so I could see my balance going up every quarter. I was single. I didn’t have any expenses, and I was like, yeah, but you’re not getting proportionately happier.

26:48 I was basically had one of those two-floor flats in the cool part of town, no family, no, not many friends, and I was just kind of, you know, drinking myself to death. That was like what I was kind of doing, and I decided to take a meditation course. And they were, that’s, this is like 2010, and so there wasn’t much online there wasn’t much on YouTube, and so I finally took, what’s the meditation course with the mantra and the twice a day? I always forget the name.

27:16 Yeah, transcendental. So I found a transcendental class. I paid the fee, which was high at the time. It was crazy. It wasn’t crazy, but it was like 800 pounds or something.

27:24 I went there, and they’re playing these old video cassettes of the Indian guy who was dead, and then they said we’re gonna come to this ceremony, and you got to bring two pieces of fruit in a handkerchief, and I was like, man, I was like, I don’t know about this, but I already paid, so I’m gonna do it, and I started meditating, and like two weeks later I woke up one day, and I said, Brian’s not happy doing this job. Why don’t you stop doing it, and literally, I resigned that month, and I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I didn’t want to do that anymore. And at the same time, I probably had that other kind of learning, this, whatever the one you’re talking with inside, because I was watching this, your satori moment.

28:01 That was my satori moment, and then I was, I had been watching The Joe Rogan Experience at the time, because I was a jiu-jitsu practitioner and a martial arts fan, so I knew Joe from the UFC, and so I watched his channel back when he was on Ustream, on a sofa. It was really bad, but I used to watch him before he was on YouTube, on Vimeo, and it was the time Vision when I actually had connection with usually a group of men talking for three hours about a topic like Ayahuasca or a topic like I don’t know, Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, and I thought, wow, I was hanging out with a peer group, but I never could hang out with it. It was so, my best Sunday afternoons, three hours, would end and I’d be like, wow, that was special, and so part of me deep down was thinking, maybe I could do something like that, and the meditation kicked me in the butt and said, why don’t you stop doing something you hate?

28:46 And then literally nine months later, I started London Real. That was it. I literally bought an Ikea desk. I bought some microphones. I bought some webcams, and I had my first episode of the old studio over there, and that’s how it happened, and it all started with that transcendental meditation.

29:01 Amazing. Our stories are surprisingly similar. They are. You study computer science too, right? Yeah, so I was also into martial arts.

29:08 Like, yeah, you’re in Taekwondo as well, so the meditation is super powerful, and You sound like you now have this, like, crazy meditation like on steroids system with the six steps, because it sounds like you combined so many aspects, and again we touched on gratitude a little bit earlier, but maybe we can go into what this new book is about, with the six phases, because you know, I have an academy, and in certain of my courses I always get my students to try with this meditation practice, but, you know, with so many people you meet, they give you that common excuse. Lots. I tried.

29:44 I’m no good at it. You know, I’m this and I’m that, and people don’t usually go. A lot of times, they can’t grasp it, and I’m wondering, how do you usually get people to start that meditation journey, let alone go into the six steps? Well, the first thing I try to let people understand is that there are two types of meditation, okay. So let’s say, now you’re a martial artist, have you ever gone for a yoga class, and did you like it?

30:09 Yes, and yes I did. Okay, so you’ve tried yoga. You liked it. Is there any form of exercise that you do not like? Exercise, any form of physical exertion that you do not like?

30:20 There’s definitely some that I tend more to, but I’ve got some that you train less to. Yeah, although some I appreciate more. Like I showed you the Iron Man race I did at first. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to martial arts, but then I found those quite meditative, so on a two-hour run, you go deep.

30:36 So I don’t know if that answers your question, but well, you’re a sportsman, so you probably love all forms of moving your body, but most people will tend towards maybe jogging or yoga or martial arts or tennis. Not everyone is going to like every form of exercise equally, but let’s say you play tennis and you absolutely dislike it, or you do yoga and it’s just, it just isn’t for you. It doesn’t mean that all exercise isn’t for you. What people fail to understand is that there are thousands of modes of meditation, literally thousands of modes of meditation.

31:08 I mean, this art form has been around for probably 3,000 years, but most of these practices can be divided into two. There is hermetic meditation and then active meditation. Okay, so hermetic meditation is what you tried. TM. TM is a form of hermetic meditation, so it’s the style of meditation that goes back thousands of years, to ancient China, ancient India, and it is a practice where you sit still, you focus on a mantra, you may focus on your breathing, you clear your mind by repeating the mantra or focusing on your breath, and that’s good for certain people.

31:45 Now however, many people in the modern Western world cannot do that type of meditation. It turns out more than 50 percent of people who try hermetic meditation actually don’t go back to it, and 30% of people who try hermetic meditation fall asleep and think they’re meditating. And this is where active meditation comes in. Active meditation is meditation protocols such as the Silva method or the six phase meditation, which I developed. So the Silva method is an active meditation, because in the words of Jose Silva, the founder, he passed away in 1999.

32:21 It’s not about clearing your mind. It’s about turning problems into projects. Problems into projects. You have a skin problem, you turn it into a project to heal your skin. You want to get promoted at work, you turn it into a project to get that next raise or promotion, as I did.

32:37 You want to compete in a martial arts competition and win, you turn it into a project to become a champion, and Jose Silva thought these tools to bring out the solutions to these problems, tools such as tapping into your intuitive core so you kind of get guidance on what direction to take, tools such as a technique called the three scenes technique, where you visualize healing or you visualize yourself attaining a goal, and it was all based on the idea of being able to command your mind to get into this deep state of relaxation called the alpha, and then the Theta level. The alpha level is for visualizing, for reprogramming your mind, super useful for getting rid of bad habits. The data level is for intuitive guidance.

33:19 Now, active meditation is a lot easier for people to do, because you don’t clear your mind. In fact, your mind is constantly busy. It’s constantly working on solving a problem, so if there’s a nagging problem at work, you don’t have to clear your mind about it. You bring it up on your visual screen, which is what you see when you’re doing the Silva method, and you use certain techniques to turn that problem into a solution, then you see the solution and use certain techniques to make it so real, so powerful, that you believe that that solution is inevitable.

33:50 Now after teaching the sort of method for almost five years and getting the rights to it too, so now it’s officially on Mindvalley. I also developed my own meditation approach called the six phase meditation, and the six phase meditation is also a form of active meditation, but it’s slightly different from Silva, so now let’s look at active meditation, right? Active meditation there are, again, two types. Think of these as two different tools. So I’m a big proponent of active meditation as an entrepreneur with ADD.

34:20 I can’t clear my mind. I just can’t. My mind is always racing, so I need to apply my mind to fix things, to solve problems, to create. And I’m guessing that you and some of your users might be the same. Right now, within active meditation, there are two different approaches as well.

34:39 So imagine you have a house. Do you have a coffee machine in your home? Yeah, yeah. Okay, do you have an electric drill? I think there’s an electric drill somewhere.

34:49 You’re probably, you’re probably, hire someone to drill. I think there’s somewhere, or there’s one around. So I have a coffee machine. I have an electric drill. I use the electric drill for hanging up pictures but I’m not hanging up a picture every single morning, right?

34:59 I’m using the electric drill maybe once a month to hang up a picture or try to fix something, usually sloppily, but I use my coffee machine twice a day. Now it’s the same with active meditation. I use the six phase twice a day to put me in an incredible state of focus, of productivity, of happiness. The six phase meditation, it’s a state change meditation. You’re changing six particular states of beingness.

35:23 It’s like the coffee machine. The Silva method is like the electric drill. It’s like precision when you need to heal an injury, or you need to figure out the solution to an intractable problem, or you want to certainly get your mind to believe that a certain goal is possible. You use it as an electric drill. So these are two tools that I now teach, and you use them.

35:43 They’re both based on the principles of active meditation and active mind, at the alpha level of mind, focused on the problem, but you use them differently. One is daily, one is like a precision-guided missile. Okay, now six phases. What does it break down? And it doesn’t actually take that long, because each phase is quite short, right?

36:01 So the six phase is designed to be 15 minutes, 15 to 17 minutes. That’s what it usually takes. But I believe that in that 15 to 17 minutes you gain the same benefits as hours of regular meditation, because of the precision protocols that are in play. So the six phase meditation is based on rewiring your sense of being to optimize six different aspects of being human. Now these aspects look like this.

36:30 The first is compassion and kindness. We started this interview with me expressing, sharing a story of your kindness. Kindness is such an important thing, and if we were able to train kindness as a muscle, not only do we go forth and make the world better, but we feel better in the world. we see other human beings with trust, with honor, with love, and it makes life so much better so that’s the first one. It’s called the circle of compassion.

37:01 The second phase is super simple to understand. It’s a gratitude practice. Gratitude, according to science, is the human characteristic most associated with feelings of well-being, so gratitude is something you want to train in like a muscle. You can train it. The third is forgiveness.

37:17 In my book, I call this becoming unfuckwithable. Forgiveness means you forgive life, and you forgive yourself for anything traumatic or troublesome that happened in the past. You know, there’s a famous story about Nelson Mandela. I was just watching a movie about him on the plane right here, long walk home, when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, he knew that if he didn’t forgive his jailers, he would still be in a prison of his own mind, and so he invited his jailers to come in, break bread with him.

37:51 Forgiveness frees you, but not only that, forgiveness has a strange biological effect. It actually improves athletic ability. It helps lift you out of depression. It helps you sleep better. It heals back pain, and I can go on and on and on in the signs of forgiveness.

38:06 So the first six three phases of the six phase, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness. These three qualities are so important for putting you in the right state of mind. Overall, I call these three states the practice of bliscipline, the idea that the most important thing we can do on a daily basis is to be blissful discipline means that discipline means that you are disciplined about your bliss, bliscipline. Okay, so the first three phases are all about discipline, present state, emotions.

38:39 But now you go to the next three phases. The next three phases are the phases of creation, because in today’s world you don’t just want to be sitting in a meditation pillow being all blissful. We need to go out there. We need to create. We need to invent.

38:54 We need to be entrepreneurs. We need to help heal the world, and that’s what phases four, five, and six are about. Phase four is about seeing and visualizing your life three years out with vivid clarity, so it pulls you forward. Phase five is about commanding your perfect day, so your day unfolds in the right way, so that you’re moving towards your vision and phase six is really simple. It is a prayer to God, or whatever higher power you believe in, to bless you and your day, so that everything unfolds as it should be.

39:24 This stacked together is the six phase meditation, and it’s become really popular among athletes, among professional athletes. It’s been written about in Billboard magazine as a meditation protocol used by many R&B Stars. It’s been blowing up, and so this year I decided to write a book about it. Wow, and how do you time each phase, or do you just kind of go through it in your mind? You go through it in your mind.

39:48 Each phase is about two to three minutes. Okay, so the whole meditation, including the time it takes you to relax and then come out, it’s going to be about 15 to 17 minutes. Okay, how do you have to come up with new things to be grateful for, new things to forgive? or you just, can you repeat the old ones? I’m just curious, just on some details.

40:09 So those are two different aspects, right? So let’s first talk about compassion so with compassion, it’s always the same protocol, because we have the same people around us. We have our teammates. We have our family. You have your wonderful children.

40:24 I always start that phase with seeing the face of my daughter or my son, and you feel the love for them in your heart. This is a technique from the Hartman Institute, and the scientists at the Hartman Institute found that when we close our eyes and visualize the face of someone we love, it actually changes our heart resonance. You can measure heart resonance on your aura ring, but there is a real effect on your heart resonance just by seeing the face of someone you love.

40:50 Now, as you feel that love in your heart, you go through a simple Zen roshi practice called loving-kindness meditation, and you expand that love into wider and wider circles until the love encapsulates all of planet Earth. Now, that’s always the same, because we have the same people around us, right? But when you come to phase two, which is gratitude, it’s good to always pick different things. I like to focus on gratitude from the last 24 hours. You want to focus on different things, and you want to go deep into the feeling, like really, really, really feel that feeling, that feeling of gratitude.

41:25 And it can be something small. It can be the fact that your child hugged you and just said something kind about you that morning before he left for school, but you want to really feel that. It causes an instant elevation in your feelings of bliss. There was a study done. I believe it was UCLA or one of the universities of California, and they have two groups of people, a control group and a gratitude group.

41:49 The gratitude group had to write down something that we’re grateful for in a journal for 30 days in a row, and what they found is at the end of 30 days, the gratitude group, even though it took them one or two minutes to write these things down, there were 25% happier. But the funny thing is nine months out, they were still happier than the control group, even though some of them had no longer practiced gratitude. Gratitude seems to have a long-term effect on happiness and a dramatic effect on happiness: 25% happier without 25% more money or 25% more possessions, just from reflecting on what made you happy the previous day.

42:26 So that’s gratitude. It’s always changing. And then forgiveness, it depends on what you’re trying to forgive. If it’s something simple, you might fully forgive that act in one session, but if it’s something traumatic, someone who hurt you way back in the past, it could take as many as 30 or 60 days to truly forgive that person, but you work at it, chipping away at the negative thoughts, bit by bit by bit, until it completely goes away. That’s super powerful.

42:57 And do you ever, when you get grateful, do you ever get creative and think I’m grateful for that person that yelled at me because I got to practice my composure. You know, I’m grateful that I injured myself in training, so I can now be creative and find something else to do. Like, do you do things like that? So one of the teachers I learned a lot from is the MBA professor Srikumar Rao, right? Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man.

43:20 So he’s been a great mentor of mine. He used to teach at Columbia, London Business School, Kellogg, and his classes were really popular. He brings ancient wisdom into modern business practices, and Srikumar Rao. I was just interviewing him, and he introduced me to this concept called Ananda. Ananda is a Hindu concept that means absolute happiness, absolute bliss, and he was talking about people who can be completely poor, living in abject poverty, but are absolutely happy.

43:52 They are living in Ananda, and he was trying to dissect what was going on in their minds, and you hit, you, you, you touched it. Even when something is wrong, even in the presence of sickness, of poverty you can choose to be happy. Rao, if I interviewed him, shared the story of a rickshaw driver in India. Now, if you’re a rickshaw driver, I mean, you’re basically a human-powered vehicle. You’re transporting goods around the city.

44:22 You’re earning really bad pay, and this rickshaw driver he met didn’t have a home was sleeping in the rickshaw. He had sold his body to a hospital, so in India that the poor can sell their bodies, which means that when they die, they, their widow or whoever, they get a little bit of money, but the hospital gets to use their body as a cadaver for dissection. So that was how poor this man was. But Rao spoke about how elated and happy he was despite abject poverty.

44:53 He was living in Ananda, even with not enough to eat, even with the fact that he had to sell his body, even with sleeping curled up in his dirty rickshaw, he was able to see the joy in day-to-day life. It is a aspect of mind that is not easy, but people have got it there, and when you can practice constant gratitude and really get into the feeling, it is possible to get into that state of Ananda according to Rao. Yeah, there’s always someone out there who would be grateful for your problems, right?

45:26 It is, and it’s just a simple thing to say, but it’s so easy for us always to focus on our problems, because I guess is the opposite of gratitude. Is it true that you can’t be grateful and negative at the same time? Like, if you’re really in gratitude is it true that it’s like that will actually get you out of it? Yeah, right? This is why, this is why.

45:45 So, this, there are tons of scientific studies right now on the power of gratitude. It is actually a healing act when patients express gratitude, healing accelerates. Even if you have a diseased part of your body, if you express love for that part, in gratitude for that part, you help accelerate the healing of that part of your body. It’s fascinating when you express gratitude, and this is why science says that gratitude is the human characteristic with the highest correlation to overall feelings of well-being.

46:17 And yet, I mean, I know, look, in the last five or ten years it’s become something people are focusing more on, talking now more, but still there’s a large part of society that just is like, more gratitude I mean, gratitude, that’s just like a thing. It’s a nice thing to do, you know, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s one of the most important things you can do for your mental health, for your physical health, for anything. And yet we were never taught growing up that it could be such a pillar, right?

46:42 And And here’s the crazy thing. Okay, the impact of gratitude on elevating happiness, in many cases, in some studies, has proven to be better than taking medications such as Prozac. Yet we don’t hear about it. Why? Because the pharmaceutical lobby is massive.

47:00 The gratitude lobby not so big, but, but look at this statistic. Out of approximately 56 million people in England, 8.3 million people in England are on antidepressants. That’s roughly 14.8 percent of everyone in England is on antidepressants right now, right? Because of how tough the past couple of years has been. Now, I’m not saying don’t go on antidepressants.

47:25 That is between you and your doctor, but you can also elevate levels of happiness and pull yourself out of that with the practice of gratitude. And some studies, you can Google this, some studies are showing that gratitude is a lot more effective than certain medications. Yeah, yeah. I started doing a gratitude journal about five, six years ago, and it’s a powerful thing. When I put my boys to bed at night and we do our exercises, and then we read a story, and then as they’re going drifting off to sleep, I just start talking about all the things that we’re grateful for.

47:55 Grateful to live in a city that’s safe, okay? For our teachers, we’re grateful for the kind of drift off to bed that is so beautiful with your kids, trying to stick these little ideas is in there, and then they’re starting to just get curious and have questions, and again I’m still learning these processes, but, and I met your boys as I was coming in, and they are so lit up. They are so positive that you can feel that positive energy in your children. So kudos to you there.

48:19 They’re amazing, man. They’re really just incredible, and they’re absorbing everything constantly. So they’re going to watch all of my stuff, at least someday, I guess. So circle of love and compassion, happiness and gratitude, peace to forgiveness, such an important part. I mean, I just walked you through our studio, and I showed you this movie I made called Reconnect, where I went and did Ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica, but a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s the integration process that can be very hard, and it took us 18 months to make the movie, because I had to come back and then try to integrate what I was trying to figure out, and I ended up going back to San Diego and interviewing both my mom and dad and asking them about their divorce when I was seven, and it was a really intense process.

48:57 And wow, in that way I kind of learned not only to forgive Vision, but also to really understand what was going on. A lot of times our traumas are built because we thought something was wrong done to us, but I actually met my mom and dad, two individuals that were going through a challenging time in their own lives, and they were making the best decision for them. And funny enough, when I interviewed them, I realized that if they hadn’t made those decisions, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

49:20 And so I walked away from that with the forgiveness, and now I don’t look at that as something bad that happened. I look at something empowering that happens. That’s beautiful. That is such a beautiful story, and it now no longer hangs me up. And so I try to think about this, but I like this idea of chipping away at that forgiveness, because some people will need 30, 60, 90 days to try to move things, but it’s a great way to kind of to get people to start on that, and so then it’s vision for the future, mastering your day, and then the blessing.

49:52 Exactly. And so the vision of the future is you just projecting and believing and knowing that’s going to happen. Mastering the day is really knowing everything you’re going to do in that day. Well, vision for the future is Bill Gates said, right? We tend, well, it’s often attributed to Bill Gates, but nobody knows who exactly said this phrase, but it is, but someone once said we overestimate what we can do in one year, and we underestimate what we can do in three.

50:20 So I like to take three years as that marker, however you think your life is going to be in three years. Odds are you’re underestimating yourself, and so stretch whatever you think that vision is, and pick an aspect of that vision, and it could be the house you want to live in. It could be the type of relationship you want to have. It could be your kids three years older than they are now, and the connection you have with them. It could be the peak body that you want to be in.

50:48 It could be the success of your show. Pick an aspect of it, and for around three or four minutes, just visualize what would my project, my company, what would my love life look like three years from now? What would my body look like three years from now? And as you do that, you see it on a giant mental screen. So Jose Silva, who pioneered creative visualization in the 1970s, he said you want to imagine there’s a giant television screen in front of you.

51:16 It should be at least six feet out, and it should be about 20 degrees above the line of horizon. Now, why 20 degrees? Studies show that if you raise your eyeballs 20 degrees, you activate alpha waves. Okay, so this seems to work better when we’re at the alpha level of mind. It’s a brainwave frequency that anyone can measure.

51:35 There are many devices right now, such as the Muse headband, that can measure if you’re on the alpha level. So, but, but you know, some people worry if they’re there. Don’t worry, as long as you feel relaxed you’re at alpha. So you see the giant television screen, and on it you project a vivid vision of that final outcome, and you want to make sure that it’s in full color. You want to make sure that all your senses are being activated.

52:00 You’re not just seeing that dream office or that dream love life. You’re feeling that person holding your hand as you walk through the park. You’re feeling kissing that woman on the cheek. You are feeling yourself running your fingers through her hair. You are sensing the smell of her perfume, the touch of her skin.

52:21 You’re bringing in all the senses. You’re hearing the sounds of the birds chirping as you walk through that park. You’re feeling the grass under your feet, or the wind blowing on your hair as you kiss her. You might taste her lips. Notice all five senses brought in, and the more vivid you get, the more you start to believe it’s possible.

52:41 Now, some people say you’re manifesting, maybe we’re not talking about Law of Attraction here, but the fact is when your brain starts believing that that’s possible, your subconscious starts expecting it, and when your subconscious starts expecting it, your faith in yourself goes up. And so the next time you are with your partner, you’re going to be a little bit more confident. You’re gonna remember that vision, and you’re going to start acting these things out.

53:07 If you visualize your company being successful, that when you get to work on that day, you’re going to start acting those things out. It’s as if you have programmed your brain, like a hypnotist, to believe a new possibility. But remember, our beliefs become our reality. Remember the story I shared of Dr. J.B. Moseley, who showed that if a patient believes they’ve been cured of arthritis of the knee, the arthritis disappears.

53:31 The same thing happens if you believe you’re going to be successful, you’re also becoming successful. Go, go up. If you believe you’re going to find the love of your life, you are more confident when you go out on a date. You are more charismatic. If you believe that you’re going to have a great relationship with your child, you will be taking better actions when you connect with your child.

53:52 So it’s all about the power of belief and faith, right? And that’s, that’s stage four, and that also stops you from the self-sabotaging, which is kind of what a lot, probably everybody, does it on the subconscious level without ever knowing about it, right? So it’s one thing to reinforce the positive, but also just to stop the probably maybe even hundreds of self-sabotaging acts we do every single day without even knowing it. The thoughts in our brain, oh, you can’t do that, that kind of thing.

54:18 So all that counteracts it and pushes you towards that future. Absolutely. But here’s a really interesting thing. So studies are beginning to show that you can apply the same technique for two really interesting tools. One tool is rewiring bad habits, and the other tool is healing.

54:34 So Dr. O. Carl Simonton did a study on the Silva method. He was a cancer research pioneer, and in the study they analyzed, they took close to two to three hundred, I believe the number was 259 patients who were unfortunately going through terminal cancer and had been given 12.4 months to live, and these patients had to apply this technique, visualizing the a cancer disappearing. Now, in that study they found that roughly 13 patients went through full remission.

55:10 That means the cancer disappeared. Now, this is 13 out of around 250, right? So it’s not that many, but it’s still pretty significant. 17, so their cancers start to diminish, started going into remission and the overall survival time for this entire pool of patients went from 12.4 months to 24 months. The survival time doubled.

55:30 Now, that everyone healed cancer, no, but there was enough that saw the cancer disappear. The overall survival time doubled, enough evidence to show that even in diseases like cancer there is a mental aspect to it, and creative visualization can, in some cases, with the help of your doctor and with modern medicine, help accelerate healing. You mentioned Law of Attraction. Where do you stand on this, Law of Attraction versus change your subconscious and everything will flow?

56:02 So I don’t understand how it works and I don’t believe I need to understand how it works. Most of us can’t understand how an iPhone works, we still get to use it. I don’t know if we’re changing our subconscious beliefs and we are making these beliefs manifest, or if we are tapped into an intelligent universe, and that universe is redesigning itself for us, and honestly, Brian, I don’t care. All I know is when I visualize future outcomes, they tend to happen.

56:33 It’s as if you are reprogramming something inside you. But let’s talk about habit control. Okay, so Jose Silva, and I just want to acknowledge here, full transparency, I now teach the Silva method. After Jose Silva passed away, his family asked me to take over his legacy, and the new Silva Ultramind program. I’m now the face of it, right?

56:55 Jose Silva invented a technique to rewire bad habits, and if you like, I’d like to teach it to your audience here in about three minutes. Okay, so in your meditative level of mind, you want to see that giant television screen in front of you. But this is what you’re going to do on the screen directly in front of you. You’re going to see your current bad habit. And so I remember one particular student.

57:17 He was addicted to Coke. Now, I’m not talking about cocaine. I’m talking about Coca-Cola. This guy had to drink two liters of Coca-Cola every single day just to function. Coke, because of its sugar, because of the caffeine, can be highly addictive, right?

57:30 So he needed two liters of Coca-Cola every single day just to get work done. But of course, when you’re putting that much sugar into your body, gonna really mess up your biology. So he was putting on weight. He was losing energy. He couldn’t focus, and his wife was starting to get pretty disgusted with him, so he knew he needed to change.

57:50 So the first screen he saw himself and you want to exaggerate. So you want to really exaggerate. He knew having to drink two liters of Coke is bad, but he exaggerated. He would see himself like chugging Coke, Coke dripping all over his body, exaggerating it making it ridiculously obscene. Now what you do is you move the screen 15 degrees to the left.

58:12 Now, why are you doing that in your subconscious mind? According to Silva, the subconscious thinks of the left, the future, as being on your left, so 15 degrees to the left means near future. And now, on this, on the video, the TV screen, he seems, sees himself taking some deliberate action to reduce his Coke consumption, so maybe now he’s replacing one bottle with water or sparkling water. So he’s still drinking one liter of Coke, but the other liter, he’s maybe having sparkling water.

58:40 And then you move the screen another 15 degrees to the left, now future, and you are seeing the end result. The end result here is that he’s fit. He’s only drinking sparkling water. He is offered a Coke in a restaurant, and he’s disgusted by it. Now, in two weeks this guy in Texas completely eradicated his Coke habit.

59:02 But here’s the trick: every time, every day, as you see progress, you take into account that progress in the first scene. So when he first started out, he was seeing himself chugging two liters of Coke, but by day eight, he’s seeing himself chugging one liter. By day 10, half a liter. By day 12, he’s just having one glass of Coke, but it’s still disgusting. But by day 14, it’s completely replaced with water.

59:29 He’s updating the visual. Now, somehow this seems to have a hypnotic effect on your brain. You can literally train your brain to overcome bad habits, overcome addictions. Now, it’s not going to work for everyone. You must have a susceptible mind, right?

59:45 Like, some people are easily hypnotizable. If you’re easily hypnotizable, you might be able to do it in one week. If you’re not easily hypnotizable, it might take you a month, two months, three months, depending on how severe the addiction is, but it’s a very, very effective tool to rewire bad habits. You can even use it to train yourself to go to the gym more often, to train yourself to eat healthy, to implant bad, good habits into your day-to-day routine.

1:00:10 That’s what you do in phase four. Okay, powerful. And I like what you said about Law of Attraction versus you know, whatever you’re doing with changing your subconscious. I’m an engineer by training, and if it’s working, then it’s working. Right now, if you go, I do a test, and if it gets results, I’m not here to question it, and meditation changed my life in the first early years of London Real.

1:00:32 One year in, two years in, three years in, I was literally like, what am I doing here? I mean, this was never a business. There wasn’t any revenue, and people are like, you’re out of your mind. I didn’t really have any fans, and then, but I, every year my life got better. I was doing something positive.

1:00:45 I was meeting people. I was connecting. I was putting their messages out there, and so as an engineer, I said, I’ve never, I’m much happier. A year now, we’re going to do this one more year. I used to look myself in the mirror every new year, so be like, what are you doing?

1:00:56 One more year. And so same with these practices. When I start doing them, I see the results, and I then, again, I don’t need to know why. I just know they’re working. So I’m with you, I’m with you.

1:01:06 We don’t need to know about all these things. We just know if it’s working, then keep doing it, right? Find ways to magnify it. Phase five, mastering your day. Talk about this, okay, so it’s funny you brought up Law of Attraction, because phase five actually comes from the author of the book Law of Attraction, the woman who coined that phrase.

1:01:22 Okay, and that woman is Esther Hicks. She wrote a beautiful series of books which she says are channeled works. In other words, she was communicating with a higher intelligence and writing down this wisdom, so the books are fascinating, and it was the Law of Attraction book that inspired that famous movie The Secret. Yeah. Now, in the book she suggests a beautiful technique called segment intending.

1:01:44 Now, again, you don’t have to believe in the Law of Attraction. This technique works no matter whether you believe it’s magic or whether it’s just a brain-conditioning exercise. Now, segment intending is what we do in phase five. We call it commanding your day, and it’s basically just that. If you’re meditating in the morning, if you’re doing the six phase in the morning, you then visualize your day unfolding segment by segment.

1:02:08 So you might see your morning segment: getting the kids ready for school, making them breakfast, getting them onto the school bus, and you see that unfolding in the most amazing way. You’re fully connected with your children. There, there is no stress. There’s no, no rush. You give them a beautiful hug.

1:02:26 Then you might see the next segment. Maybe you meditate, maybe you go to the gym. The segment after that, commuting to work. No traffic, great. A great podcast on the radio.

1:02:35 The segment after that, your morning huddle at work. The segment after that, an amazing lunch with a colleague in a beautiful restaurant, great, you know, great food, great ambiance, everything going well, inspiring conversation, and you go all the way segment by segment by segment by segment by segment until you come to nighttime, and then you see yourself going to bed in the most amazing, perfect way, where you’re about to just completely knock off in deep sleep. Now segment intending, it turns out, is a really powerful protocol.

1:03:06 Now, Esther Hicks in her book, she says if you’re normally a negative person, think of it as a little game play the game, it’s called, wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice, as if my commute today was just smooth? Wouldn’t it be nice if my boss appreciated me at the 3pm meeting? Wouldn’t it be nice if lunch at that restaurant was inspiring and I really connected with my colleague? Wouldn’t it be nice if when I came home from work, my spouse was in a super loving mode, and we just had the most romantic dinner together.

1:03:36 It turns out that when we start expecting good things to happen, good things happen. Now, is that the Law of Attraction maybe, but it could also be the brain’s reticular activating system. So in our brains, write it back over here, that’s this flashy Parton. It’s called the RAS, right? And this is the goal-seeking mechanism of the brain.

1:03:53 It’s what allowed us to hunt bison or find the right berries to eat before the dawn of civilization. You’re giving that brain of yours a command on what to notice. So let’s say you do go to the restaurant with your colleague, and the food is bad. You’re less likely to focus on the food and more likely to focus on the beautiful ambiance, the connection with your colleague, the inspiring conversation, because you told your brain to focus on that. Your brain will focus on what you tell it to focus on.

1:04:24 Psychologists when they talk about this phenomenon, they always give the same example: you buy a white Volkswagen, and you’re driving down the street, all of a sudden you will notice every other white Volkswagen, because your brain has a target on what to focus on. So you’re literally commanding your brain on what to focus on that day, and you’re telling your brain to focus on positive things. So in a way, you are in a form of self-delusion, but it’s a good kind of self-delusion, because when you go to bed at night, you’re going to have less negative thoughts and more appreciation for how beautiful your day went.

1:04:59 I’m loving this stuff. Phase six, the blessing. You said God or whatever higher power is how you finish this off. How does that work? So Brian, I, I grew up in a religious society, and at a certain point in my life I started to really, really dislike religion.

1:05:15 When I was 19, I told my dad I’m giving up being a Hindu, and as I got older, I began to believe in God again, and today I firmly believe in God. I think we call it different names: higher intelligence, the universe, Carl Jung’s morphogenetic field. Doesn’t matter what you call it. I believe that there is a higher intelligence around us. Phase six is about acknowledging that.

1:05:39 Now, if you’re an atheist, that’s fine. What you’re acknowledging in phase six is your own inner strength, the life force, as Bruce Lee called it, that flows and ends through you. In physics, you’re essentially saying, look, I have given compassion and kindness to the world. I’ve expressed gratitude for all the bounties of the universe. I’ve forgiven my enemies and bad mistakes I made.

1:06:03 I’ve given a vision of how I want my life to unfold. I’ve asked for today to be a blessing. Now, would you bless me and support me? That’s it, and that’s what you do, and you gift, you asked for this blessing from whatever higher power you believe in. It could be Jesus.

1:06:19 It could be, it could be Brahma, it could be Shiva. It doesn’t matter, whatever higher power you believe in, and then I like to give a little fist bump to God, because at the age of COVID you can’t be too careful, and that’s how I wrap up the sixth phase. That when I’m done, I just open my eyes and I come out of it. Wow, it’s beautiful. I want to just ask you a little bit about religion there.

1:06:39 I mean, a lot of young people did what you did, you know, would grow up with religion, and we kind of reject it. We run the other way, and we don’t think it’s for us, we don’t get it, and then sometimes later come back to it, but we’ve raised a couple generations now that maybe didn’t embrace it as a given, right? Do you think those same people are looking for answers that oftentimes would have been provided in that religion, and therefore they’re looking to other sources, including Mindvalley, including what you’re looking at here, whereas they might have found that in the past in some of these more organized religions.

1:07:12 I’m not saying that would have been the right thing to do, but do you think that’s what’s happening in the world to a certain extent? Well, there is a movement. There is a movement from religion to spiritual but not religious, and this is happening across the Western world. Not only the Western world, it’s happening in India more and more young Hindus I meet tell me that they eat beef and they may pray to Hindu gods, but they also practice modern Western spiritual practices, and people in the West practice Indian spiritual practices.

1:07:43 We’re coming into a world where there’s a unification of our spirituality. You go to a place like Dubai, which is a Muslim country, and you will see that there’s this huge eruption of meditation and yoga, so on and so. I think as a species we’re moving towards a humanistic view of spirituality, and a lot of the beauties of organized religion, whether it’s Islam or Christianity, are coming to the surface. But the one thing that’s changing is the dogma is slipping, and this is what people have to understand.

1:08:18 Religion equals spirituality plus dogma. If you take away the dogma, religion and spirituality are the same. Now, what is the dogma? The dogma are the were the political constructs of religion, the political constructs that said that, you know, during medieval times, if you did something wrong, you had to go and confess to your priest, and basically give a bribe to God to have your sins washed off. You, the dogma would be what the horrendous Iranian regime is doing to women by forcing them to dress in a certain way and taking away their freedom.

1:08:54 When you pull away that dogma, you start to see that all religions have so much beauty and spiritual truth. And what’s happening today’s world is because we are all so deeply connected as cultures and societies. We’re able to see how other cultures and societies are. We’re able to pull the best parts of different spiritual practices and integrate them. When you do the six phase meditation, you are actually integrating a ton of different spiritual beliefs.

1:09:20 Just phase one, you’re bringing in Zen roshi Buddhism, but you’re also bringing in principles from Christianity, love thy neighbor, all of that is being integrated into one belief. It’s so important. You know, I think when we threw out religion, we threw the baby out with the bathwater, and the problem is, is that we ran away from it, but we ran away from what I believe is technology. I mean, a religion is a technology that’s developed over thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands if you take it back to Pagan times, that was then, you know, called a religion afterwards, and look at what’s in there.

1:09:54 I had a guest in here named Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who lives in London, and he wrote a book called Science and Spiritual Practice. I love that man. Oh yeah, okay, he’s a really good friend. He lives down the right book, yeah, he came to my Thanksgiving dinner here in London, and he loved it because it was a spiritual practice. It was coming together to give thanks, and he does pilgrimages.

1:10:12 I’ve been on a pilgrimage with him, and you know, looks, he fasts, and he looks at all these spiritual practices that we threw out with the bathwater, that we have a need. Humans have a need for that to come together, to sing, to give alms to the poor, to fast, to have all these things that make the world make sense to us and give us the feelings inside, and yet we’ve rejected with religion, and now I think people are drawn to things like you’re describing here. You’re six phase, because you’re pulling almost the best of the best in, right?

1:10:43 You don’t have to be like, well, this religion, the Hindu, and you get the bag dogmas, but we know we have a need for these things, and now you see people fasting and breathing and cold water therapy, and we’re pulling things, beautiful to see there, and those are all from some religious practices. Exactly. By the way, Rupert Sheldrake, his books, on, particularly on the Gaia hypothesis, was so meaningful to me. My daughter’s middle name is Gaia. Oh wow, after, after Rupert Sheldrake’s theory.

1:11:08 Oh, that’s fantastic. He lives down the street from, if you ever see him, tell him, tell him that I will. I will. He’s amazing. He first came on the show eight, nine years ago, and he’s been on many, many times, and I a quick Rupert story.

1:11:19 He does these pilgrimages where he’ll do these long walks to certain sites, like religious sites, and because this is what we used to do, and there’s something about gathering and walking distances and going places, and I went with my daughter one morning. She was like 14 or 15 and we started at a church right near the Tower of London, and we went, and I’m not really religious, but I was like, I’m gonna go, and we went to 14 different churches, and we ended up with Westminster Abbey at the very end, and I did this with my daughter, and we just went to all these historic, strange churches that would build one for the Air Force lieutenants, and one for this, and one for this, and then we got to the end, and it was just this incredible day of pilgrimage.

1:11:59 And then there was Rupert Sheldrake talking about the history of each one of these things, and amazing, it was amazing. Amazing experience. Yeah, and I felt this connection, and I was like, oh, that’s why they used to do pilgrimages back in the day, for some type of connection and meaning, history. There’s a little bit of a giving thanks, for sure, and gratitude in that process. I’ve been working with a lot of shamans with a lot of spiritual teachers, and I can tell you, like, it says real to me now, as this chair, the ability to sense energy, intuitive insights, the ability to connect with another person across time and space, everything from plant medicine to Tantra, all of these things are so worth studying, and that the deeper you go into it, the better life becomes, the better you start to understand that so much of what we are trained to believe about the world is an artificial construct of our mind.

1:12:52 So my other book is The Buddha and the Badass. Basically, it looks at that it looks at spirituality applied to business, because I believe that’s going to be the next phase, taking this deep spirituality and applying it as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, as a C-level executive, to become a better leader, but also to get more done in less time. This is my fascination right now. Wow, that’s powerful, and you have never been afraid to dive into these topics, and you know you’re not being criticized for them.

1:13:22 I can imagine, and I wanted to kind of acknowledge you for that, because you know you do these incredible events called AFest, where you take people to different places around the world, and they all have themes, and then oftentimes I think you create sometimes these open universities that happen in the cities afterwards. I know you did that in Barcelona, maybe in Thailand, maybe you can talk about that, but you know, you did one on psychedelics years ago, and you know, a lot of CEOs of big media companies and education platforms would have thought, let’s just pass on that, because we’ll alienate people. Right, well, they say that publicly but not privately, right?

1:13:54 You know, one one of my favorite American CEOs, John Butcher, he built Precious Moments, which is one of the biggest, like, art licensing brands in the world. He said, when I was interviewing him, any Silicon Valley CEO who was not using plant medicine today is a competitive disadvantage, and I can tell you I agree. So let me make a confession right here. I use plant medicine in safe ways to design UX, to come up with new business ideas, even to write chapters of my book.

1:14:28 I start every year with a tiny dosage of a certain plant medicine to go deep into my soul, communicate with God, and I literally hear her talking to me, and I write down what I meant to focus on for that year. For example, last year, in 2022, I was in a tiny dose of plant medicine. I was with a shaman. What are we talking here? Are we talking okay, can I share that on the show?

1:14:58 Yeah, of course. Okay, so like one gram, two grams, so I like to do, I like to do what is it called, a mini dose? Okay, which is between 0.5 to 1 gram. Okay, right? So it’s a very light dose.

1:15:08 I take it in the form of chocolate. You can literally drive a car if you want it, but you must do it with the right sitter. Okay, so I like to do it with a trained shaman. So I was with a trained shaman, and I wanted to have a conversation with the universe. They asked the universe a simple question: how do I grow the revenues of my company make more money?

1:15:28 And I know it sounds like a bad question, and it was, because the universe came back to me and the universe said, and I quote, nope, not going to give you that. And I’m like, why? And the universe goes, nope, your mission this year, in 2022, will be to grow your compassion. So I’m like, okay, tell me how to grow my compassion, and over the next two hours I get seven commands from the universe. Now these commands were super specific.

1:15:55 One command was, you must speak to 300 customers and understand exactly what they like and don’t like about your product. So I started communicating with customers on Instagram. Another command was a little bit more challenging: you must sign the Founders Pledge. Now let me tell you what the Founders Pledge is. It is a pledge that founders sign, and it’s an actual pledge that when your company goes public, you’re going to commit to taking a certain amount of your money, what you gain, and giving it to charity.

1:16:24 And so I signed the Founders Pledge in 2022. Right, and the commands were super, super specific. I had to work with my children, love my children, make a tiny modification to how I am with my kids, all good things, but I was shocked at how clear the commands were and how specific they were. It was as if a real human being was whispering in my ear. Now, will everyone experience this?

1:16:52 We can’t say. Could it be a statement of my own imagination? Maybe, but I can tell you it was a lot clearer than that b******t idea of simply make more money. Yeah, that’s powerful. When I had my Ayahuasca ceremony that’s chronicled in that movie Reconnect, I mean, for me, when I have an Ayahuasca ceremony, a strong one, I literally got 10 commandments from her.

1:17:16 I mean, and it was like, this is what you need to do. Number one, number two, number three, number four. And at the, towards the end of my ceremony, as I’m phasing out, she’s like, let’s review those one more time. Number one. I literally, and I went and wrote that.

1:17:28 I mean, that’s crazy, and I hadn’t actually touched the medicine. At least I started this show by talking about doing Ayahuasca ceremonies. Episode eight, we went a before-and-after show, back when everyone said you can’t put this on YouTube. This is like 2011. And so we had a history, but I haven’t been in the touch of medicine in six, seven years.

1:17:46 I’d done some psilocybin here and there, but the Ayahuasca, really, vision gave me these clear, clear, clear messages and then I had to come back and execute, which was hard, and they say you don’t get what you want, you get what you need. So you went in and said, how can I increase my revenues? Which is actually an okay question to ask. Can you ask any question you want, and then you’ll get what you need, what you need, right? And what you need might be painful.

1:18:10 Now I want to give a caveat here. Okay, so there’s a book called Altered Traits by Daniel Goldman, Dr. Daniel Goldman, and he says that there are four ways to access altered states of mind, so I don’t want anyone thinking that we’re only advocating for plant medicine. Plant medicine is actually the riskiest, the most expensive, the puckiest, right? But there are three additional ways we can do it, and the three additional ways are a lot cheaper. So one is breath work.

1:18:37 So a study just came out showing that breath work is even more effective than meditation. The breath work modality I do is, so my breath work, I have no affiliation with Soma, but so my breath work by the rajnik, he’s based in Ibiza, that’s really cool because they infuse incredible music with it. The second one is meditation. Meditation, Dr. Daniel Goldman says, is the best, and that’s essentially what we’re doing with the Silva method with the six phase meditation.

1:19:05 And then the fourth one is neurotraining, where I do my neurotraining is 40 Years of Zen by Dave Asbury. Again, no affiliation, but that’s where I do it. But neural training is really expensive, so I did forgiveness protocol training at 40 Years of Zen. It cost around 15 grand. It takes five days, and it is intense work.

1:19:24 Intense work, it’s expensive, but what happens is that with that level of biofeedback, with that really expensive machinery, they rewire your brain to develop the brainwave patterns of monks who have spent 20 to 40 years in meditation. So there are four different methods, and you know, I, they are cheaper ways of neural training, but I just want people to know that you don’t necessarily have to do plant medicine. And if you do decide to do that, make sure, please make sure that you’re doing it with a well-trained shaman, because I did do it once with a friend who had just gotten trained, and it was stupid of me, because I had an incredible experience, but one week later I sank into the worst depression of my life, and I became nearly suicidal, and I couldn’t understand what the heck happened to my mind.

1:20:15 The mistake I made was that I was doing it with a friend who had only just been trained, and I shouldn’t have done that. Always choose the right shaman. So when that happened, I had to go to a hypnotherapist who got me out of that right instantly. But don’t risk it. Always have the right shaman, the right person with you there.

1:20:36 There’s a protocol in plant medicine that’s used for therapy called the DISSI protocol. D-I-S-S-I. D stands for dosage. You must know the dosage. I stands for intention.

1:20:49 What are you looking to get out of it? S is setting. What’s the space you’re doing it in? The other S is sitter. Who are you doing it with?

1:20:57 Setting and sitter, you cannot overlook. You must know someone who knows how to create a protective space and who knows what the heck they’re doing. And then the final I in DISSI is integration. This is when you come out and you integrate. So it’s a really powerful, like, MAPS therapy, which is MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, psilocybin used as an assisted therapy, are all really powerful, but you got to be really, really, really careful, and I cannot stress this enough.

1:21:25 Yeah, amen to that. I mean, gone are the days of dropping mushrooms in Amsterdam. I mean, it’s just not, you’re not, please don’t do that. Things I had done that, and so then when Ayahuasca came up, I had all these bad experiences, because I don’t, in, yeah, no set, no setting, no, none of these other ideas, and so I got something from it, but I was also terrified at it. So I agree, it’s like, know your dosage, your set, setting, the disease is a perfect thing to do, right?

1:21:50 And so don’t go about this the wrong way. But if you do, it can be an incredible tool, right? And I would say if you’re being called to it, you should go explore it, and that’s the thing about it. Exactly, it’ll find you usually, but know the alternatives, right? Yeah, and the best alternative for the impact that you get from plant medicine today is breath work, right?

1:22:11 Breath work is crazy powerful. Meditation is intentional. Breath work you don’t know what’s going to happen when you go into an altered state with breath work. You get some of the same results as being on psilocybin. In fact, Cambridge University is doing a study on Soma breath work right now, and they’re seeing that it’s beginning to produce some of the similar chemicals in the brain as plant medicine, but in a much safer way.

1:22:31 You do, like, it’s like a 20, 30 minute session. These are quite long, about an hour, right? Okay, so all right, yeah, I did a lot of breath work at Burning Man this past, this past Burning Man, and I can tell you the stuff I experience just from breath work, no artificial substances, was incredibly powerful. I remember the first time I heard that 10 years ago, after Ayahuasca ceremony, I thought people were crazy, right? But now that I’ve done some of it, I haven’t gone that deep.

1:22:54 I can now see what’s going on there, and it’s pretty powerful that it’s right there. Yeah, we now make breath work part of every Mindvalley event because it’s that powerful. Okay, and long sessions, one hour long sessions, yeah, okay, that’s where you can really go deep. Yeah, people have incredible breaks. I’ve seen things in her, and it’s legal.

1:23:11 It’s legal everywhere in the world, unlike some of the other things we’re talking about. Yeah, yeah, so those are the four modalities we’re looking at, all of them. The 40 Years of Zen worked out really good for you. I remember I think I heard you tell a story one time that you needed to forgive. I think it was a business partner of yours, it was an employee, a key employee who I later discovered I placed a lot of trust in, but had been stealing from the company, right?

1:23:33 Remember you told me that. Yeah, and so 40 Years has done, really worked. 40, really helped me forgive that particular situation, and forgive myself. Yeah, because look, I’ve f***ed up for 10 years building up my company. I made so many stupid mistakes, right?

1:23:50 I almost lost my company three times to bankruptcy, to just dumb mistakes. I had to forgive myself, and this is something that people need to remember about forgiveness. Very often you’re not forgiving another person, you’re forgiving a younger version of yourself that f***ed up. Yeah, so true. You know, there’s always that old saying that when we get angry in life, a lot of times we directed at someone else, but most of that we’re directing at ourselves, right?

1:24:14 Because we made the mistake exactly of this and this and that, so a lot of that was for. It is the ultimate act of healing, right? You mentioned Mindvalley. What’s the last few years been like for Mindvalley? What do the next three years look like for Mindvalley?

1:24:27 What’s it been like to run this cutting edge company with so many random things happening, to go through lockdown, when you had a lot of events? You know, what’s it been like? Well, I think they have two things which I’m trying to do as I build Mindvalley. So my value already at this point is probably the world’s biggest platform for mind, body, and spirit. The biggest platform in the world.

1:24:48 And I look back at how it’s grown, and I’m in awe, but I think there are two things that make it happen. The first thing is I never sought to be a guru. Yes, I teach on Mindvalley, but as of today there are 65 other teachers on Mindvalley, including Tal Ben-Shahar, who’s the number one professor at Harvard University, Maye Musk, who’s Elon’s mother, right? So many other teachers. You don’t have to like my teachings.

1:25:15 They teach us on fitness, teachers on leadership, teach features on happiness, teachers on entrepreneurship. It’s a very diverse platform, so there is no, we are extremely against guru ship. I firmly believe you should never have one guru. You need to be in the center, and you need to look at all of the other teachers, and then you validate them, and you should be, you should be free to jump from one to one. So I’m not even the only meditation teacher on Mindvalley.

1:25:42 Satguru is online Bali. Maybe you like his technique. Smoke Emily Fletcher, who teaches at Harvard and at Google, is on Mindvalley. Maybe you like her techniques more, and that’s okay. And the second thing that I really pay attention to is, will this truly transform people?

1:25:56 Right, so transformation is the key thing on our website. We are approaching 18 000 case studies of lives transformed, and about one percent of our customers will submit a case study, so it’s about 10 it’s about 100 times that in terms of actual lives transformed. But I care about when you go through this modality, will it give you a really powerful transformation in as little time as possible, because all of us are busy. So I’m not interested in, like, one-hour-long meditation practices.

1:26:26 We want to look at the science, what will create the biggest effect in the tiniest amount of time, and that’s my obsession, and that’s really what my value is built on. And how, what are the challenges for the next few years? And how was it, the last few years, was it challenging? It is locked down hard. Well, since COVID we’ve more than doubled.

1:26:44 Okay, right? We’ve more than doubled, and we’re staying there. And I think big reason is word of mouth. People go through a transformation. It physically changes them.

1:26:54 Their friends go up to them and like, how did you lose all of that weight? How did you transform your body? And then their friends want to join. If you look at the old videos of me on London Real and me today, you’ll see my physique has changed. That’s because between my last London Real appearance and today, I’ve gone from maybe 22 body fat to around 13 body fat, literally, and I’ve reversed aging based on, like, you know, tests that thank you.

1:27:21 It’s because I’m obsessed with transformation. Look, Brian, like, the inescapable truth is that I’m dying. You’re dying. We’re all dying, and I want to extend my life as long as possible, and so a big part of transformation for me is longevity. I want to live to see my great grandkids, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about this field.

1:27:43 Yeah, and then going forward, you want to continue expanding Mindvalley. I want to. I think we need to have big goals for ourselves, and my goal my personal goal is we have 18,000 case studies right now. I want to be able to get to a million case studies before I die. A lot of, a lot of amazing stories.

1:28:02 And to get to a million case studies, you got to touch about, you know, 100 million lives. Okay, so that’s the plan. Yeah, all right. And so keep building, keep expanding, keep bringing in other specialists, keep doing your live events, all that is the future of Mindvalley. Right, you recently consciously uncoupled with your wife and business partner.

1:28:21 Well, it was four years ago, right? Was it four years ago? Wow, I’m always late, but watching your stuff, and you had a party and celebrated it, and I was just like fascinated by the way you handled that, right, in a very Mindvalley way. How was that experience? I think it was a beautiful experience.

1:28:34 I’m still very close to my ex-wife. We raise our kids together. And she’s the most incredible woman and the most incredible mom. When I started Mindvalley and I had to leave New York and move to Malaysia, she gave up her career in Estonia, and she moved to Malaysia with me. So after we consciously uncoupled, I told her, look, you pick where you want to be.

1:28:53 I will move, right? And so I moved to Estonia. It’s a small country. Most of my work is in London, and LA, and Dubai, and those are probably better for my career, but I’m a man who puts my kids first, and so she moved. She, the children I’m usually with her, so she moved to Estonia.

1:29:11 It’s a great place for our children, and therefore I decided to, you know, my career can wait, but I decided to move to Estonia so I can spend the time I have right now with my kids. With them, my son’s gonna head out to college in two and a half years. My daughter’s gonna head to high school in two and a half years. We’re going to move to London at that point, but for now my kids come first, and that’s why I’m in Estonia. Wow, fantastic.

1:29:33 So London soon. Yeah, all that stuff. You mentioned Dubai. Tell me what it’s like going to that city. What do you think of it?

1:29:38 I was there for the first time three months ago, and I was really blown away. I think, by, is the city of the future. If I had to bet on one city, it’s Dubai. I’m in awe with how that city is developing, how the government thinks, how, and the level of progress. People come to me and they’re like, you can’t be talking about Dubai like that.

1:29:58 I was there, and it was this and this and this, and I asked them, when were you there? And they said, well, I was there in 2010, and I explained to them, Dubai is growing at least three times faster, culturally and physically, as any other city. In fact, physically it’s probably growing 10 times faster than any other city out there, but culturally it’s evolving so fast. So saying you went to Dubai in 2010 and suggesting that it hasn’t changed, it’s like seeing New York of 1990 is the same as New York of 2022.

1:30:28 That’s a three-decade time span. Dubai is changing really rapidly, and I know it gets its criticism. Okay, like, for example, there are certain things that we take for granted in the West, which maybe culturally are not acceptable in Dubai. That’s going to change too. Let’s remember that in a survey done in 1991 on the American public, the majority of Americans, close to 55 percent of Americans, said it was wrong for interracial marriages to happen.

1:30:58 In other words, the majority of Americans, 55% of Americans in 1991, said that it was wrong, morally wrong for a Black and a white person to marry. Today four percent of Americans think that, and eventually that idea is going to feel so ludicrous that no one would think that. But that changed, 55 to 4 percent, marks what we talk about when we speak of social progress and cultural progress, and it’s happened in 30 years, and in Dubai that level of progress, cultural progress, is happening in around a decade.

1:31:32 And so whatever we think of Dubai right now, it’s going to be different. It’s going to be different a few years from now, and that’s why I’m betting on that city. Yeah, it’s an incredible city. I did a vlog there when I was walking through the mall there, and I titled it, Dubai is what America used to be. And I was just talking about this concept of when you got to America a couple hundred years ago, you know, you could do what you want, you could go West, you could, you know, use the land, you could build your businesses, the government wasn’t trying to stop you, wasn’t trying to tax you, wasn’t trying to tell you.

1:32:02 And then I felt like that was the same way. It was entrepreneurial, it was free spirit, the sky was the limit, right? People were all there, they moved there to go build their lives, their fortunes, their everything, and I got this incredible feeling there, and people from all over the world were there doing all these incredible things. I got, I got stopped more in Dubai than I do in London. People, all the Dubai Mall, Brian Rose, Brian Rose, I remember you.

1:32:25 I saw your videos during lockdown, all this. I was like, oh my God, that’s amazing. Crazy guys started me for stopping me from Kuwait, and then from all over the world that were there, and I was, that something I noticed, that people there really love learning. Yeah, I get recognized in the street there more than any other city in the world. They love learning yeah.

1:32:41 I was telling you, like, when you go there, you realize you know no one’s phoning it in there. Like, no one’s just coasting in Dubai, because everyone there is there with intention, and it changes the vibe of the place. It’s maybe it’s like a Mindvalley event, where it’s like everyone comes there and they’re there for a reason. Okay, I’m here to do this. Okay, maybe you’re there to drive a taxi.

1:32:59 Maybe you’re there to build a building. Maybe they’re to build a house, but you’re there because you believe it represents something greater than where you are, and you can, you can criticize you buy for certain things, but people intentionally go there to build something, and that energy is really infectious. Yeah, and it’s not what you think it is. It’s not the stereotype of what you told, was I was actually there in 2008 when I still work in the city of London.

1:33:21 I stayed in one of the Palm Resorts, and I looked around, and I didn’t really get it either, but it’s come so far now, and everyone there looks like they work for the tourism Board of Dubai, because Americans, Israelis, that all they want to do is pull you aside and say, this is the greatest place on Earth. I know, isn’t that crazy? That that’s what I’m getting. That’s vital marketing. People who I meet, the most incredible people in Dubai, and I don’t see this in any other city.

1:33:43 They are trying to recruit other people to Dubai. Yeah, it’s, it’s the energy there is incredible. So I went to Dubai on a business trip. I was meeting with the government. I was there for two weeks before I left.

1:33:54 I’d found an apartment, and I bought an apartment right next to the Burj Khalifa, because I decided I want to make the city my second home. I love it. Congratulations. Like, I love it, I love it. I’m looking to do the same thing, and I want to spend a few months a year there, and there’s so much great stuff going on, so many cool things, so many great projects, cool blockchain stuff, and just all around entrepreneurial stuff, and again I’d say everybody, it’s not what you think it is.

1:34:18 Go check it out. It’s not like I wish people wouldn’t have a close mind. I I think there is a certain form of eurocentrism in the world, where people are skeptical whenever a Middle Eastern country or an Asian country makes such rapid progress. Oh, they must be cheating, right? I look at how people in the West sometimes label Singapore.

1:34:34 It’s authoritarian. It’s, it’s a chewing gum is banned. Who the heck cares about chewing gum? This band, and firstly that’s not completely true. Singapore is a marvel of engineering.

1:34:43 It’s an incredible city, as is Dubai, and I think people need to have an open mind. Yeah, and if you’re a Londoner, I mean, you come back and you know, the NHS now is about to break. The nurses are on strike. I go into the tube today, take my boys to school, and you know, I mean, it hasn’t changed much since 1960. let’s be honest.

1:35:02 You know, this city and this country in many ways is breaking. If we’re honest, you know, is it really fun to live in this democracy? Do we really see progress? Are people really being looked after? And then I go to Dubai, and I see a transportation system that is driverless, everything that is seamless, everything being built for the future, infrastructure, zero taxes, all this health care, and it’s like, well, which city is better, right?

1:35:28 And which, and then the safety, and it’s like, well, I think, like you said, very eurocentric, and we’ve convinced ourselves that this is the right way, but if you really look at the metrics, I don’t know if it is. Yeah, yeah. And so I look at, like, the Sheikh in Dubai, and I’m like, well, here’s a guy who has a really firm vision. There’s a, there’s a little memorial there, right, by the, by the birds in the park there, and it’s got a bunch of his mantras on the outside of it.

1:35:53 And you got a guy who, and I was born in 1971, and there was pictures of Dubai in 1971, and there wasn’t much there. So in 50 years, it’s done these incredible things, and he’s got this really long-term vision that’s probably backed up by all of his kids, and they’re like, we’re gonna build this in the next 100 years, and we’re putting our family name on the line, our capital on the line, our culture on the line. It’s like, I kind of want to roll with someone like that.

1:36:15 Now, I ran to be the next mayor of London, and I looked up. Honestly, vision. I looked at the infrastructure problem, the knife crime problem, the housing problem, and I came up with all these solutions, and I remember one time I looked at my team, and we had advisors from the Metropolitan Police in the House of Lords, and I remember the Zoom call, and I said, look, if we do the right thing, the next mayor is going to take credit for everything we do. I said, are you all okay with that?

1:36:37 And they said, we’re all okay with that, and like, all right, let’s go. That’s long-term thinking. Yeah, that was the only way, because the tubes are going to take 10, 20 years, but the problem is no one’s ever going to do that because we’re on an election cycle, and so the system, I think, is inherently flawed, whereas a place like Dubai, they’re like, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re going to spend the next hundred years, and so I’m seeing some of the positives, and yeah, maybe there’s some negatives, maybe in certain human rights, or maybe in certain things they’re not where other places are, but I agree with you, I think it’s going there rapidly, right?

1:37:08 And again, it’s, it’s funny how it all comes down somehow, even, even to capital. You know, if you really have a place that is pro-business, I actually think pro-ideas comes right after that, right? You know, and there’s one more thing about Dubai that’s worth mentioning: the Emirates are minority in their own country. They said, look, if you’re brilliant, if you’re talented, come, you can get a golden visa in Dubai for buying a property, you know, that’s half a million, or for being extremely talented, or for starting a business, debt.

1:37:35 The Emiratis don’t care that they are minority in their own country, but now you look at what happened in the UK with Brexit, right? The pro-Brexit people literally got Brits to vote for Brexit based on lies, and one of those lies, remember the billboard with the hordes of brown people, and then creating the fear that Turks are going to be coming into the UK, which was a lie, because the UK is not part of Schengen. in the UK, people literally shot themselves in the foot with Brexit, and now that’s become evident with the shrinking of the UK economy.

1:38:08 One culture chose to go, you know, what if you’re brilliant, if you’re smart, come, we don’t care, we just want our country to be great, and you’re welcome. The other culture like egged on by xenophobic politicians took the opposite part, and I think that is the key difference between the Emirates and the UK today. Yeah, now I’m not saying that’s true for all of the UK, right? Like, I grew up in the British Empire. I speak English because Britain did, Britain used to run Malaysia, where I was born, and I’m going to be moving to London, so I’m not in any way trying to say, speak negatively of the UK, but there is something to be said about cultures that are open to immigration and cultures that decide to be close to immigration, and I’m very, very, very pro-immigration.

1:38:58 Yeah, and I am too, and we saw a lot of that kind of filter out of this country, and I think there was a lot of other complex things happening, as in, do you really want to go also in with Europe and have to be part of that whole piece? But I agree, I was very surprised most people in London didn’t want it to happen. Yeah, and it was very isolationist, and we’re still paying the price for that, yeah, economically, and it’s still a pain in that sense, and it is the opposite of what these two things are doing.

1:39:24 So I look forward to that, hopefully changing. That being said, we’re still here, and we’re still doing this, and there’s some great things about London, but hopefully they’ll learn, right? You know, and I think they will have to learn when they start seeing some of these things that are being built there, and I love London. I choose London. My family is moving to London in two and a half years.

1:39:40 Yeah, but I’m going to have a second home in Dubai. Yeah, good. I like that action you personally, Vishen, 10 years from now, what are you doing, and maybe what are you doing for vision? So what do you want to do? You know what brings me the greatest joy?

1:39:54 It is connecting people. So my greatest joy I love Mindvalley. I love what I do, but Mindvalley isn’t my greatest joy. My greatest joy, surprisingly, is hosting dinner parties of brilliant minds around the world. It’s not even a business.

1:40:10 I don’t care to make money from it. After this interview, I’m going straight to Soho House, where I rented a private room, and I created a curated guest list of 15 people here in London, and they don’t necessarily know each other, but I know them, and I want them to get to know each other. I’m paying for everything, because I just love bringing people together. I found that through these dinner parties I’ve been able to introduce people to the love of their life, to future business partners.

1:40:34 I’ve been asked to conduct weddings because of people who met through my connection, and that’s what gives me joy. I served the world by bringing people together, and so that’s what I’m excited about, and I’m trying to figure out how to do this at scale. So Mindvalley aside, I want to figure out, how can I create an app powered by a certain type of AI that can predict who you should connect with in any city as a friend, as a mentor, as a romantic partner, and that is my long-term project.

1:41:08 I want to bring this app out to the world within the next decade or so, when you show up in any city based on an understanding of who you are, the app will be able to say, hey Brian, there’s this guy called Greg two and a half kilometers away from you, and if you have coffee with him, we think you’re both going to be able to progress towards your goal. Would you like an intro? That’s what I want to create. That’s a super cool idea. you mentioned AI, so I have to ask you, I mean, we’ve seen the OpenAI project ChatGPT really get a lot of people’s attention.

1:41:38 It’s got my attention as well and a lot of people are embracing it, and already seeing that it can do some pretty incredible things. How do you see AI affecting the world in the next, say, even 24 months? So I remember attending a conference in Silicon Valley, where this question was asked. I was with a group of innovators, and we went in the tour of the different companies that were developing AI. Now, this was in 2017, and there was an open discussion on this.

1:42:06 Peter Diamandis was leading this group, and one of the things as we, as we spoke about where the world was going was that we are going to come to a world where people will only have to work 10 to 20 hours a week or not at all. Universal basic income. Elon Musk said, Universal basic income is not an if, it’s a when. It’s going to happen. Bill Gates said, if robots are going to take our jobs, tax the robots.

1:42:40 What we’re going to see happen, I believe, is we’re going to move towards the world where we’re only going to have to work 20 hours a week or not at all. We’re already seeing in experiments with the four hour work week that unanimously through these experiments, when companies cut working hours from 40 to 32 and give Fridays off productivity goes up. It’s incredible, but it’s happening. We’re going to go beyond the 40-hour work week to maybe two to three day work weeks, because AI is going to make work so effortless.

1:43:09 I use AI now for coming up with advertisement titles. I was just interviewing a creative director, and I put this prompt in ChatGPT: suggest to me eight questions that I can ask a person with a background in film production who’s interviewing for a role of creative director in a health and wellness platform-based company, and I got eight amazing questions. AI is so powerful. It’s going to reduce the amount of time we work, but it’s also going to create this huge positive effect in the world.

1:43:42 Now, many people think that if we work less, human beings are going to get lazy. No, not at all. I believe in human nature. I believe if we work less, we’re going to have more time for creativity, for deep connection, for spending with our kids, for exploring nature. All of us have gifts that we want to give to the world, and many of us will give these gifts without any expectation of money.

1:44:04 You know, there was this, there, I’m seeing this happen even among the Mindvalley community. People are helping other people grow. People are mentoring other people at no cost. I organize these dinner parties. I don’t charge anyone for it.

1:44:17 It’s my gift to the world, and I believe what we’re going to see is more and more people doing acts of charity, acts of contribution, taking care of the elderly, taking care of nature, because of this increase in free time, and I think it’s going to be really good for the world. That’s interesting. On the opposite point, you know, what it takes to create something like Mindvalley, and I’m sure in those first five years, you were working every hour of every waking hour.

1:44:44 I was a day, I was, and so will that still be required to create something in the future? Things are going to get faster and faster and faster when I started Mindvalley, I had to code my own checkout. There was no Stripe. I had to build my own web web pages using Microsoft FrontPage. Do you guys remember that?

1:45:01 There were no drag-and-drop web page builders. I had to build everything myself. I had, heck, I had to code my own PayPal API. Right now it’s a copy and pasting, right? So things are going to get faster and faster.

1:45:14 If you’re a creative person, it’s going to be easier and easier to build a business and make money. What’s going to be the competitive advantage is your mindset, and this is really why I’m building Mind Body. I want to help be the best possible best possible platform for giving people the right mindset to survive in this new world. Yeah, a couple asked questions. When you look at, say, the America right now, you see a country that seems very divided.

1:45:42 You’ve seen people that kind of be separated, maybe between two teams based on politics, based on, maybe, about 10 different issues, and they seem to do a lot of fighting, a lot of fighting digitally as well. What do you see this going? Do you see this escalating? Do you think there are solutions to this? I just want to get your thoughts in.

1:46:02 So I think there’s a difference between what we perceive and what is reality. I have a friend by the name of Monty Moran. Monty is, he was the first CEO of Chipotle, the famous American fast food chain, right? And Monty, after he’s, he stepped down as CEO, he traveled across the U.S. doing a documentary on connection, and I was just interviewing Monty for my YouTube show, and he said, you know, Vishen, we’re not as divided as people think everywhere. I go in the US.

1:46:27 People truly love each other, like even incidents of racism did you happen? But according to Monty, it’s, you hardly see that anymore. People truly love each other. People truly connect with each other, but as soon as you go online, right, whether it’s CNN or Fox, they have to amplify differences because they are rage machines. They need to get you hooked on being angry, and one of the ways to get you hooked, one of the ways to feed the algorithm, is to get angry comments.

1:46:58 The best way to get a YouTube video to pop, on Instagram, video to pop, is to get more people writing comments, and how do you get people writing comments? Well, people don’t, you don’t get thousand-long comment threads if everybody agrees. You get thousand-long common threads of people are pissing each other off, and that’s what the media is designed to do. But if you actually set foot in America, and I flew in from Los Angeles and New York. It is the most loving culture everywhere I go.

1:47:26 Nobody’s wearing a badge that says Republican or Democrat. Everyone is just so friendly, so open, and that’s the America I love. In the America I see, and I think we are a lot more connected than what the media makes us think, and it’s so important that we do not develop tribal affiliation and identify ourselves as hardcore Republicans or hardcore Democrats. all issues are in the gray. It’s not black and white, and we need to be able to, to move between issues and to be able to hear each other out, but we’re going more digital, so is it going to get worse, because when it goes digital, it’s easy to, right, hate someone?

1:48:03 Here’s what’s also happening while we’re getting more digital: the old news media companies are failing. Viewership of Fox and CNN are going down. They’re literally going down, and yes, we can get on Instagram, we can get on YouTube, and some people can may use Instagram and YouTube to generate, you know, like, like, like separatist ideology. That’s fine too, but I think more and more people are beginning to see that you can also gain an audience through hope, through inspiration, through collaboration, by building communities that are united around certain issues.

1:48:37 I think, I think the world is going to shift. I think we’re going to see that age of mass division is going to start fading away, and I think we’re going to start seeing people come closer together again, or at least that’s my hope. Maybe I’m an idealist. Yeah, well, look, there’s a little bit of hope, as in we saw content being racing to short form, but we’ve also seen a similar way of racing to long-form content, like these conversations, and when you actually listen to someone for a long period of time, it’s very hard to hate them, because it’s very hard to say they’re this, that, or the other.

1:49:09 You actually, what’s that phrase? When you walk a mile in a man’s shoes, like, you understand the nuances or why they feel that way. So I think as long as we consume, usually independent media created long-form content, I do think that ultimately brings us together. Very true, much more so than the click bait, the headlines, sometimes the tweets, the memes, the news articles. So yeah, that is positive.

1:49:31 I always ask at the end this question, and I think they’ll be always helpful. If you could pick up the phone and call up 20-year-old Vishen, who I guess is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, freshman year or sophomore year, and going a little crazy, and give that man some advice based on what you know now, what would you tell him? If anything, I would have told 20-year-old myself, start a company now. stop waiting and thinking that you need that damn college degree, and then you need to get three or four years work experience before you become an entrepreneur.

1:50:02 The internet has been invented. Start your company now. Yeah, good advice. Some people are waiting for permission, aren’t they? Some people say not everyone should start a company, and I always say I think everybody should try, because it teaches you so much about yourself, about business, about everything, and I always think that everyone should think about that at least.

1:50:23 So great advice. Best advice you’ve ever received could be from a mentor, a parent, a book, you know, you know, I know you read that quote by Gandhi when you were young, that he said I’m a Hindu, I’m a Jew, I’m a Christian, and you realize things were like that, but was there a mentor, per se, or anyone who gave you a piece of advice? Well, I let’s go back to that quote by Gandhi, because I think it’s worth bringing up, and I’m impressed that you remember that it was important for you.

1:50:49 So yes, when I was young, I read a quote by God the ungati said I’m a Hindu, and I’m a Muslim, and I’m a Christian, and I’m a Jew, and I’m a Buddhist. What he was saying is that I am not going to identify myself by one thing, because as soon as we identify ourselves by one thing, whether it’s a religion or it’s a political affiliation, that identity becomes so real that we will resist anything counter to that identity, and that can be dangerous. We need to have open minds.

1:51:19 We need to be, we need to be open to other points of view, even if it’s other points of view that may be different from our religion or different from what our political party says, and that’s the only way I think we can create a humanity that’s acted that weather is less fighting, and that’s the best way for us to grow. That’s probably why you created Mindvalley, too, because you were open to taking the best of the best from all these practices and bringing them together, and we’ve got to be conscious that we may be wrong as well, because of that quote, is the reason why I am not the only meditation teacher on Mindvalley. Think about it.

1:51:57 Almost every other personal growth teacher builds a company around their own brand. I built a company, and I brought invited 61 of the teachers this time last year. The biggest teacher on Mindvalley wasn’t me. It was one of my employees. So my gifted employees, they become teachers as well.

1:52:11 I don’t want to be a guru, because if I told people to just follow Vishen’s advice, even if it was in the meditation protocol, I believed I would be locking them into one viewpoint. I want people to question. I want people to look at alternate sources of truth. I want people to make decisions on their own. No guru ship.

1:52:30 Yeah, I appreciate that. And, um, you just reminded me of something. So I’ve been doing this, so just over 11 years, and many of my guests came on audition that I didn’t like, I didn’t agree with, that made me squirm, from damn pain to the trillion dollar man to man Tech Chia talking about, you know, sexual energy, to all these people, and I just decided my job was to sit here and listen and try to bring their message to the world. And sometimes a year later, or two years later, I realized maybe they’re right.

1:52:59 And then, and so, again, I, I think that’s important, that this whole world has an open mind, and we don’t always assume we’re right, because I’ve changed my mind so much, exactly, in real time over the show, to where now sometimes I try to put someone in the chair that I don’t agree with, and force myself to sit there and just try to listen, and I think that’s really, really, really important. Right, really important. Yeah. When I was going to come on the show, my media team said you don’t want to be on Brian Rose’s show, because he has some really extreme views, and my response was, well, he’s a good man, and what’s wrong with those extreme views?

1:53:33 Do I have to agree with every guest that he’s ever had? And so I wanted to be here, but people have to understand how media works, and I have to make an apology to you, because I want people to know the story. There was a time two years ago, two years ago, this was in the middle of the pandemic when someone on my team was releasing a video, what was was preparing a video on women’s rights, and they were taking snippets from different talk shows and stuff to show that we used to live in a world where misogyny exist, and there was a quote by you that was taken out of context and put in that video.

1:54:13 This is one of my guests, was it? I think it was Elliot Hulse. I think you were agreeing with something a guest said, but you were not fully agree. I can’t even remember what it was, but I knew it was taken out of context before you’d even seen it. I had that video pulled, destroyed.

1:54:28 I reprimanded that person who edited the video, and I wrote you an apology letter. I remember that, right? And the reason I did that is because I so believe that media, you me, we vote, run media companies, even CNN, even Fox News, even Vice News, has to stop doing it. They have to stop making people angry by taking things out of context. You know, 10-second clip, and going, oh, he’s racist, oh, he’s misogynistic, this guy is an a**hole.

1:54:55 When you extend the conversation, you start to see what people, people really are, and I never want Mindvalley doing that. I don’t think anyone should be doing that, and so that’s what, why I shared that story is because I think the audience needs to understand that the media is designed to trigger you, and we have to be open-minded about things. I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, it’s fascinating to me. I mean, I like to put people in the leather chair and hear them out, and I always think that, you know, their ideas stand for themselves, and people can take what they want, and they can choose to do things with them or not.

1:55:28 I always say you can go on YouTube and you can find all these videos about the flat Earth, right? And it’s none of my business if you think the Earth is flat, but they’re out there, and people can watch them or not watch them, but sometimes I have guests on my show that people decide that that people aren’t even allowed to, to make that judgment. And there’s a concept called freedom of speech, but there’s also the freedom to listen to someone, and I think everyone should have the right, and is an adult enough to be able to consume the content without having a regulatory body or someone.

1:55:56 Even in Britain, they say, oh, you have to challenge the guest and try to give two sides of the story in a podcast. I’m like, no, I don’t. You can go watch any video you want on YouTube and consume whatever you want. My job isn’t, that my job is to let someone present that. Right, exactly, right, and then you do that, but, but yeah, it can be controversial, but I appreciate that, and I appreciate this, and I remember you sent me that message as well, and so thank you.

1:56:18 Last question: what’s that piece of advice to the 20-year-old who’s out there listening to us, that could be in maybe China, they’re getting this, maybe, or or Dubai, or South America, or Estonia, or America. 20-year-old, they’re growing up in this world where Jesus, you know, AI is going to be a big part of their lives. They grew up on social media. The internet was always there. What do you advise them?

1:56:41 So I would say, if I can give you one piece of homework right now, dive into the huge number of new AI companies which are emerging. Okay, there you can find these lists. ChatGPT is just one, but there are loads of companies that are being formed on these services, and these companies are about to disrupt everything from the legal industry to copywriting to marketing, everything, and if you can start leveraging this as a toolkit and getting good at it, it’s called prompt engineering, right?

1:57:13 It’s the prompt that you put in AI. You are going to be formidable. You’re going to be formidable, and you will be able to go into fields and completely be the top performer in those fields. For example, you may know nothing about copywriting, but if you know prompt engineering, you can produce better headlines, better blog copy, better book titles than some of the best copywriters out there who are too slow to embrace these. Take advantage of this disruption.

1:57:42 Completely agree. AI, I mean, ChatGPT got a million customers in four days, the fastest adoption of any technology I think in human history, and, um, yeah, we’re actually actively investing in companies now through London Real Ventures with AI and blockchain capabilities and you said it right there. I mean, you might have no experience, but if you know how to work these tools, you can do better than the best of the best who are not going to want to adopt it.

1:58:06 They will probably reject it and be slow to adopt it, maybe because of the innovator’s dilemma, because it’s going to take them out of a job, and there’s going to be so much disruption, faster than anything we’ve seen before. Yeah, right. We had to design a cover for one of our programs, so we had different designers designed to cover. One designer decided to cheat by using Midjourney, which is an AI artist, to design the cover, and then we put these covers up on social media, and we had the audience vote on the AI cover.

1:58:33 The audience didn’t know that, but the AI cover won. So who was the smartest designer? Exactly. Yeah, I use it as a tool, and I feel like I’m like 10x, or I have like a 10x team that’s in my brain, and by playing with it and popping different ideas and doing it, I can create things. It’s like 10 times as fast.

1:58:51 Exactly, and so I agree with you. Get people, they go into this technology now, because this will change the world, and it’s going to change it really, really fast. Okay, exciting times, Vishen. Um, just want to say I really appreciate you, grateful for everything you do. I know how hard it is to run an education company, a teaching company, a platform, and live events, and I’ve been to all of yours, and they’re incredible.

1:59:15 You have a really devoted group of fans and a big community. That’s amazing, so appreciate what you do, all your content. It’s always a pleasure. You’re welcome back anytime, and maybe the next time we’ll do this in Dubai. Thank you, that would be fun, doing it in Dubai.

1:59:29 Yeah, all right, well, fantastic, all the best, thank you, Brian. Cool, man. We’ll see you all next time on London Real. Take care, bye. Thank you.