Dhru Purohit Show - How to Rewire a Fearful, Judgmental, and Stressed-Out Mind into One Rooted in Freedom and Presence with Joe Hudson

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, LMNT, and BiOptimizers. Did you know that your judgmental thoughts—about both yourself and others—could be contributing to unhappiness, blocking joy, and even affecting your health? Most people don’t realize that these thoughts often stem from a fear of fully feeling and embracing the emotions that arise in certain situations. When we avoid those emotions, we remain stuck in patterns of judgment and disconnection. Today’s guest is here to help us break free. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Joe Hudson to explore how judgment, whether directed outward or inward, influences our thoughts, relationships, and overall well-being. Joe shares what leads us to have judgmental thoughts, the initial high it brings, and the vulnerable feelings that it covers up. Joe also shares the roadblocks that hold us back from being exactly who we want to be, as well as the common pattern of self-reliance, abandonment, and shame. It’s time to drop the judgment and reclaim your freedom. Dubbed “the coach behind Silicon Valley’s unicorn CEOs,” Joe Hudson is one of the most in-demand mentors to top leaders at OpenAI, Apple, Alphabet, and beyond. With a background in venture capital and over 25 years of deep work across psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative traditions, Joe has crafted a radically different path to personal growth—one that goes far beyond traditional self-help. His approach rewires how people relate to themselves, dissolving internal blocks and unlocking sustainable high performance rooted in ease, clarity, and joy. In this episode, Dhru and Joe dive into: How self-judgment impacts our well-being and emotional regulation (00:15) Why judging others feels good, the inner voice, and the impact of negative self-talk (5:16) Are our judgmental thoughts contributing to physical disease in the body? (14:58) Joe's personal journey and what he internalized from childhood (18:18) Why the inner voice in your head is often wrong (24:13) Judgment, shame, and guilt as key drivers of stress (30:51) How do you want to be right now? (35:07) How to deal with internal resistance (42:57) The connection between abandonment and self-reliance (44:35) Understanding the pattern of abandonment and how to address it (51:95) Receiving unconditional love and building unconditional relationships (56:40) An introduction to The Matrix Protocol (1:08:15) What it means to live in the compassionate truth (1:20:12) The hidden “protocol” of unhappiness (1:24:47) Gratitude moments and shifting from lack to love (1:33:04) How stress, lack of enjoyment, and negative self-talk threaten our well-being (1:43:31) Where to find Joe’s work and resources (1:49:57) For more on Joe, follow him on Twitter, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, LMNT, and BiOptimizers. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. Head over to drinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order of Sleep Breakthrough and find out this month’s gift with purchase. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joe, welcome to the podcast. I've so enjoyed diving deep into your work over these last couple months. Shout out to Tom. And I'd love to start off on the topic of judgment. You know, most people have no idea that their thoughts about judgment towards themselves or others is driving a huge part. And one of the biggest contributors of unhappiness, stress, disease. that they feel on a daily basis. In fact, you've shared, I'd love to share a little quote from you.

Please, yeah. One of the things you'll notice is that the more judgmental a person is, the less they feel good about themselves. So the big question is, if the judgmental voice inside of all our heads, I'm guilty of it as well too, is such a driver of stress and lack of enjoyment. Yeah. Why are we all so addicted to it? So the way I look at the mind is that I see three minds, not that there are, but because I find it useful.

So we have the prefrontal cortex, which is the human intellectual mind. Then there's the emotional center, which is the mammalian mind. And there's the nervous system, more reptilian mind. And so you're talking about the prefrontal cortex, but they all dance together. And so I think one of the main reasons outside of it was really useful to be able to check ourselves for mistakes when we were hunting and gathering. But one of the main reasons is to not feel emotions. So every time that you're judging yourself or somebody else,

there's an emotion underneath that you don't want to feel. And so if you say to yourself in that moment, oh, if I couldn't feel this judgment, if I couldn't be judgmental, what would I have to feel at this moment? There's always an emotion underneath there that your body is trying to push against. And so the reason that the judgment makes you miserable

is because you're pushing down emotional experiences. And I was saying that joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house if her children aren't welcome. And so that joy comes from being able to feel and love all of your emotional experiences. That doesn't mean being taken by them, but it means love and feel them. And there's a ton of science behind the stress and the pain of not feeling into your emotions. And so leaning into the emotions has physiological benefits and has a lot of benefits. I think most importantly is that if you're attacking yourself with judgments or negative self-talk,

then your body sees that it's under attack. Cortisol gets raised. You're under stress. You're under fight or flight. And eventually that burns you out. What's so scary about feeling those emotions to us? So that's on more of a nervous system level. So most of us when we were kids, we're told, don't get so excited.

calm down, boys don't cry, girls don't get angry, whatever the stories that we had. Or don't show your fear in the ghetto because you're going to look like prey. There's a lot of reasons that we get told to shove our emotions down. And we take those as little kids as, oh, I'm bad. This is a naturally thing occurring in me. And it's happening. I'm sad. And my mom is telling me I shouldn't, or my dad is telling me I shouldn't be sad,

which means there's something wrong with me. And so they get locked down. on a nervous system level. Don't feel that emotion. And there's these great experiments. I don't know if you've ever heard of the stone-faced baby experiments. Do you know about them?

Is this where a baby's kind of cooing for its mom's attention and the mom is stone, like the research tells her, like, do not show any emotion? Yeah, that's right. And it drives the baby. It goes crying.

It goes crying. And then the baby goes stoneface. Just shuts down the emotion. So when love is removed from us when we're trying to engage and trying to connect, we stop engaging in trying to connect in that way. So it's a survival mechanism for most of us.

And almost all of us were either bribed out of our emotions, distracted our emotions, punished out of our emotions. So that is just a very normal thing. And it's amazing because if you even just look at this, the science of decision making, if I pulled the emotional center out of your brain, your IQ would stay the same, but your ability to make a decision would become dilathing.

It would take you potentially half an hour to hour to decide where to have lunch or what color pen to use because emotions are actually what drive our decision making. And you can see it in your own life if you think to yourself, oh, how many decisions did I make to feel like a success or to not feel like a failure or to feel loved or to not feel hated? So many of our decisions are made that way that we can see. And so great decision making doesn't come from being logical. great decision making comes from not avoiding your emotions, loving all of your emotion experiences. So you're, oh, I can do this big thing because I'm not scared of feeling like a failure.

I like the feeling of being a failure as much as I like the feeling of being a winner. And oftentimes it's both of those feelings that are very scary for people to totally let in. You know, pulling on this threat of judgment, there's obviously those two parts of it. There's judgment towards others and there's judgment towards ourselves.

and they're intertwined deeply, and that's what you talk about in your work. Why does it feel so good temporarily? You liken it to, in one of your videos, it's like the quick high that you get from sugar, the quick high you get from doom scrolling on social media. Yeah, yeah. Why does it feel so good temporarily and good as an asterisk next to it when we're judging other people? Because it puts us above them for a minute. Like if you're judging somebody, then you've put your, you've made.

your self better than them. And so for a short while, that feeds something, oh, now I don't have to feel the heartbreak of the fact that they don't love me or I don't have to feel the heartbreak that they're allowing themselves to be a way that I don't allow myself to be. And so, so that's the short buzz is just feeling better than. But the thing is, what I've noticed is that the more somebody judges the outside world, the more they're judging themselves, which gives me great compassion for when people judge me. You know, I'm like, oh, easier to be me than you and not better than you. Like I have been just as judgmental in my life.

Is the high similar when we judge ourselves? Because we get something out of it, right? Is it that we're just copying the voices that we heard, the inner voices when we were younger, or that there's actually some solace or some place of refuge that we get to sit in when we're in that judgment towards ourselves? If we're saying, I'm not good enough, we try to go for something. thing. It didn't happen exactly the way that we wanted to. See, I told you so. Like, is there something that we get in that? Yeah. So the reason that the brain is scared to give it up is,

oh, if I stop judging myself, if I start criticizing myself, I'm going to end up just drinking beer on the couch and eating pizza. That's how most people think about it. And then the way to see through that is pretty easy. It's just, so I think there's, I think it's like 50 or 60,000 thoughts a day is what the Cleveland is it or the Mayo Clinic said that we have and most of those are repetitious and negative. So we're having a lot of the same negative self-talk over and over and over again. And so if you're if you had a boss doing that, if I was sitting there and I was your boss and I was like, hey, you're doing the podcast wrong. You could do the podcast. Why aren't you paying attention to Joe Moore? Why aren't you look? If I was doing that, that would not make you effective.

You turn around and you'd be like, you'd be like, boss, right? But we somehow think that if we do it to ourselves, it's going to get better performance. What it does is it actually makes us anxious and then where we learn slower. So it's not good for our performance. What's the high that we get out of it?

It's it is a form of love. And that's the thing that I think people forget. So oftentimes when people start working on the critical voice in their head, instead of doing something that's super effective, they do something that's supernatural, which is stop doing that. Stop. No.

Like they try to stop the voice in their head. And it doesn't work. That which we resist persists. But you can just experiment with it and tell it to stop. Every time it says something, you'll notice it won't. But if you react to it with love, then you're teaching it how to love you better. So everything that is said is, I'm doing a bad job answering your questions. Let's say my voice said that.

It wants me to do better. Like there's some love. There's some care behind it. It's just really ineffective. And so what I'll teach people is with that critical voice in your head, what are three or four or five experiments that you can run in your response? So you can't particularly control what it does, but you can control how you respond to it.

So you could respond with a show tune. You could respond with no, stop that. You could respond by yelling at it. What I notice is the things that change the negative self-talk the quickest are things like, I see how scared you are and I'm right here with you. or, ouch, or I see what you're pointing to is important, but the way you're pointing to it doesn't help me. Just like a loving, compassionate boundary and response

often creates a different relationship with the voice in the head and extremely short period of time. Inside of a month. Instead of a month doing it regularly, there's a massive shift that you see that takes place for most people. When I start asking this key question, which you talk about, which is what is it that I don't want to feel right now? Just when you're responding to the negative self-talk differently, just having a different response to it.

That would be one response. Okay. So the other version of that would be somebody judging themselves for even having a thought. Like, I'm judging myself for being too judgmental, right? Right. Yes. That's another version. Yeah.

That will stick the judgment in place. That will keep the judgment in place. But what you're saying is that an acknowledgement, something met with love. Yes. That also allows you to feel? It will allow you to feel, yes. A, it will allow you to feel, and B, it's letting you know that you're safe. So a lot of the time that's negative self-talk happened because when we're a kid,

we think we're responsible for the world. So if mom doesn't love us or doesn't attuned to us, must be something we did. And so we're constantly telling ourselves, okay, if I do this, if I do this, the world will be right. I'll get it right. I'll finally, like, manage everything so that it works out. And what we needed is a kid and what we still need is someone saying, I got you. I'm here. I love you.

Yeah. You can feel your feelings fully. I love you. Yeah. Even if the situation doesn't change. Correct. I love you. Everything's okay.

Yeah. I'm right here with you. So it's a reparenting of sorts. But that'll change things a lot quicker than. How do I change? What do I do? How do I get better? Okay, I've got to stop that thing.

Okay. So now how do I stop talking to myself like that? That is a very long tedious road. I know I took it. It's hard. I want to shout about your story in a moment here, but do you think that these judgmental thoughts are besides just psychologically tormenting us? Yeah.

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So a lot of my experiments, when I do them, I do them right in the moment because that's where we learn the quickest. And when we create our courses, they're just all experiments. There's very little talking. So here's an experiment. Do whatever you have to do right now to stop feeling all of your emotions. Is that tension? Absolutely.

Yes. Yeah. So you have to contract your muscles. And as a matter of fact, habitually, you know, you can look at somebody's body and assuming they don't, for instance, assuming they don't have scoliosis, you can see the hunch in the back is a critical parent hunch that just from the way that they hold or in Ayurvedic medicine, you know, repressed anger is a line right here in the forehead. There is cues that your body has been holding in a very particular way if there are certain emotions that you're not allowed to have. And so that, yes, that's stress. That's physiological harm. Like incessant forever stress.

And you're constantly judging yourself. So you're constantly under attack. So your cortisol is up. And I think this is the thing that the way I think about this, just in general, like the top line theory is most people think that they're stressed out because they have so much to do. There's not enough money. Their marriage is bad.

They have this list of external things. And my experience is that there's really three main. core causes of stress and all that other stuff. It adds to it, but it's not the core cause. And the first core cause is just negative self-talk, constantly under attack. And so you see the world as a threat. You're under constant threat. And so the world starts acting like a threat. And what people do is, oh, I'm going to get better. I'm going to be better. I'm going to improve myself. And that's a much slower road. And what we suggest is, how do you just become yourself? How do you know yourself? And just the knowing of yourself is a better path to evolution than trying to

constantly improve. And then there's the emotional side of things, which is we're going to hold back all of our emotions. And we get told in society that the thing to do is to manage them instead of being completely fluid and fall in love with the emotions. And so that stresses constantly from this constant held emotional experience. And then the last one is just a lack of connection, which is in part really important to the nervous system, but just part of us, very important, part of being a human. And Harvard has a study that, I think the longest study in America.

There's an English one that's longer. And they basically track people through their lives, multiple generations now. And what they find is that human connection is the number one telltale sign for longevity. for good life or lack of disease. And so those three things are actually the cause of our stress. And then we blame it on the thing in front of us like too much TikTok or our phone or whatever it is. I want to chat just about your life growing up in the context of what you've shared so far. Because I think a practical example, which you are so generous in sharing your story on,

you know, catching everybody up to speed, you are one of the most sought out underground, not so underground coaches that's out there now, primarily to Silicon Valley, but business leaders everywhere. You were a former venture capitalist and had a successful career. A lot of people, you know, as they dig into your story, will also understand you share very openly. You had a very tumultuous and chaotic childhood, to say the least.

Yeah, brutal. You moved around, I think it was 26 cities. That's right. When you guys were younger, it got so bad. At one point in time, I don't know the exact circumstances, but you ended up having to be removed from your family and go to a boarding school. Yeah, yeah. Help us understand a little bit of what you were seeing that was being modeled around you.

You said children look around at the world, and if something is wrong, they immediately think it's their fault. Yeah. What was going on and how did you internalize it? Where I was lucky was my dad suffered alcoholism, but the alcoholism really didn't kick in until I was like 10. So my first seven, eight years were pretty good. So that was the lucky part. Not perfect. Lots of things went wrong.

You know, very rigid, critical mom. And my dad was very loving and playful, but at the same time, not particularly emotionally available. So, but when I hit about 10, my dad was just became more and more of an emotionally abusive alcoholic. And so by the time I'm 13 years old, every dinner was being yelled at. at the top of their lungs, his lungs, mostly for like an hour and a half. And if I said, yeah, okay, dad, you're right, fine.

You'd be like, see, I told you you were weak. Like, it was, there was a no way out situation. Or when I cried, they would take pictures of me to make fun of me. So I got told crying was not okay. You needed to be self-reliant. I was told that your natural state is not a healthy state. There's something wrong with it. Your emotions aren't healthy.

I internalized all. everything is on me. I became incredibly self-reliant. And with that comes that deep feeling of loneliness that comes to self-reliance and the feeling of, oh, no, I'm constantly feeling abandoned. Nobody's there for me,

even though people are trying to be there for me, but I can't see it, which is a common CEO issue, a really common CEO issue. And so that, I just, I learned all that stuff. Yeah, it was, and it was, I mean,

25 years of constant work. to undo a lot of that stuff. What would be the primary ways that as a young adult, this learned behavior, these patterns, which again, you don't know you're going through, just like all of us. We didn't know that that's our sort of defense mechanism, survival mechanism to what's going on.

What were the primary ways that it showed up externally for you? Like if people were interacting with you or you're interacting with the world, what would they see would be the patterns that you were struggling with or dealing with? Animacy and connection where, you know, I think in my early 20s I went through, I haven't talked about this before, but I think I went through like 30 women in a year and a half or something like that. Any kind of intimacy was very scary. Love was scary because I associated love with guilt and pain and abuse.

And so the idea of falling in love was only going to be guilt and pain and abuse. And I find that with a lot of my clients who haven't been able to get that core love relationship going, it's because it's been more. wired with something that they don't want to repeat. And so until that breaks apart. So that was one of the things that you could see in me, wild temper, very angry and not angry in a way that it was like moving, healing or moving. It was anger, taking it out on people and being verbally abusive. So that was another big part of my world.

What else would people have seen? I suffer with bouts of depression, low-level depression, because I was so hard on myself, all the time that eventually I just pooped out. And then, you know, I'd go through a couple, three weeks of that. Also, you would have seen me as high performance. I was three promotions. My second, my first job out of, first job was butchering fish in Alaska. Second was teaching head start.

Third job was international stock lending. Three and a half, three promotions in a year and a half, something like that. So you would have seen very high achiever. And there's a lot of high achievers who have that kind of, they only got love and validation when they performed, which was one of the things my parents did. Like I had to perform. I couldn't be wrong, that kind of thing.

If somebody could see during this time period, which obviously I know spans a little bit, if they could read those thought bubbles above your head of your inner voice. Yeah. Especially when it came to achievement. What were those bubbles voices? That was stupid. Why did you do that?

What's wrong with you? like it was there was a constant negative self-talk editing and monitoring my life. It was just perpetual. Pop-up, up, up, up, constant. Yeah, it makes me sad just thinking about it. For whatever reason, there is a place where that negative self-talk can just stops happening. And that occurred for me like right around 36, 37 years old. So I spent like from 25 to,

35 just chasing, going into debt and chasing every single modality that I could chase to find different tools and ways out of my predicament. And seven years were mostly meditating in a room. At one point in time, the insight in your journey came that led to one of the things that you talk about when it comes to this inner voice, which is that, I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the quote in front of me, but the inner voice in your head, the critical inner voice in your head is always wrong. It's always wrong. A lot of people will hear that. The inner voice in your head is always wrong. And even people who are pretty into self-development and spend

a lot of time reflecting or thinking about stuff, they probably have to sit with that for a second and say, okay, let me think, is it always, always wrong? Yeah. Dive into that a little bit for us. There's so many ways to do this. And I'm not going to go to the deeper ones because we would geek out on that forever. And as a hint for someone to look into it, it's the voice is projecting on itself. It's usually saying, what it's saying is usually more about it than it is about you. So that's a cool little hack if you want to geek out. So I'm also, I'm also not saying that the voice in your head is ever.

wrong. I'm just saying it's always wrong. So meaning that there's always a little bit of truth potentially to what it's saying, but the way it's saying it or how it's saying it, so it's never the whole truth. So if I take a picture of the Eiffel Tower and I was like, oh, there's a picture. Is that a true picture? Well, it depends. Yeah, I could go like that. Is that a true picture with the two different pictures? So it is a particular point of view, the voice in your head, and it's not the whole truth and therefore it's it's always wrong and so that's one way to look at it that helps disassemble it the other one that's really really useful is would you tell that to anybody else you you're a you're a liar you lied you're a liar everybody every human being has a lot every human

being is a liar every human being is fucked up so what makes you not say that to other people what makes that say that to you and what makes that your defining feature and not their defining feature So that gives you a clue of, oh, if I just wouldn't say that to anybody else, what would make me say it to myself? And it says it doesn't feel like I'm holding the truth back from all those people? Do you walk around going, oh, I didn't call that guy a liar? So I must be holding back my truth. Maybe that happens to you once a year or something like that. So the way you're talking to yourself, if you're not willing to talk to other people like that,

than what makes it particularly true about you, even though everything that you're doing, hundreds of millions of other people are doing probably right now in this very moment. So that's an interesting way to look at it as well. The other thing is that you're doing, let's say, you're driving a car in a way that makes you say you're a bad driver. Somebody else is driving in a car in the same way, and they're not calling themselves a bad driver.

They're calling themselves a good driver, and then somebody else is driving the car in the same way. They call themselves a medium. driver well who's right and who's to say who's right there everybody's driving the car in the exact same way like what's true what's not true could you even if you could sum up all the drivers and say most drivers drive like that doesn't mean that way is a good way to drive in particular so that's another one and another great example of this is two people and the consequence of this I think is what's really nice to be seen is two people are on a roller coaster.

And one of them says, this is the scariest thing. They feel it's scary. Their brain says it's scary. They're petrified holding on the other ones. This is fun. And one of them is literally releasing toxins into their body. And one is literally sending healing chemicals into their body. but they're both having the exact same experience.

So which one's right? This is fun. This is scary. And so that's what I mean when I say, it's always wrong. It is a matter of perspective. And so what's the perspective that's going to be most helpful to you is the question.

That's why a huge part of your work is the inquiry of even assessing the statement in the first place. It feels for a lot of people, and again, all forget it, as much as work as I've done, I'll forget moments where I don't even know that that critical thought is not me. I'm just like, oh, that's just me thinking.

Right, right, right. It's not even I'm calling it the critical inner voice. Right. I'm just like, oh, I just had a thought about something. Right. I just had a judgmental thought about myself and I need to get my shit together about a particular topic or whatever. So let's go there because that's the neatest way to do it. So if it's your thought and it's you, then you should be able to stop your thoughts.

That didn't last very long. So if they're yours, you should stop them. You can't even stop them. You're definitely also not deciding what your next thought is going to be. Yeah, you're not choosing it on purpose. You're not choosing it on purpose. So how is it yours? How are you responsible for these thoughts?

How can they be you? And also, they change. So if I'm looking at what you are essentially over time, it shouldn't change. Body changes because I know that's not me. Essentially, that's not me. My thoughts are changing. My emotions are changing. So those are essentially not me.

So we say it's us. It's this thing that we can't control. We can't stop and we don't decide on. And they constantly change so it can't be us. But we're so identified with that thought. And I believe, neurologically speaking, the sense of self, that part, I think when that sense of self is on, my understanding was that it lights up in the same place that the part of our brain that hallucinates lights up.

So we basically kind of hallucinate a sense of self. Wow. Yeah. And that's the core of a lot of the work is. How do you see who you actually are? And what I've noticed is when people say, I want to improve myself, it's a lot slower than I want to see myself. I want to realize who I am. And what's amazing is you'll see people all the time they do this following thing.

They have a big epiphany. Let's say you and I were having an epiphany about how to use this microphone. Use it from here and I used it from here and I got the recording. I found out here is better. The thing that I don't do next is how do I use the microphone? How do I keep on using the microphone that way? or if I understand a math problem, how do I not lose that?

But people have these big epiphanies that help them realize who they are. And then almost the first thing they'll do is how do I keep that, as if the realization isn't enough. And how to keep that, how do I do something is like this movement that actually pushes away the learning.

Pulling on that theme, one of the things you've talked about is that if you want to hyper stagnate yourself in life, turn the judgmental volume all the way up. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by bioptimizers. I can't tell you how many people I know that struggle with sleep. Even for me, the middle of night wakeups and tossing and turning can be an issue from time to time.

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at checkout. Again, that's buy optimizers, B-I-O-P-T-I-Z-E-R-S dot com slash Drew with the promo code Drew D-H-R-U at checkout. Judgment, shame, and guilt. Those are the three that'll do that. Yeah, because that's what's used to stop you as a kid. So I sit on a couch with my aunts and I fart and all my aunts laugh. Oh, that's so funny. I'm probably not going to try to stop myself from farting. I sit on a couch with my aunts and I fart and they shame me. I'm probably going to not fart in front of them again. I'm going to stop that expression or that movement happening in my system.

So shame, judgment, and guilt are built to make us not. That's their purpose is to make us not feel. Not just when they come from other people, but when we're doing it to ourselves. Correct. Absolutely. And then in the not feeling, the stress and the lack of joy. And then people wake up one day and feel like 40, 50, 60, 60. 70 years old, if they have a tiny little moment of clarity,

they can move beyond, you know, my boss is a j-hick, and that's the reason I have all my problems. Maybe your boss isn't that great, and that could be part of the story, as you've said, or my partner doesn't hear me out or doesn't love me in the way I want to. Okay, great, that might be part of the story, there might be some things to improve,

but if they can move a little bit beyond that and they can get a little glimpse of their life, they're left with themselves and feeling like, why is this all happening to me? Why am I causing all this? Like this can't be the purpose of life. There's a great saying about that. And I don't know where it comes from, but it is at the beginning, other people are responsible

for your problems. And the middle, you're responsible for your problems. And the end, nobody's responsible for your problems. And it doesn't mean that you aren't taking responsibility for them, but you're not blaming yourself anymore. I feel like that's the path. And that second part is this incredibly important moment of, okay, I'm 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. I got everything I wanted and I'm still miserable.

You know, I mean, because of my job, I get to see that a lot, right? I get to see people who have billions of dollars and they're not happy. It's like that Chinese problem. I think it's, you know, there's two big teachers in life, going after something and not getting what you want. And then there's another one, even more profound, which is exactly what you said, going out for something, getting it, and realizing you've climbed up somebody else's ladder.

This wasn't the thing that you wanted in the first place. Yeah. Both really important. And something that we will all feel. And if we can, partly what I'm feeling that I'm synthesizing from diving into your content over the last, you know, a couple months since we got introduced, is that these can be important moments in our life,

things that we can use to further our growth. You talk about, you know, business can be one of the biggest spiritual teachers in life. Relationships can be one of this biggest spiritual teachers in life. If we allow ourselves to go through these things where it leads to maybe some sort of layer one level of disappointment, unhappiness, discomfort, whatever it might be, if we can allow ourselves to feel fully what's there, a whole landscape of freedom could be on the other side. If we don't, we're stuck and trapped in the thing that hasn't been working for us for a long time. Even if the word freedom, a lot of people can use that in a lot of different ways. But freedom is literally, do you have the option right now to be the way you want to be? That's the question.

Like, how do you want to be right now? I'd ask all your viewers. And when I noticed, when I asked somebody that the first time, right now you have full permission to be exactly how you want to be right now. Go ahead. How do you want to be right now? Right. Most people don't even know that that's the sense of freedom that they have, that that's the level of freedom that they have. They actually get to be how they want to be whenever. But somehow or another, there's this convoluted set of thoughts and repressed emotions that prevent it. I've heard you say that before, but hearing it right now in this moment is very profound. So I'll just, you know, could you just repeat it one more time for our audience? Yeah, yeah. The way I would typically do it is I would ask it more than once, but I would say, how do you want to be right now?

And then so for the people who are listening, they can answer. Yeah. You wouldn't even, it's not, it's not an answer in words. It's literally in, like, in the way you're being. Yeah. Just be that way. Be that way. Yeah, it's a really profound practice.

If you, if you ask yourself that question 20 times a day for a couple weeks, you'll feel a significant difference. So right now, if you were to ask me, I say, I want to be present. I'm not like I would be answering to you, but the feeling, the synthesis of those feeling into word. I want to be present with my guest. I want to present my guest in the best light for my audience to receive all the wisdom that they have. I want to, and for me, that means. So those are some doing. The first one, the present is a sense of being. Okay. Okay. So if I would say the beingness, I want to be a great listener. Yeah. And allow the conversation to unfold the way that it is meant to or needs to unfold. Yeah, that's the thing is oftentimes we'll immediately go from how do I want to be to

what's the result I want. Yeah. And oftentimes, you understand something that a lot of people don't understand, which is how do I listen, actually defines your world

a lot more deeply than what you say. Most people, if you listen to them deeply, they want to be around you. They'll tell you things that they don't tell anybody else. You get information

in a business meeting that you wouldn't get any other way. But everybody's worried about, are they going to like my presentation? Are they going to think I sound smart? But I've literally sat on a plane with a guy asked a single question and he talked to me for 90 minutes or something like that.

We're getting out to go and he realized what had happened. He said, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I'm like, that was fantastic. I was enjoying myself the whole time. So for the audience member who's listening today, you know, they heard your question. And let's say the feeling came up for them that on this topic that we started off this podcast with

on judgment. And they're seeing, as you're talking about, the environment you grow up in, the critical voices that we inherited from the people that were around us, the little boy, the little girl who was just doing their best, who just was trying to make sense of the world and just adopted this behavior because they thought that that's a way to keep themselves safe. And they're recognizing themselves in that. And they're listening to that question and they're saying, and they're having the feeling, and I'm putting words to that feeling.

And that feeling is, I want to be kinder to myself. Yeah. And so they're sitting in that. Yeah. They're present to it. Right? Yeah. For some of those people, another series of thoughts have already come up.

Yes, correct. For the people that are doing it right, they're sitting in that beingness. And they're being, they're being kind of themselves. What does that look like right now? Yeah. Maybe you're sitting up a little bit more straighter. Maybe you're taking a breath because you were holding on to all this tension. The kindest thing you could do right now is you just took a breath.

Right. Or you're enjoying the sensations that are moving through your body. You're enjoying the sensations that are there. You are a little bit more present to your environment and you're not rushed to the next thing that you have to do. Yeah. Or you're not in a stuck in the loop of beating yourself up. For the person who is already on to those next series of thoughts of, okay, I want to be kinder to myself. Like, how do I be kind of myself?

What do I got to do right now? What do we have to say to them? Yeah. So before I answer that question, to back up. So when I did this experiment, so the way that I can't, that I have all these experiments is that I had authority issues because I had a dad who yelled at me and was abusive. So I couldn't listen to any authority. So I would read and then I would test it. Everything, I would test everything.

Oh, okay, being present, what does that mean? How do I want to be right now? And I would test that. So when I tested, how do you want to be right now? I was playing pickleball, something like pickleball. And one of the things I had said, I want to, I don't want to be in a rush, you know, like, and then I'm in a rush and pickleball. And I want to be in a rush and pickleball.

I want to get to the, to the net. I want to hit the ball. So, wait, what's going on? And immediately I could see the difference between what is rush in a pickleball court. and why is it that different than rushing in traffic? Like what makes those things different? And it is literally the thought pattern of I need to be there. I have to get there.

So you think about it like a Sunday drive. You're driving along on Sunday. You've got, well, this is my dad's generation, but Sunday drives was a thing where you just get in the car and drive around. You have no place to go, no time to get there. Very enjoyable experience. driving commute traffic to get to work on time, far less enjoyable experience for most people. That question, how do I get there? How do I get more gentle with myself? All those things

are the things that stop the enjoyment because it is having the time and place that you have to be there and you have to be there soon. And then the secondary thing that makes them not work is that they are, they often assume, not always, but often assume. So that means I don't want to be this way and this way and this way. So I want to be present means I can't be not present. And then not wanting to be in an emotion is back to not being able to get to the joy because you're repressing that emotional experience. So when I was doing this practice, one of the things that I saw was, oh, I'm not present. How do I enjoy that?

How do I want to be not present? Rather than, okay, now that I've, in this moment right now, how do I want to be right now, leaves me in a place, 10 minutes from now it might be a slightly different place. A year from now, hopefully it's a completely different place. How do I not make that into a morality that I have to be a certain way? Because as soon as that happens, then I can't enjoy whatever's happening, including my sadness, including my rush, including my, all those things are going to happen. You can't stop that. So the question is, how do you enjoy that?

How do you want to be right now when you're crying? You have this great quote, which is when we stop resisting, we experience pleasure. Yeah. It sounds so simple. It sounds so simple. Resistance is futile. is the other way to say it, but everybody puts that into a power dynamic. Yeah, and if you can't stop resisting, then love the resistance.

Yeah, it's a, that one's a nice thing. If seen it allows you to drop the resistance, there are some people like me the first time I heard it, how do I stop resisting, which was just more resistance? So if that's happening to you, just let it go and find something that helps. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because you say let it go and it's also kind of pick it up, right? It's like pick up this feeling of resistance, hold it all the way, and love it.

Yeah. Right? It's a little bit of both. Yeah. As a matter of fact, one of the things that we say is that resistance is often the thing that happens right before transformation. So if we're teaching a workshop, one of the things I'll do is if you don't feel safe, that's really important to let us know. and so that we can make sure that you are doing whatever you need to do or we're doing whatever we need to do to help you feel safe.

If you're feeling resistance, go for it and enjoy because resistance is often the thing that happens right before transformation. Watch my teenage girls doing homework and you'll see it over and over and over here. I got it. I want to pick up on one of other quotes. I wrote a bunch down that just were these truth bombs. going through your work. This is one that relates to a theme that you mentioned earlier.

I'll share the quote and then I'll go into it. When they fall in love with the feeling of abandonment, the pattern goes away. Yeah. I'm bringing this up because one of the things that you talked about inside of judgment is that especially when we're hypercritical on ourselves, it could be that hypercritical, like, you need to work harder. You're not working hard enough. A lot of high achievers can relate to that.

Yeah, yep. Right? You need to do a better job of, you know, whatever that critical, voice or thought is that's related to achievement, that underneath of it, a lot of what we don't want to feel is this idea that we don't want to be abandoned or that we're worried about abandonment. That's right. What's the interplay and why do those two things, why are they so common, especially for people that consider them type A personalities or high achievers?

Yeah. So self-reliance often meant that you didn't think you could depend on other people to get your needs met. So you were taught at a pretty young age, your needs can't be met. Literally, when our oldest was born, my mom came in and she said, oh, you know, you need to get the baby on your schedule. So change the diaper at the exact same time and then they'll poop at the time of your changing of the diaper. And I was like, oh, see how I didn't think my needs were going to get met. So whether they're emotional or physical or some sort of way, oh, my needs are met and somehow or another, I'm responsible for other people's needs.

Those two things, I need to make sure mom is happy or dad is happy or that my sisters and brothers get taken care of. That's usually the background. Not always, but 80% of the time, that's a background of a cheaper. So they felt that abandonment. And so the way that it works is if you have a pattern in your life that isn't serving you anymore, like dating the same kind of person over and over again or having the same kind of boss over and over again or finding yourself abandoned over and over again.

And typically what's happening is that there's an emotion there that you aren't feeling. And so your body is operating like trying to get back into homeostasis. It's recreating that pattern over and over and over again until you finally get to feel the emotion and and clarified in your system. And so what I notice is when we're moving people out of decades old patterns, one of the things they're usually ashamed of it, that's what keeps it stuck. And if they feel the emotion that they've been avoiding in that pattern, then the pattern goes away. So for me, emotional abandonment was a big deal with an alcoholic father. And everything that I did to avoid it, I invited it in.

So I call that like the golden algorithm is what we call that. And so what that looks like is, I'm scared you're going to emotionally abandon me. I don't want to feel that. So move number one, I just get hard and tense, which makes you want to run away because that's how I'm trying not to feel it. Move number two is get needy. Oh, can I help you? Can I do, like how can I get you to stay?

Which also makes people want to go, ugh, move away. So the way in which we try to not feel the thing is the way that we invite it. So any emotion, you can notice, any emotion that you're trying to not feel your inviting it in the exact way you're trying not to feel it. Yeah. It's so cool. That's huge. You've got to say that one more time. Yeah. Yeah. That right there, that was one of the first big takeaways that I took from you. Yeah. And it's not that I hadn't heard some version of that, but I want to give you so much acknowledgement that the way that it was all pieced together, it just, it clicks sometimes. So would you mind repeating that? Yeah. No problem. The emotion that we're trying not to feel, we invite in the exact way

that we're trying not to feel it. Take any emotion. Any emotion that people are trying to resist. Yeah. Look at the way you try to resist it. Yeah. And then notice how that invites it into your world. So you were giving the example of abandonment.

Yeah. Can you give another example that can connect with people? Yeah. Well, let's try one with you. What's an emotion that you... I mean, abandonment is probably one of the main ones. Okay. And so when you notice that you might get abandoned, what's your reaction?

I definitely go into the zone of I got a feeling. figure everything out by myself. So I'll isolate from other people. Right. So you already did it. You isolate, which is abandonment. Yeah. It's just that quick. And that we actually have a prompt. I think we put it on LinkedIn the other day. We have an AI prompt where you can put this in and then it asks you the questions and it shows you how you're doing it, which is pretty cool. But yeah, there's, even if you don't do abandonment, let's say you're trying not to feel angry. This is a kind of a classic one. I don't want to feel angry because, let's say, mom abandoned me when I was angry or somebody

always got angry or at me when I got angry. And so I'm not going to get angry. So what do I do? Typically, when people don't get angry, they get a little passive aggressive, they do a little gilchipy, they do little pokes. And then that gets people angry at them, which usually brings up the anger more in the person. It's another great example. But it's literally every, I mean, I've done this with thousands of people and marked it out.

It's really consistent. It's powerful and a little bit disarming for people, I'm sure, to see it. It's like, wow, I'm a child. Yeah. And I don't mean that in a negative way. Right, yeah. I'm a child. I am saying, okay, you don't love me.

I'm going to, you know, run away or do this. or do that. Yeah. And it's, you feel for everybody that has that pattern, which we all do. We all do, yeah.

And you feel for them more so that sometimes just not doing that thing is the answer. Yeah. Just not being in it. Yeah. And if you're married to somebody

or relating to somebody who's doing that thing to not allow it, not that you change them, but you just don't buy in. you know i mean that's an incredibly healing thing that's what you get to see happened in our workshops and the people who do the work like how their marriages go is that you know my wife would literally say to me there's nothing in me that wants you to feel abandoned right now i can get really so she's

sensing a pattern in you right she's seeing you pull away because maybe you guys are talking about a conflict or arguing over something or whatever it might be yeah so you're armoring up and your go-to for that is what uh crossing your arm Yeah, we'd get angry. Okay, you get angry. Yeah. So she knows you. She's seeing this pattern pull out.

She's like, oh, there's nothing. And does she, for, you know, in a relationship, is she touching you when she's doing this? Or she sort of saying it across the room? You guys are sitting on like. It's a little different every time. But usually it's just, she just says it. She just looks at me, open-hearted. There's nothing in me that wants you to feel abandoned right now.

I have a woman that I've been working with for a long time. Her name is Sarah. And she's amazing. And I would come in frustrated every once in while into the office. And I love my frustration. And I definitely don't want it to go away because my frustration is it's never at anybody or very, very rarely at anybody. But I always know it's something that's important.

And one day I walked into the office, I was like, oh, I'm frustrated. And she's like, good. I love your frustration. My whole system went, someone's going to be able to hold me in this. And so then I relax. says like, this is what I'm frustrated back. She's like, great. Like, I see how this can improve what we're doing.

But yeah, oftentimes if you can meet the person, I'm not saying I accept abuse or anything like that, but if you can meet the person as they are and speak to the pattern underneath it, it can be incredibly healing for a relationship. So in that moment, there's part of you that is using this outward expression of anger. You might have forgotten about it temporarily,

even though you teach this work, just as we all, we can hear this podcast and we'll forget about it the next moment. We'll get stuck in our stuff. But your wife is seeing that you're projecting, is that the right word? Yeah, projecting. You're projecting. You're using anger as a way to say, nobody loves me, I'm on my own.

The anger is an old one. I would say the new, let me think about what a recent one is. When we do retreats, often I will rush. If I'm like, oh, everybody's, we got to end her new one is, I see how much you care. So you're rushing her because maybe you guys have to go somewhere. Or I'm just rushing. You're just rushing.

Which is not how I want to be deeply present with people. I don't want to be rushing. Okay. Deep work now. You know, I want to, great, I'll be a couple minutes late if that's what's necessary to be present with them. And she'll just say, I see how much you care. Immediately dissolves it in me. That's powerful.

I mean, obviously you both are playing. Is that a prompt that you came up with? Is that something that she came up on our own? We investigated it together. I think it was actually a third person who came up with. we were doing it during a facilitation and we had our co-facilitators with us. And I was like, I noticed that I rush. I don't know if you all see it.

They're like, yeah, we see it. I was like, okay. So I would love an antidote to that. And so we sat around and brainstormed and somebody said that. I'm like, that does it right away for me. Wow. Because for me, the rush is I don't want people to think that I'm abandoning them, right, the way I was abandoned.

For somebody who's listening and they're in a relationship and they're like, I have this pattern with my. partner, you know, they come home from work and they feel stressed out and they can't shake off what they went through in the day and they become cold or they, you know, they get worried sometimes about stuff. They feel like it's all on them. They're not opening up. How do we create some of that in our own life? So typically the way that we talk about this and is if you're, if you want, it's just like the emotions or just like yourself. If you're trying to drive to an outcome, it's less likely to work.

I want my partner to feel more emotionally available is not going to work. What does work is like, what do you want? How does that? How does the emotional availability work for you? What are you looking for? What's satisfying? What's not satisfying?

It's open-ended questions full of love, full of vulnerability, your own vulnerability, impartiality, and empathy and wonder. It's like to be with them afresh in it and to chat with them. about it and be in a deep state of wonder with them and then allow them to come to you with what they want. The thing is even when I'm coaching people and when people see my coaching, they think

it's amazing because there's a lot of transformation in a short period of time. But what shocks people even more than that is that I'm following the person. I might not look like I have because I know shortcuts now, but I'm following them. They're telling me everything I need to know. And they usually tell me in the first minute. They're telling me what it is that they, what they want. They're telling me how they stop it. They tell me how they're going to mess with me in the coaching session. They do it all in the first minute if I'm listening, you know.

And so almost all that can be solved in the moment with them. Like right now, I see you're in a relationship like this with me right now. How is that working out for you? You know, and so it's all about that following them. It's not about getting your, you know, trying to change them. Moving a mountain or changing man, I'd rather move a mountain. It's easier. So I won't even do coaching with folks who don't have a question.

So because I can't follow them if they don't want to go. Yeah, it's an important insight. It's so much of modern day relationship, I'm sure it's been this way for a while, but maybe magnified in more modern day is stuck in sort of. of people trying to get to an outcome and using some version of their shadow side to manipulate each other to get to that outcome. Totally. That's what it is.

And nobody's happy with that. Nobody wants that. We don't feel good when we, when somebody, when we feel that somebody's trying to manipulate us. Right. It doesn't feel good. Right. And yet so many people feel stuck in a relationship because they never were, is it

as simple as they were just never given the tools and they never, saw a lot of healthy relationships around them. So they just don't know. Is it that simple? It's that simple to explain how it got there. Yeah, it's not that simple to fix it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think very few of us got unconditional love for who we were.

But my thought process is that, I mean, have you met people that have gotten unconditional love? Because even people that I hear of that had, you know, a really good childhood, right? And I know that that can mean a lot of different things and implications. right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that good? Are you projecting? Are you not seeing the humanity of your parents and where they actually messed up,

which is not blaming them, but they're a human being too? Right, right. Right. Like, are you romanticizing your childhood, right, instead of seeing it? But I guess what I'm saying is that are there two-part question, are there people that have gotten unconditional love? And number two, is that even needed because everybody's a human being? And so everybody has some version of this wound,

and we all need to be able to have the recent. resources to do the work to, you know, not overcome it, but be more accepting of who we are. Yeah. Two-part question. I don't know if I've met anybody who has, but I have, has that unconditional love. But I have, I'm a weird point of fact because you wouldn't come to me potentially if you had it. So like, maybe I just haven't met those people yet. But if I look at my daughters who both got raised with a tremendous amount of, of unconditional love. never, never punished. I don't think ever.

Shamed a couple times with an almost always an immediate apology, both successful now. One's about to be a junior, so as successful as one can be at that. So they're great kids. And they still wrestle with how to love. But they also wrestle with the fact that, it's really hard for them because there's not a lot of people who can be as connected or deep with them as they want.

So they also have that issue. It's harder for them to find friends. They have a lot of friends, but it's harder for them to find those close friends. But they're still learning something. And I think that that's just part of our nature. But I don't know if the first part makes too much of a difference. All that really makes a difference is, are you taking? taking your relationship to help you find your own freedom?

Are you taking your relationship to manage the other person? And I highly recommend the first. How do I learn how to be free? And that's what made all the difference in our marriage. Tara and I married now 26, seven years. And like at the beginning of our relationship looked like my parents' relationship. So it was me yelling at her over the car with a pitchfork and her revving the engine to run me over and yelling at each other.

And that was not uncommon. It was like an M&M video. And so it was brutal. And one of the big pivot points was, oh, I can't change her. I can only change myself. Every time I'm triggered, that's more about what's happening to me than what's happening in her because somebody else wouldn't be triggered by that. they have more freedom than I

and every time I saw oh I'm upset I need to change her whatever somebody else has more freedom than that and I want what that person has somebody else can be with her in this date with an open loving heart and I want that freedom I don't want the freedom of

I am controlled by her whims you know I don't want freedom that I'm pulled into her trauma I want the freedom of I can love her unconditionally in any place that she's at. And she luckily wanted that same freedom. And so that just changed everything about our marriage because it became our path to freedom rather than something that needed to be managed

so that we could feel safe. Inside of a relationship, many people have an idea that, hey, I want a relationship with somebody that I can love them unconditionally, right? And I want them, especially most people probably have the feeling, I wish I was with somebody that would love me unconditionally. Yeah. And you're lucky if you're even thinking that. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good start. Yeah.

And yeah, you're lucky. You're lucky if you could think that. The pathway to that direction of just even improving any relationship. Yeah. Intimate relationship. Is it always first through ourselves? So if we don't learn how to love ourselves unconditionally, there's zero chance in hell that we're going to give it to somebody else. Correct.

Correct, but a little bit without the self-reliance. So I'd say, correct. and your relationship can be a tool for that and you two can agree to do that together. So the relationship can be one of the vehicles that helps you unlock it for yourself. In fact, you might say that that's the primary purpose. One of the primary purposes of a relationship. We don't have to be a monk that disappears to the Himalayas. Right.

And we figure it out on our own. We come back when everything is all good. Well, you can't. And you can't. You can't. Right? Yeah. It's actually through. Show me the monk.

Show me the monk with the two screaming. kids in the back of the car. He's not frustrated. Having been the guy who meditated for close to a decade, six, seven hours a day most of the time, like that was great, but it wasn't real life. And real life, business failures and kids getting upset and kids with colic and wife having a bad day. And like that was the thing that was a far greater teacher to me than learning how to sit with myself. That was, that was easy. That was easy work. And unnecessary and good work. Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that it's bad. I think I just think it's balanced with humanity. It's really easy to be a quantumist when you're getting two meals a day and you're

sitting quietly. It's harder to be a class when, you know, your company's capitalization just dropped and by 50 percent for market cap. I had this mentor in the Jane tradition. Oh, yeah, yeah. His name was Chitrabanaji. He passed away a few years ago. The opening of the primary text of the Jane is freaking amazing. It's one of the best openings. I think I read it like 20 times when it was put in front of me. It's amazing.

Yeah. There's a few books that are there. But yes, I definitely agree with you. He was a former monk and then left the monkhood largely out of like a lot of the things that you were talking about. ended up getting married, was very involved in sort of the civil rights movement and the movement of Ahimsa that Gandhi was doing at the time in India and felt very called to sort of participate in that and then became a householder and brought sort of the Jane tradition to North America. Anyways, the reason I bring him up is that he would always do these lectures for, you know,

youth in that community. And one of the things that you would talk about was say, you know, the reason that business and career and relationship are some of the best teachers in life is because in our modern sort of Western world, most people are taught that these things, when you finally get them, when you finally get that job, when you finally make that amount of money or the Disney version, when you finally marry the princess or Prince Charming, then everything else is going to come together. And they're the best teachers.

that are there because they're the realization that that's not where, you know, the happiness is found. Yeah. And what it brings up for me is that is these things that we're all dealing with on a day-to-day basis. If we allow them to without the resistance, which is a key part of your message, this is literally where we're meant to be. Yeah.

You know, Byron Katie has this quote. is like, this is where you're meant to be. How do you know? Because this is exactly where you are. Which I love. Yeah. Ramana Marhii has a really good, similar story to that. Somebody comes up and he says,

should I be a householder or should I be a monk? I'm a householder. I'm wondering if I should be a monk. And Ramana goes, no, you shouldn't be a monk. And the guy's like, well, you don't even know me. How can you say that that quickly? He goes, what you should be is sitting here asking me a question. I love.

Where else should you be? I believe he also had this quote. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Yeah, yeah. I think one of his students asked him, asked him, how do we measure spiritual progress? Yeah. And he said by the absence of thought.

And so my question for you is, do you have any general thoughts in that? And number two, as part of this work of doing the inquiry, right? Yeah. Not resisting is one byproduct of it that you're able to sort of be in more, you're just in a state of joy because you're not having so many of these 50,000 thoughts in the day

running and ruining your life. You're just more present. It's a little trickier, I think, than that. I think from his point of view, that made a lot of sense because he was sitting and teaching all day and didn't have like a modern life in that way. He just sat. And so I think for him, that makes a lot of sense. I think one of the ways to measure, particularly development of the prefrontal cortex of the human part is the reduction of, I wouldn't say thought generally. I would say the reduction of repetitive, repetitive thought, particularly repetitive critical thought. And I would probably just say repetitive thought because oftentimes positive thoughts are a way to, you can do it is a way of saying,

I don't actually believe you can do it, so you need a pep talk. So there's a little bit of a trick in there. But generally, those repetitive thoughts going down, I think is a mark of progress in the prefrontal cortex. I think not believing your thoughts is also a mark of that.

But I don't think it expresses the movement of the heart or the movement of the gut. The movement of the heart is just the emotion, fluidity, how easily does it all pass through you? And the movement of the gut is how much pleasure you can take. You've talked about some of these themes, but I just want to put it together. You share this in your breaking free of the Matrix protocol video. You've already talked about a lot of these themes that are there. But I think it's helpful to bring it back to a little bit of that structure here as we continue. What is the matrix? Yeah. So this is the golden algorithm. This is the exact thing

of the golden algorithm. And it's basically how we trap ourselves by trying to avoid our emotions, how we trap ourselves in emotions by trying to avoid our emotions. So that was what we were talking about is like we are in our own, we are creating our own reality that traps us.

Yeah. So step one was notice any emotion that you're avoiding. Yes. Step two was notice how you're avoiding the feeling. Yes. Right? And then step three, which I'd love you to expand on a little bit,

is notice how that avoidance actually brings that emotion to you. You shared about it a little bit earlier. We talked about in the context of abandonment. Yes. We also, I think there was another couple examples that you shared as well. Would you mind give us one more example inside of that space? Something that you see a lot of people dealing with today. Yeah. Let's use anxiety. So oftentimes, and there's a lot of ways that people can avoid anxiety. But I was sitting with a woman today and she's like, how do I get rid of my anxiety? And my answer is always the same, which is you don't. You love your anxiety. You go towards your anxiety. You feel everything that the anxiety has to offer. But let's take a look at it. So what do you do when

you're anxious? Oh, I start doing my to-do list. Cool. And so if you have a day where you're just in your to-do list all day, how do you feel at the end of the day? How do you feel at the end of the day? I feel like wound up and and I have a hard time getting to sleep. I'm like so by doing your to-do list to get away from anxiety, you get more anxious by the end of the day. I have an example of that in my personal life

that I'll share a little bit. I got my wife's permission to talk about this beforehand. Cool. I was playing on. How long have you been married? I've been married now for three years. Awesome. Yeah.

Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, I've been married three years now. Yeah. And my wife's amazing. shout out to her, Yasmin. I would notice sometimes that when she was in her getting things, I have to get things done. Yeah.

The immediate thing would be, especially if you're at home, she feels stressed out, there's a lot of stuff for us to do. Yeah. She would go and immediately sort of empty out the dishwasher, like something task-oriented. Right. Just to start to sort of scratch that feeling of like, I feel behind is what we started to explore. Okay, what do you feel right now? Yeah. Okay.

I'm feeling behind. Yeah. Okay. What does that make you feel? Yeah. Like when you feel behind, yeah. What else does that bring up for you?

Yeah. I'm not getting enough done. Yeah. Okay. All right. Go deal a deeper. My business isn't growing as much this month as it was the last month. Right.

Maybe I'm not a good CEO. Maybe I'm not a good steward of my team. Maybe I'm not a good leader and so on and so forth. Right. That would come up. And I've had those same exact, feelings myself. Yeah, yeah.

That are there. And I think the power is when you can catch that for yourself and your partner. And sometimes you'll get better at catching it in your, I get better. There are moments where I'm like, oh, I'm so good at catching out of her. Right, right, right. Yeah. But can you be honest about the times where you're doing that same thing? Yeah.

That same version for yourself. And those are my favorite moments because they're so humbling to me that, wow, I talk a big game. and I can point it out on somebody else, but here I am doing the same thing. Okay, let's not turn that into a judgment. Let's also hold that as well. Yeah. Right.

What does that make you feel? Oh, I should know better. Oh, I've already read, I've read this book. Why am I not practicing that thing? Right. So that feels like shame. Yeah. Right.

Mine, my sort of branch. I'm not reading that book. I'm not like that feels like. Or I have been reading these books and I should know better. Would that also be... Shame. Yeah.

Right, which is going to stagnate the experience. Yeah. So in that example, so let's say that she's worried at the end of it is, oh, I don't feel like I'm doing a great job as a CEO. So let's say she does the dishes for six hours, cleans the house, does all that stuff. At the end of those six hours where she scratched that itch

or didn't feel the thing of, oh, I might not be a great CEO. all that leaves her with is six hours later going, I should have been like working on my business rather than doing the dishes. Sure. And therefore it just amplifies the emotional experience. And my version of that, not to make sure that I still talk about me too, is that I might start checking off a to-do list of all these priorities that other people have for me, which I also have gotten really good at in my life.

Yeah, yeah. Of, and I think this is where we share a tiny bit of an overlap in our stories. You moved around, I think, to a bunch of different cities when you were younger. Yeah, yeah. My dad was doing the immigrant dream and was getting promoted to different sort of roles in finance, ultimately a CFO of a group of psychiatric hospitals. And we would move every time he got a new opportunity. Now, it wasn't 26 times, but it was like four times, five times.

at like key critical moments in your life. You're just about to start middle school or high school or whatever it might be. I was harder for my older sister actually than even it was for me. And I got really good when you move into a new school. Well, I got really good at like, well, how do I get people to like me? Because I don't want to not have friends. That's painful. What happens when you don't have friends?

Well, you might get picked on, which I did at a period of time. You don't as much fun. You feel alone. Yeah. and all the other feelings that go with there. So how I got good and one of my sort of coping mechanisms, this started more in high school, is I became good at being the resource guy for other people.

Yeah. Like I was. You still are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If somebody needed something or needed a situation, even teachers.

Yeah. Like, oh, we don't have a computer for this. Like, I would go and talk to this other person and this department or know who to email at the superintendent's office or whatever it might be. Nice. Nice. Because when you are in my sort of childhood mind, oh, if I can do things for people, they'll never let me go.

Right. And that pattern turned into overcommitting as a young adult after I left school into university and constantly being in this place where I'm beating myself up of, why am I burning out every few months because I have so many different things I'm doing and it's not even the core thing that I want to work on in the first place. Right. I'm overworking on these nonprofits.

I'm sitting on too many different things. I've taken on too many responsibilities or events or stuff for friends. Yeah. And that was one of the main drivers in my life that was not only driving unhappiness, but my health was taking a huge toll during that period of time.

Yeah. And I have enough insight to know that has helped me avoid the extreme versions of those things. Yeah. But today, if I feel stressed, I have to really sort of say, how am I playing out that emotion? Yeah, yeah. And it's, oh, let me do all these things for other people because at least I have control that the people around me won't abandon me.

Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. And that doesn't feel good because just like you were talking about the example with my wife. Yeah. And okay, you can do six hour dishes and that doesn't help you get any further in being a better CEO. Right. I can do 10 hours of work for other people and planning and following up and connecting

other things, which all from the outside may look very benevolent. People even tell me a lot of times, dude, you're so selfless. Look at all these things you do for other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in these moments of truth, especially with my men's group meets on a weekly basis, I'm like, dude, it may look great, but there's plenty of times that I'm doing it to completely avoid a feeling that I don't want to feel inside. Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay, let's break down, see if I can do this, if I can remember enough to do this. break down a couple of the things that we talked about. So the first one is a childhood experience landed a pattern of not being able to, or not wanting to feel this thing, which made sense as a kid you don't want to feel. It would that level call it abandonment or you could call it isolation or some version of, I'm not going to get the support that I need. And from that, you learned this behavior of satisfying a whole bunch of people,

being the resource guy. That's the behavior that you learned. And by being the resource guy, in and of itself, it keeps you isolated. Meaning, so this is the matrix or the golden algorithm, meaning on some level, when I work with people, what they know is they don't want you. They want your resources. So you're still isolated. If you've set up a world where everybody wants you because of what you can deliver, then they don't want you. Right.

if you have to be somebody else to get people to love you, then they don't love you. And so that's the pattern that was learned. And what happens today is that emotion arises. And when that emotion arises, you're like, I don't want to feel that emotion, stress. What do I do about stress? I'm going to do what I typically did on some version of that, not the version that you had in your college, but your new version of it. Fuck that. I'm not doing that.

Instead, I'm just going to really deeply feel that isolation. I'm going to, what is that thing? What is it trying to tell me? What's the signal that it's trying to give me? How do I love that thing the way that I wasn't loved? Literally, I would say, treat that feeling of isolation the way you wanted to be treated when you were isolated. Like what is the love and attunement that you didn't get and give it to that isolation? And when that happens and three or four times that isolation arises and you give it that attunement,

then that whole pattern can drop. And then you look around and you say, oh, I do want to give or I don't want to give. I do want to provide a resource for somebody because it feeds me. What you do right now clearly feeds you. So this is a place I want to do it. And this is a gift of my upbringing.

But this other way, I don't want to do that anymore. And so it can go away because you're not doing it as a way of running away from this emotion of being isolated. Because it's a trap for some people, and I've definitely done this, is that if you don't do that, you are walking around with all this, all these ball and chains, these rocks that you're carrying around with you, which you're projecting as the expectations of other people.

And it actually has nothing to do with that. Even more than that. Let's say you were throwing a party and I showed up. And you're like, hey, Joe, glad you could come. And I was like, well, I came because I felt obligated. Would you say, cool, you should keep on being here. I'm so glad to have you. Or would you be like, well, I don't really want you here if you're,

if you're doing this out of obligation. Yeah. Most people don't want you doing what you're doing if they knew it was out of obligation. As soon as you see that, then the obligation joke subsides in your life. No, like nobody actually wants me doing this if I feel obligated.

And if they do, do I want that relationship? Right. It's a transactional relationship. It's a transactional relationship. That's really beautiful. It reminds me of a story that you shared in some of your content. And before I share, you know, what it was,

the idea that like a compassionate truth, the freedom that comes along with it. And the story that I'm thinking of is you mentioned that when you were younger, that there was a friend, I believe his name was Alex. That's right, Alex Bell. That told you one time and sat you down and literally said, hey, we would all like you a lot more if you just lied less. And at that point in time in your life, I was lying all the time. You were lying all the time. Yeah, yeah. I was a freshman in high school, had that super abusive childhood. So I felt like there was absolutely something wrong with me and the only way I'd be liked is by line. And it was compulsive and everybody knew it, but I didn't particularly know that everybody knew it. And when he just sat me down,

it was an amazing thing because he sat me down just no judgment, no hardship, no wanting to change me. Just, hey, just wanted you to know. In a way, the reason I bring it up too is that Alex is kind of like we are all wanting to train ourselves to have an inner Alex. Right? That benevolent version of us that can just meet us where we're at. You were talking about, hey, what did you want to feel when you were really feeling isolated? Yeah. Right?

What would you, what if you really want? What would you have want to be met with? Yeah. And I would have wanted to be met with just a sense of love, understanding. Yeah. And like just a place to sort of fully feel what I was feeling. Yeah. Without somebody saying, get over it.

Right. Exactly. And without somebody saying, no, you're not isolated. all these other people love you. Right. Yeah. Right. Which can sometimes be in our field like spiritual bypassing or whatever it might be.

Yeah. You would have wanted somebody just be there and say, hey, I'm here. Yeah. I'm here. Yeah. So that would be a place. So to tie it into the other part of our conversation, that would be a great place. When you see that happening, what is it that your wife could say or do for you in that moment?

That would immediately neutralize. that experience. Yeah. Kind of like the phrase that your wife gave you, right? What's a phrase that she could say that would resonate or action? Yeah, action. So some of the things for my wife, it's just being held. She's like, when you see me doing this, will you just come and hold me?

Yeah. Sometimes it's just physical. But what is the thing that she could say when you're feeling, you notice that you're acting out of obligation, that you have some sort of tension and you're feeling that, even though you might not recognize it right away, you know you're feeling that aloneness, that isolation. Like, what's the thing that she could do that would just immediately show your mind that you're not a kid anymore?

You're not isolated. And that isolated part of yourself can be fully accepted and loved. Yeah, I think actually being held, like coming up to me and hugging me, holding me. Yeah. Like, that definitely would. Because I think about the, sometimes I know where my mind is at by sort of sensing where my body's at. That's right.

Right? Yeah. So if I can see myself sort of frantically kind of doing things or I keep up tension in my neck that's there, maybe have my arms are a little bit hunched up because that's where the tension is or maybe my jaw's tight, I can immediately see somebody coming me, not somebody, my wife coming to me, you know, holding me. Yeah. Giving me a hug. And all of a sudden, all that stress that you're putting into your body in real time to try to carry the burden of something, it's not needed anymore. Yeah. And probably if there's a lot of self-reliance, some phrase of like, I got you, I'm right here with you, or some version of you're not alone in this.

But probably also, there might be some phrase like that to experiment with the hug. I'll try those on. Yeah, yeah. I'll try it on. If she's game, don't like, don't force. Oh, she's super game. Yeah. That's one of the things I appreciate about her the most.

You made a piece of content that I really loved. And I want to set you up for this part of the podcast, which is that you share that a lot of people come to you. Yeah. And they're wanting to work with you because inadvertently they want to figure out how can I be happier? Yeah. And they start to make a list of all the things that they need to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the dilemma, as you set up the video, and we'll link to in the show notes because I thought it was so beautifully done. The dilemma is that some things they might make some, progress on, some things they don't do, and they use that as an opportunity to sort of beat themselves up and be even unhappy, more unhappier than when they started off with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the setup for the video is that oftentimes by studying the thing that is the opposite that leads to, like, you want to be happy?

Well, let's study, like, if you absolutely did not want to be happy. What would you do? What would you do? Just like, it's one of my favorite questions because I ask it. It's a health podcast. All ask experts who come on here and I say, I have a group of 100 people, induce depression in them from a food, society, and everything else. What would you have them do if you wanted to guarantee that these people would walk away depressed

and just extremely unhappy with their life? And people say, okay, yeah, number one, I'm eating only ultra-processed foods. Right? Number two, and so on and so forth. Yeah. And so you had a list inside of here, which was the protocol for being. unhappy and the first thing on there was number one be a victim yeah yeah it's really hard to be happy if you think that other people are in control of your

happiness and that's basically what victim is victim is a hard word to use in today's society because you know if I'm in the Ukraine war and Russia just bombed apartment complex. Like, there's a real victim to that. And in South Africa, you know, the Mandela was put into a camp and told to break rocks.

There's a real victimhood to that. So I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the mentality of, oh, poor me, I don't have control. I don't have, I'm not empowered to change something as compared to a Mandela who is like, oh, no, how I am with myself, that's always in my choice. I get to be how I want to be in this moment, and nobody can take that away from me.

I'm speaking about that kind of victim. And so if you don't feel like you have choice and the world is the way it is, there's just no way that's going to lead to happiness. And so that's a, and typically also people who have the propensity for that behavior, they also seem to freeze a lot when their emotions come into play. And so they're stifling their emotional. The more likely you are to feel that you're a victim and that it's everybody else is the problem. Excluding out these extreme acts of violence and everything else that we're talking about,

sexual abuse. The more likely you are to do that, the more likely you are to be somebody that feels stagnant with your emotions. No, just that you are more likely to freeze as your fear. response. So fight, fight, flight, and freeze. And so there's a lot of, which is holding back your emotions in that moment. There's, there's ways other people hold up back their emotions, but there's more likely to freeze. So also creates a lot of, it creates a lot of suffering. A phrase you've never heard is, I am so happy because everybody else gets to determine what I do.

I'm so happy because, you know, my society and my mom and dad told me how to be and I have to be that way. It's just, it's not a recipe for happiness. When I think about it. When I think about being a victim, I also think about like the law of responsibility. If it's 100% somebody else's fault, I can't do anything to change in anyway. And so. Except for your reaction to it. Yeah. 100% their fault. Great. But give me 100 people and they're going to react differently to that thing. How are you going to react to it? That's where you have the freedom. Yeah. And I guess the second part of that that I was mentioning is that if we at least played a small role, that means, that we have agency in our life.

Yeah. Right. And we've always played a small role, even if that is our perspective of the situation. That's true. Right. Which often is the biggest role that's there. Number two on the list is repress emotions. This has been the first part of our entire conversation.

Yeah, exactly. Right. But anything you want to say about that in the context of happiness? Not anything that we haven't said already. Let's go to number three. Have no gratitude. Yeah. Why is that such an important part of keeping?

keeping you unhappy. If you want to stay unhappy, definitely don't have no gratitude. Yeah. So gratitude is what, so one of the things that gratitude does is it makes, it, it helps you recognize that you're not fully in charge. So, and by not being fully in charge, there's a, there's a sense of freedom to it. So I'll give you a thing that I talk about with free will often. There's some point in the journey where it's really important to say, I have free will. I get to choose. This is, this is me and I get to make the life that I want to make it, which is the victim thing that we are talking about. There's another place where that sense of self and I become such a burden that there's another thought that creates a lot of freedom,

which is it's all a gift. It's not all on me. In Islam, it's surrender. In some forms of Christianity, it's surrender, it's this, oh, there's something greater than me moving, even if it's my unconscious, if you don't believe in God. It is the same thing that gives you relief when you realize that none of the thoughts are yours, that they're just moving through you as well. And so gratitude is one of the ways that we can acknowledge that because what we're not doing is I'm grateful for me. You know, it's like I'm grateful for the food on the table. All the people who brought thick food on the table. I'm grateful for the fact that today was a good day.

You're acknowledging that there's stuff outside of your control. And there's a lot of freedom because it unwinds a lot of the obligation, that we feel in a lot of the self-pressure that you feel when you uncover the fact that you're not a victim that you get to choose. And so this is a lot like what I was saying is the stages of the beginning you think you're to blame in the second stage. you think, the first stage you think others are to blame. The second stage you think you're to blame.

It's like, and then the third stage is where it leads, which is no one's to blame. Number four, isolate yourself. My shadow side. Yeah. No connection, no happiness. Yeah, there's a great book, and I can't remember the author's name who basically talks about depression as a lack of connection. I would add some things to that thesis, but, uh,

that Harvard thing that I was talking about, that long study, the more connection we feel that just the happier we are, the longer we live, the less health issues we have, psychologically more stable, all those things. So that deep level of connection with, I would say, with self and others is incredibly, it's just we're born for it. We're born social animals. So it's like, put a dog in a cage. It's not going to be happy because it doesn't get to be itself. Even if we're introverted, connection is deeply important to us. And I think the best study on this is, you know, the rats and heroin addiction thing,

you know about that one where in the 70s, yeah, exactly. 70s, they gave a rat this thing and it's like all the rats got addicted because they could push a lover and get cocaine or heroin or whatever. They're like, well, there's just nowhere to stop it. And then they put the rat with a whole bunch of other rats. I think it was like 10% of them became addicted or something like that. Yeah, they had like a whole rat playground where they can play with other rats and all of a sudden addiction is not something that's happening at that same level.

Exactly. Before we go to number five, which is feel superior, I have a question which is as we're going through this list. Yeah. Can somebody audit these things in their own life? Like for example, number three and number four, like, okay, if you don't want to be stuck in unhappiness. Yeah.

Can you audit the amount of moments or expressions of gratitude that you had today? And is it helpful to work on that from the outside and say, you know what, I want to be more grateful. Let me practice being more grateful, right? Is that helpful? Super helpful. Yeah. So the first thing I would say is that there isn't happiness and non-happiness.

There is a, it's asymptotic in the fact that you can always deepen your happiness. and so it's just a scale. And as it turns out, I haven't found a place where I'm like, okay, I'm happy enough. You know, there's enough joy in my life. So you can continue to deepen almost all of these things. And so that it just, oh, like in this moment, there's, we could be 10% more connected, as it turns out.

And I've never met a moment that hasn't allowed for me to deepen my connection with myself or with others. similarly being better than is a little on and off it's like a yes or no thing but the other ones you know we all have a little victim in us like how how

how do I let go a little more victim how do I allow for a little more gratitude how do I deepen my connection and that so that's a way that I think about it is and almost all of them have, like there's a sense of practice, but it's not a sense of practice. Like, I have to get better at it. It's a sense of practice.

There was this great musician that I was listening to recently as a famous jazz musician. And he said, the way you practice is like the way you brush your teeth. You're not trying to get anywhere. I practice the piano because I'm not trying to get anywhere. When I tried to get somewhere, it slowed down my practice. If I do it just like, oh, this is what I do. then my practice goes a lot smoother.

And so it's just like, great way to practice connection is how do I be 10% more connected right now? A great way to do gratitude is, I find seven minutes of gratitude a day is incredibly useful, especially if it's with somebody, where you're viscerally feeling. We have a whole way of teaching how people how to do connection or do gratitude. And I think we even have a like a day,

daily gathering of people doing gratitude. And it's very visceral and very felt. And that changes lives dramatically because one is that if we're solving problems, we usually solve problems from this is wrong. How do I fix it instead of this is right? How do I grow it? And gratitude really points to that which is right. And it also helps people because it redefines who we are.

My wife and I, when we didn't have any money, started a gratitude practice of everything we did have, financially and a year later we were out of debt making tons of money. So there's, again, I've seen people redefine all sorts of themselves that way. Like I can't get the love relationship that I want. So gratitude, when you start showing yourself, oh, here's a way I get love, here's a way I get love, here's a way I get love. You can't think of yourself as the person who doesn't have love anymore. And so then that changes your identity.

And so, yeah, there's practices of all of them and they go on forever. they just keep on opening doors is my experience. I have a version of that with my year-end review. Yeah. And I'll often do it with my wife. Before I did it with her, I would do it with friends. And one of the things that happens when people are thinking about the year that is coming,

they're immediately starting from a place traditionally. Let's say you're understanding that New Year's resolutions aren't the best way to approach the next year. Still, it's a sense of, okay, what do I want? more of. Yeah. And I often found that when I'm in that place, there's an immediate sort of feeling of not understanding how hard I work to get even where I am right now. Yes. And so I would always start off, I published it for my readers and everything on my newsletter. It's called a gratitude hack workshop. Yeah. Is that instead of, you know, setting goals in the traditional way or even

a different version, let's actually take a moment, which is a little uncomfortable. Because if you're going to go and think about, I have three questions, which I can just, share real quick, if you're going to think about the year and actually take time, you know, you lived an entire year, you've spent a lot of time on a lot of different things. You gave it your best. You went through a lot of ups. You went through a lot of downs. And even things that didn't work out, you still tried hard. Yeah. If we don't take a moment to just at least acknowledge that, then no wonder we're going into the next year feeling like we're behind. We didn't make progress. We didn't do things. But one of the first questions that I ask is no matter how big or small,

what's something that you accomplished or make progress on this month? I'll do like a monthly thing. And one of the questions is no matter how big or small, who's somebody that you helped this month? Right. And then the important one, no matter how big or small, and this was a good reminder for me, who tends to go towards isolation, not reach out,

who's somebody that helped you? That's a good one. And I found out that when I did that, I went into the year moving forward, look at all this love that not only that I gave, but I'm surrounded by. Right. Yeah, beautiful. And there's this recognition of like, I'm exactly where I need to be. And sure, that might mean that I want to accomplish more.

Yeah. Or bring in more to my life or do things or have new experiences. That's fine. But when you're approaching those things, not from a place of lack, but from a place of gratitude of everything you went through, it's a whole different energy. Yeah, because you're also redefining yourself in that moment, right? If you, if all your life you're saying, I'm not doing enough, I need to catch up, why am I accomplishing that, then you're the guy who doesn't accomplish stuff. And you're taking a moment to say, I've accomplished stuff, I'm supported, I am loved, I am supporting.

Like, you're acknowledging yourself in a different definition. And so one of the reasons that New Year's resolutions, I think, don't work. And there's a great statistic about how many of them don't work is because they're coming from that place of love. black. Here's what's wrong for me. Here's what's wrong with me. Here's what I have to fix. There's this great, like the most quintessential story I've ever heard, and I just found out, I think his name is Palmer. He's a Quaker. Deeply depressed. Had a community, but he was deeply depressed. And his community would come and visit him to help him feel better. And everybody who came to him said, you know, you could do this, you should do this. Why don't you do this?

He said every one of them made it worse because they were all agreeing with me that there was something wrong with me. One guy came in every Tuesday at noon and washed my feet. And he says that like that guy saved my life because he was the only one saying you're great just the way you are. Not you're great. And so you don't have you'll get there just like right here, right now, you're worthy of me washing your feet. and like that's what you're doing in that moment of a light version of that and so oh that's the person like the person who feels that way is the one the more likely to accomplish than the person who feels like they're not doing enough ever okay like who would you bet on here's a person who feels like

they're worthy and connected and here's the person who feels like they always are behind like who are you going to bet on to achieve the goal that they've set for themselves I intrinsically know that answer, but I'd love to ask you because you work with some of the highest performing people in the world. It feels that some of them and probably the people that you're not working with get a lot of stuff done. Now, whether or not they're in contentment, whether or not they're joyful, whether or not they actually have any sort of solace in their life, they seem to get a lot of done by berating people that they're behind and there's so much more to do. right what am I most of the ones that I've met it's pretty rare for them to have that particular

I'm not doing enough like if you're 35 years old and you're running the $2 billion company that's not particularly a story that you tell yourself that story seems to be more for people who are like aren't hyper achievers but there are people who are like achievers who have

who run that story and so it's just a very dirty fuel. It can work for a while and then it leads to burnout, which is what you are talking about with the occasional depression or burnout that you said you would have. And so it's just this very dirty fuel. You have to change your filters a lot. The people that I see that I work with that are billionaires, that's not, they're not. They're not in that, I'm not doing enough mode. That's not something in their self. They have other things that talk about but that's not it. Yeah.

Absolutely, you can get things done with that dirty fuel. Like, you can accomplish that. What I notice is the people who do accomplish that at some point have a reckoning, that they're not doing what they wanted, that they were. So even the idea of I'm behind, behind what, behind who, whose race are you running exactly? Who decided that you should be here? like that whole situation is make-believe. It's a scorecard based on some idea that we had

that our parents would be happy with or some version of that. So typically when I see someone do that, they have the dirty fuel. They burn out more often. But the other thing that happens is at some point, they wake up and they go, wait, this isn't where I wanted to be.

And so they redefine their life in some way and find something that's actually their purpose. Or the stress of it just eats them up. Yeah, yeah. Turns into disease or other things like that. Yeah, brutally. I think it was recently in one of your interviews, somebody asked you about your life's mission and work,

and you talked about this abundance of probation of two things that are sort of running society right now, stress being one of them. Yeah. And lack of enjoyment. What do you feel are the lies that keep, these things at the forefront that they're able to sort of run society or be under the surface, but something that everybody's dealing with. Are there lies that are keeping those things alive?

Yeah, the negative self-talk. That's like the big. And it's a little bit different for everybody, but there's some version is, I'm not enough, I'm not lovable, I don't belong. It's always some version of those three things in the self-talk that is keeping this whole thing. Under And the thing that I think people don't notice about is when I'm under stress, I'm seeing the world as a threat. And if I treat something like a threat long enough, they start acting like a threat. If I, like, sat here with you and after two days, I was just like, like, eventually you're going to be pissed at me. What the fuck? I didn't do anything, man.

Like, relax. Like, why are you treating me like this? Eventually there's going to be, you'll start acting like a threat. And so when we look at society where we are all stressed because of this negative self-talk and this restriction of emotions, we're treating the world as a threat and the world is acting like. And that happens on the level of society like geopolitically. Yes. It happens on the level of, you know, our community, the other. Yeah.

It happens in relationship, like in our household. Correct. And it happens with ourselves. Yeah. And it happens in like geopolitically, but also like so right now, I work deeply with an AI company. And I'm there with a lot of the decision makers. And so I get to see this entire culture. And it reminds me of a birthing process, an American birthing process, which is, okay, we're pregnant.

We're about to have a kid. First thing is, let's project onto the kid. they're going to be my savior. I'm going to be so happy. Or, oh, my God, all of my freedom is going to be taken away. So that's the first thing that everyone is projecting onto AI one of these two things. Or it's going to be inconsequential, but not a lot of people think that. But and then everybody's anxious going into like, oh, we're birthing this thing.

And it's like really anxious. It's all about the birth. But, you know, the kid comes out. And then you have to like deal with it. You have to like. And you're not thinking about that. you're thinking about the birth. And the decision about whether we should have the kid or not have a kid is far more about

how did I raise the kid. And three years from now, I should have had the kid is more about whether I raised the kid than I didn't raise the kid. And what I don't see people saying is like, oh, how do we show up for this thing with not seeing it as a threat as like, how do we care for this? how do we as a society come together to honor this thing that's happening? And we're treating, so many of us are treating different things like that in the world as a threat. And therefore, we're going to raise it like a threat. We're going to react to things and people as a threat. Politically, you see this all the time.

Everybody's a threat to everybody else. Is there ways that that plays out in like our intimate relationship? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if she does this at the party, then I'm going to be looked poorly upon stress, threat. I treat you like a threat. Therefore, I try to control you. I try to control you.

You feel controlled. You push back. We're in a fight. This is like, and it happens inside of ourselves, too. That anger that I feel, that's a threat. I'm not going to feel that, which creates the stress. The sadness, the fear. I can't feel the anxiety.

That's a thing. threat. And it's the exact opposite of what happens. When we cry, we feel better. Like our mind tells us, oh, we cry. Don't cry because if we do, it'll last forever. Don't get scared because if we do, we'll be less capable. Don't get angry because if we do, we'll destroy what we love. But in reality, when you cry, you feel better. When you allow yourself to feel fear, you feel more capable. And if you allow yourself to be angry, not at somebody, not yelling at somebody, but allow you the anger to express, you get to clarity and determination. There's no, there's no anger that isn't based in love. I got really pissed at something that I didn't care

about at all. Nobody says that, right? You get angry at the things you care about. There's some care in your anger. And when that anger gets to express, all you're left with is the care. And so, yeah, that's the, but instead we treat it as a threat and it just spirals. We treat our own anger as a threat because we're so afraid of it and we end up creating all this negativity in our lives. Our anger is a threat. Our judgment is a threat. Just parts of ourselves. We're like constantly looking at ourselves and saying that part of me is bad. That part of me is good. This is what I should do. This is what I shouldn't do. all of its shame, all of it stagnates the emotional process, stops transformation, and creates this threat that will act like a threat eventually. Yeah, and that's why it's my mission is, you know, the other way to say it is in a war

with yourself, you always lose. Like, my mission is to make a dent in the world's war with yourself. itself. Well, for a lot of people that are in your world, they see you making the rounds. Yeah. And they've even heard about the different companies that you advise and see. Yeah. I would say that a lot of my audience, you're going to be new, which I'm excited about. Well, your work is going to be new. Nice. And they feel excited about your mission. Yeah. And they also want to participate. Tell us a little about what you and your team have set up. That allows people to go down this journey if they want to do some more work in the world.

this space. Cool. So the best way to just get informed right away is to sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter will have a whole bunch of free information, access to experiments like the ones I was talking about today, and the free coaching that I do and the free workshops that we do. So you can just have a whole, we do a whole bunch of free stuff for people so that they can find out if the work is for them because we don't want to do the work with people who aren't like, yeah, let's do that. Then there's the podcast. I think we're 120-something episodes now. And it's not a typical podcast where I'm interviewing somebody. We're just extracting in for kind of this thing where I'm talking about a topic like depression or something for an extended period of time. And then YouTube and X are

other places to find me. Those are great ways. And then our courses are, you'll find out about the courses eventually, but the courses are really fun. We have a crazy completion rate. I think on average, we have a 96% completion rate of our courses because they're just really, really fun and very active, interactive courses. There's very little talking and it's just, here's an experiment, run it with a group. See what you learn. Based on a little bit of what you've learned about me here in today's conversation. Yeah. And I'm excited to try one of your courses. Is there one that you would say That could be a good fit for me. Well, so for most people, the best place to start is the connection course because it's the basics and it's about relating.

And it is that vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, wonder thing that I was talking about in relationship with each other with other people. We call it View. For you in particular, we have a course that we don't talk about. We don't put it on our website. It's called Groundbreakers. It's run with groups of 12 people. and there's two facilitators, two assistants for every 12 people. And the results have been awesome.

We've studied the results, and we reduce negative self-talk by almost the standard deviation. We reduce neuroses by a standard deviation, and we increase awe and thriving. Those are defined terms in psychological literature by close to standard deviation. So I think that would be a good one for you. Well, I'm glad I know you, so at least you can tell me a little bit more about that. I can tell you a little bit about that. Usually that's only, we only let people know that once they've done some of our other big work. Okay.

I'll put in some of the work. Okay. Yeah. And I would be totally pleased to, I highly recommend doing the connection course with your wife. Yeah. So I'd be happy to. Couples can do it together? Yeah, that one they can do together.

Can't do groundbreakers together. Yeah. But I'd be, please come as my guests. You're welcome to come. It'd be a pleasure to have you. Thank you. Joe, this has been fantastic and an honor and a pleasure. I feel like we could keep on going over here.

Oh, yeah, it'd be fun. There's so much more to talk about, but it'll leave room for another round too in the future. Thank you for coming home. Thanks for having me. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share. with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health.

We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This. Or just go to Drew Perot.com.

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