The Mindset Mentor - What It's Like to Never Sleep w/ Mike Dillard

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Mike Dillard has sold over $60 million online. On top of that, he didn't sleep for more than 2 hours for over a year. He has a wild life story and throughout this entire episode, we take you on a ride of what it's like to be a lifetime entrepreneur and how stress and micro toxins can destroy your sleeping patterns.Follow me on Instagram @RobDialJrhttps://www.instagram.com/robdialjr/ Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. And today we are diving in with my good friend, Mike Dillard. Mike Dillard has an incredible story. The guy has sold over $60 million worth of stuff online. And you know, what's cool about this podcast episode is we don't really highlight a lot of the amazing things. What we actually highlight, believe it or not, are some of the struggles that he's had along the way. Because I think most people, they look at an incredible entrepreneur that's super successful. And they think, man, it must have been so easy for them. They must have had an easy route.

I wish I had things as easy as him. But if you listen to Mike's story, you'll hear over and over and over again about different roadblocks, different failures, and how no matter what, he continues to believe in himself. And a year and a half ago, he had this really crazy thing happen where he couldn't sleep. And I mean, like did not sleep for seven days straight. And then he could only sleep for about an hour to two hours at most. And he had to take over the counter drugs and prescription drugs and tried all of these different remedies and none of them helped. And so for over a year, he was not able to sleep. And he actually contemplated committing suicide when he was on some of the prescription drugs that he was on. And he talks through what actually

happened. And what's crazy is the reason why, and you know, he's okay now and he's sleeping better now, but what he had was something that is inside of every single one of your houses, which is the crazy thing. So he'll talk about that. And then every single one of your houses, which is the crazy thing. So he'll talk about that. And then also he'll talk about how psychedelics made it worth it. So he actually went on this journey of thinking, maybe I'm not sleeping. Maybe I'm in fight or flight because I have so many past traumas that I'm dealing with. And so he talks a little bit about a psychedelic journey and how he had never done any psychedelics in his entire life and how he thinks that going through those year to 18 months of crazy times actually made it, it was worth it because he

discovered psychedelics and the healing that he had from them. So it's an incredible story. You'll hear about wins, you'll hear about losses, you'll hear about ups and downs, possible committing suicide to coming out on the other end, a better person in better shape with a great relationship, with a great life. And now he's got the next 40 years of his life to be the new person that he is. So without further ado, my friend, Mike Dillard. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. I'm sitting here with my good friend, Mike Dillard. It's been a long time getting him on the show and he's been through an incredible journey over the past about two years or so now.

And I'm excited to dive in with you, talk about it. I've seen a big change in you over the past couple years. And I'm excited to talk about it because I think there's a lot of value in the journey that you've been on. And before we dive into it though, I always like to have people have an idea of where you came from, what you do.

You're super famous in the Internet. You've sold over $60 million on the Internet. And so take us through how you got into that first before we dive into the journey that the past couple years have been for you. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. It's been, I think, a year we've been talking about getting here and then health stuff popped up. But I got my start back in high school really that's where the seed for becoming an entrepreneur was planted i grew up in san antonio texas worked at the original macaroni grill before it was a chain it was an old dance hall they converted into this

crazy ass restaurant with a three-hour wait every weekend and so i used to bus and wait tables there in school and you bust your butt you know if you get a double shift on a weekend yeah it's a good 15 18 hour day you come home exhausted at midnight one in the morning smelling like food and covered other people's food that's what i hated about bussing yeah and serving this is in the mid 90s and so there was just there was no such thing as social media yeah it was you know web 1.0 days so you would come home and obviously i'm living with my parents still so you turn on the television at 1 a.m and what's on infomercials yeah and so watching infomercials for tony robbins and carlton sheets

and all of these folks and that planted the seed that oh there are some other ways to go about making money in life so that's where the seed was planted. And I started to experiment with business ideas all the way through college, got involved in network marketing. At that point, this is mid-90s. I graduated from Texas A&M in 2000 and probably joined 12, 15 different network marketing businesses over the course of five years. Failed at all of them miserably. And realized that I had no idea how to sell. But I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

And those two things don't mix well. If you're going to own a business, got to sell. So I really struggled. I was also very introverted, very shy at that time. Didn't have a lot of confidence. And talking to strangers, pitching them on a business opportunity just felt super uncomfortable and very weird. What does this broke college student have to offer a gentleman or a woman in their 40s who have a career and I'm supposed to pitch them on a business opportunity? Right.

So I struggled. And then I finally, I didn't give up on the dream. I kept working at it, kept working at it. I graduated again in 2000, called up my mentor at the time who lived in San Diego. He was making about fifty thousand dollars a month. And I was like, OK, that's my dream goal. I know it's possible because you're doing it. I want to do that. Packed up my truck had never this is before internet video we just talked on the phone i said i'm coming out to san diego to work with you and mentor under you until i figure this out so i did drove all the way out there

with everything i owned blew the transmission going over the mountains into cali and came in in second gear that's all i had Landed on his couch with his family. Showed up at his door. First time we'd ever seen each other in person. Wow. And a broken down car. Didn't have any money or anywhere to stay to fix it. So they were super generous and allowed me to stay in their home for a week or two.

Moved into a $300 a month apartment in Temecula because I realized I couldn't afford San Diego. And next day was 9-11. So that was September 10th. September 11th happened the next day. I found out because my mom called. I didn't even have television or internet yet. And that really blew up any plans that I had. For sure. Because nobody was interested in talking business at that right moment in time for at least six months to a year so got a job at best buy you know put my tail between my legs came back to san antonio uh probably a year later started waiting tables again got a little a little stint in a corporate job but bottom line is i figured out i realized that i needed to become a professional at this industry or this business model if I wanted to actually make money. And you're how old at this point? 23, early 20s. Yeah. And again,

five years of failure by that point. I'm like, okay, what's going on here? Why are all these other people making money? And why am I not? Right. And I finally realized that I was thinking success was going to come from the product, the business opportunity, the timing, or the mentor that I was working with. None of those things pointed back at myself. And yet in every single one of those businesses, there were people making a lot of money and I was making nothing. Okay, what's going on here? And that's what I was like, you know what? They're all absolute professionals at what they do. They've mastered a certain type of skill and I have mastered nothing. And that's why I'm failing. Uh, so I translate that today into something I call PVL or your personal value level. My personal value level at the time was absolute zero. Yeah. So it was like, okay, I need to up my skills, really become a master at something.

And I dove into sales because that's where my biggest challenge and weakness was discovered direct response copywriting guys like Dan Kennedy David Ogilvy and all of a sudden I realized hey I can actually write a sales presentation that people can read and then send me money and that was just you know way back then yeah and this is what year this is probably 2003 okay yeah and so i taught myself google adwords and then i taught myself how to write copy how to create a landing page and this is way back before click funnels or any of these softwares so i literally had to go to the bookstore buy a dummy's book on how to code html oh my god by dreamweaver which nobody y'all don't even know

what dreamweaver is anymore and learn how to hand code html to make the web my website my landing page uh but i did because that was the only option and what were you selling at this point uh i was generating leads for other people in my upline okay so here i was discovered internet marketing starting to get good at it and it was like magic to this older generation who was still doing the home meetings and that type of stuff and And all of a sudden I can now generate leads for them on Google AdWords for 50 cents a piece, a dollar a piece, but I didn't have any money. So I'm like, Hey, you've got money, no time. I've got a lot of time and no money. Let's partner up here. I'm going to manage a lead campaign for you. You pay for it and I'll charge you a dollar a lead that I generate for you. And that worked

like that. All of a sudden I was generating 30, 40, 50, 100 leads a day. They're paying for it. Now I'm making 100 bucks a day on top of that in profit and we're splitting the leads. So I'm giving all 100 leads to them and I'm keeping all 100 for myself. And that started to work really, really well

and I started to build a team. Long story short, I realized, I really discovered what attraction marketing was at that time as well through the dating industry and evan pagan david d'angelo is his pen name and i realized his whole thing was attraction marketing how do you attract women to you as a guy instead of running after him and chasing him and i read his stuff and i was like man this could be applied to business so elegantly i would love this industry if i had 20 or 30 people calling me a day instead of running around trying to pitch people for sure so i applied that psychology to business absolutely blew it up uh wrote a book about it for my team as a training manual that

manual started getting passed around the industry. So I was like, okay, well, I should probably sell this. Started getting them printed at Kinko's, selling them for $39 online. That was the first sales letter that I ever wrote. First product I ever sold. I think within three months, I was making about 50 grand a month just selling that book every day. Wake up every morning, take the orders, hand address the envelopes, take them in a big tub to the post office every day at lunch and do that repeatedly every single day. And that's when I realized that internet marketing is a hell of a lot more fun than the network marketing industry. And I really used that book. Essentially, it was a big moment. It was a complete accident.

I didn't have a track record, but I had discovered something that worked in another industry and I brought it to this industry. So it was a complete accident i didn't have a track record but i had discovered something that worked in another industry and i brought it to this industry so it was brand new and it completely turned that world on its head for sure i became a giant brand in that industry uh you know some people thought uh it was the best thing they'd ever seen other people wanted you know pitchforks and knives because it threatened their old paradigm for sure. And that turned into a $25 million business, uh, just educating that industry on internet marketing strategies. So I did that for about three years. And then, um, that was the beginning of my career as an entrepreneur. So that's amazing. And one thing that you said that I love is that you, you didn't just,

cause, cause there's a ton of people that follow me, um, that are in, you know, MLM in some sort of way. And I see them doing the same. They, they tagged me in their posts. They do the same thing every single day. Like it's just like literally I can see them doing the exact same thing as all of the other people. What you did was you got really good at it, but also then you went and tried to find something from another industry and put it in, you know, Jeff Hoffman is started priceline.com. Yes. So the way he got, he, he does this thing called info sponging. Have you heard of this? Where he'll go and he reads something that has nothing to do with his industry. Every single day, he'll write it down on a piece of paper, he'll throw it inside of a box and he'll look at that every single,

at the end of the month, he'll look at all this piece of paper and see if he could put it into his business. Cool. He got the idea because the guy who, there was a guy who had this exact same idea. This is like the twenties, thirties. And he went in and, uh, he had, uh, you know, a fast food restaurant, but it was, this is before there were drive-thrus, any of these types of things. And he was really big on, can we make burgers faster? Can we make it more efficient? Can we make the sodas come out faster? Can we bring people up? Can we do all this faster? And it got to the point where he felt like he couldn't really do anymore. And so he's like, I'm just going to go to all these different industries and see what I can find that they do and put it into mine. And one

day he walked into a bank and they were doing construction outside. And he's like, well, what are you guys doing out there? It's like, oh, we're going to do this thing called a drive-through. And so he's like, that's a genius idea. And he put it into his place. He sold his company for like two or $4 million to McDonald's. This is like in the 1930s. And it's literally just from what he calls info sponging, where you go and try to look at other industries that have nothing to do with your industry and see if you can learn something from them and put it into yours, which seems like for you, that's like the one thing that clicked in it. It really started to take off from there. Yeah. You know, it's the whole sacred killing the sacred cows deal. Yeah. Uh, if you can find a technique or a way to challenge what has been the norm in any industry for a few

decades and what's just, Hey, this is how we do things. And you can come in and put a stake through that and kill it or at least challenge it. You will instantly carve out a giant portion of that industry in that niche because you have something completely different that goes against what the tradition is. And Robert Kiyosaki is famous for doing this in his niche, right? That's how he built his brand by saying your house is not an asset, it's a liability. He killed that sacred cow and it is what established him as the authority he is. Magnetic Sponsoring was the name of that book that I wrote. That's what killed the sacred cow and it is what established him as the authority he is. Magnetic sponsoring was the name of that book that I wrote.

That's what killed the sacred cow in that network marketing industry and that established my brand and business, if you will, back then. Yeah. So if you can find a way to do that, what is something that people in this industry take for granted that everybody's doing and that is not necessarily true people just bought into it because everybody has it's a group think time type deal and he could be show up and be the dark horse that brings that to an end you are positioning yourself to really disrupt things in a good way sure yeah so tell me how you went from that and then you also built a financial company as well in in how that whole thing was built. And you took the skills of internet marketing and turned it into an industry that I guess you weren't really into at that point, right?

Well, you know, what happened in that business, I was now in my 20s, I made my first million dollars by the age of 27. By the age of 30, it was eight figures. And I had a giant 6,000 square foot house, a boat, and Aston Martin, and all of these crazy trips. And like no money in the bank. Because when you're making $500,000 a month, you don't really think about saving. Hey, there's more money coming. It's fine. And I think as a single guy in his 20s, that's kind of expected. But I hit 30, and I was like, okay, I'm officially an adult now. And I'm being really irresponsible with this incredible blessing that I have in my life right now.

But I need to figure out how this money thing works because I don't know. All I know is that this is right after 2008. I know what not to do because I just saw that, you know, everything blow up and people lose so much money. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go to the bookstore. I'm gonna buy every financial book I can get. And I get there, I'm down here, book people in Austin and every single book is built around the old previous paradigm. And it was like this mutual fund and this IRA and this 401k and this real estate. And all the people that had followed that just lost half their money. Yeah. Like this is all completely irrelevant now.

And so I couldn't find the answers that I wanted. And I knew that I didn't want to invest like the middle class did because I don't want to end up in the middle class. I was like, I need to learn how to invest like the rich. They typically don't talk about how they invest because they don't want that kind of publicity. And I just left this giant gap giant gap i'm like i need to figure this out and i can't find the solution myself so i'm just going to create it and i was super passionate about that topic at the time and i was like if i have this problem then there's a lot of other people in the world who have this problem as well and the only answer that like i was seen from traditional financial advisors was just invest more money. And at the time, that's not an answer you want to hear when that person just lost 50% of your money.

Right. So it wasn't acceptable of an answer to me. It's like, OK, I'm going to go interview the wealthiest business owners I know. I'm going to find out what they do with the money that their business makes and how they build wealth. So the concept was the Oprah Winfrey model, for lack of a better word, meaning I don't know anything about finance. I don't know anything about investing. I'm approaching this entire industry as a student. Nobody knows who I am.

I don't have any kind of track record whatsoever except how to spend money. It was, frankly, a pretty ballsy business decision now that i think about it and i had no idea if it was going to succeed i just knew this is something i'm passionate in i'm reading about it every day as my hobby and if again if i have this problem other people have it uh so let's do something different. I bought every financial education product that I could, everything from Agora, Stansberry, Mark Motley Fool, everybody. And those products were great, but they were all very technical and very stock based. A lot of stock charts, option calls, puts, things like that. And I'm just like, yeah, I don't like that. It just

goes over my head. I don't want to trade stocks. This is not what the wealthy people that I mentor and learn from are doing. So I looked at that industry and I'm like, what can I do that's completely different from all of these other people? Well, they're all email based or physical newsletter based. It's all text based. There's no video at all. And it's all very technical. And there's a lot of charts. Great. I'm not going to do any of that at all. Everything's going to be video. Everything's going to be interview based. Everything's going to be in layman's terms that anyone can understand. And we're only going to interview people that either I'm personally investing with or that are a wealthy entrepreneur. So that's what we did. We interviewed three or four individuals here in Austin, real estate, financial advisors,

life insurance, different things like that. The concept was one class a month on a new investing strategy. We sold it for $97 a month or $597 for the year. I wrote a webinar for it, which is the first time I'd ever written a webinar script, launched it to my existing audience from the first business. And we did $3.2 million in our first week uh within the first year we did over 10 million dollars and then it blew up uh from there and it was just again the right message at the right time for the marketplace something new something different and the entire pitch for me in the webinar was hey i don't know what i'm doing but i'm going to figure it out if you want to learn with me come along

So that's why I call it the Oprah model where I'm not the one on the whiteboard teaching I'm interviewing and asking someone questions. Yeah, and that was it and so I think that's a big Lesson or clue that I want people to pay attention to because you do not have to be an expert Yeah to build a massive business very quickly Sure, yeah, I mean there, and this is kind of almost, almost like a podcast model before podcasts really blew up to sit down with people who are experts. And there's a lot of people that do that now and they build, there's, there's a lot of people that have built massive podcasting businesses by sitting down with influential people because the fact that they're influential and everybody always wants some form of platform. They say, Hey, you can come onto my podcast. I'll give you a

platform of X amount of downloads for every single one that you have. And because that name is on their podcast, they end up growing and growing. I mean, there's tons of people that have built massive businesses from a podcast. Well, we built the people that we interviewed. We literally changed their lives and businesses overnight. Really? Some of them, we almost out of business yeah because they got so much like the tim ferris issue yeah he can't talk about businesses because he could blow him up on accident yeah no we you know are the financial advisor who who sells you know infinite banking cash flow banking yeah uh we had him as one of the first lessons and that year was, he became the number one salesperson in the entire world for, I don't remember if it was New York life or what, what company he was with, but,

uh, that was it selling, selling life insurance. And we just reframed it, gave a new strategy around it, put them in front of our audience and, and boom done. Uh, so yeah, it was an interesting, interesting couple of years. So how many people did you have? There were actual subscribers of everything then? Over the course of three to four years, over 50,000. My God. Yeah.

And you ended up selling that company eventually? Uh, yeah, this is a whole, this could be a whole other episode, but 18 months in, uh, we ended up, uh uh interviewing a gentleman in the the forex industry who ended up being a con man oh wow so six months after we interviewed him uh i wake up to facebook blowing up hey my money's gone my money's gone and i looked and my money was gone because i invested as well yeah uh and that blew the business up overnight. We had an office here. We had built 12 employees, over a million dollars a month in revenue. And we interviewed one bad person who had presented us with a bunch of forged documents about their company's performance and what they offered. And then the next thing you know, I'm calling the FBI.

Oh, my God. Four years later, they're in jail jail guilty of hundreds of millions of dollars in global theft not just from my group but from lots of other people they'd been scamming but that was an unbelievably difficult that was the most difficult time in my life um you know you can't when something like that happens the hard part is that you're the leader in the face of an audience. You know, our email list had at least half a million people on it. And the moment a lawyer gets involved with anything, you can't talk anymore.

And when you can't talk, people start to wonder what's going on. And one of the biggest pieces of advice that I got from a mentor, Mark Ford, was he had gone through something similar in his career 30, 40 years ago. Mark's probably around 70 now. So I called him up and I was like, man, how do I handle this? And he's like, as soon as you can talk, which was like a year and a half later, just be 100% transparent. And so that's what I did. I wrote a 25-page blog post, put all of the court documents in there, everything in there. And I just said, hey, that's what I did. I wrote a 25 page blog post, put all of the court documents in there, everything in there. And I just said, Hey, here's what happened. Uh, you know,

my apologies. We got tricked. Uh, we did our best to remedy the situation. The bad guys are now in jail. Uh, and that was the best thing that I ever did was just coming out and being completely transparent with everybody because that told my audience that even if Mike fucks up, he's going to own that and he is going to be straight with us. And that just took the level of trust that I had and made it even deeper and stronger because we're all going to make mistakes. We all make mistakes as business owners. We're human. It all going to make mistakes for sure we all make mistakes as business owners we're human it's going to happen and that was a huge pivotal moment for myself and my life was was just being brave enough to own it talk about it and that's all that people want from you that's it so yeah so then what happened after that what's the what was next for you after the financial company you know walked away from

the business gave it gave it to my business partner who eventually sold it a year later and it was an unbelievably looking back it was an unbelievably traumatic experience for me to go through for about three or four years uh during that same period you know i'm trying to save the business uh my business partner gets cancer from the stress. I'm going through a divorce and our business revenue drops from a million dollars a month to 200, which is enough to pay people's overhead. Not really. And so I'm liquidating savings and selling my house to keep everything, you know, all the plates spinning, if you will. Right. Uh, and that took a much higher toll on me than i realized until the last

couple of you know year two and so it was really interesting i decided to pursue a business i went to tony robbins date with destiny december of 2014 if you've ever seen the documentary that he did i was in the audience in that taping um and i came out of that with kind of the first hint of renewed energy or positive outlook on life. Like, okay, it's time to close that chapter and start a new one. And I wanted to start a physical product business. I wanted to do something completely different. I'd now made roughly $50 million in the info space. I've been doing it for 10 years.

I felt like I'd been there and done that. I wanted a new challenge and I was very passionate about hydroponics and growing organic food. I had a new child where, you know, we're going to Whole Foods every day, feeding them, you know, organic greens and farmer's market stuff. And I got really annoyed in the fact that I realized that if you want to eat healthy, you have to be wealthy. For sure. Or you're forced to eat produce that's covered in poison.

And that pissed me off. And I was like, this shouldn't be this way. So I dove into agriculture. I was very inspired by Peter Diamandis at the time. And the book that he wrote on how to decentralize and disrupt industries. And we saw all the decentralization that started to happen with Airbnb and Odesk. 99 Designs, Uber, all of this stuff going on. I was like, why hasn't anyone decentralized the ag industry yet?

For sure. Why are we importing food from all over the country and all over the world on boats? This is stupid. Yeah. And that's why people can't afford it. And so I was like, let's do that. That sounds like a worthy goal worth putting my time, energy and money into. And so I started buying books on hydroponics on Amazon. That's literally where I started. I'd never really grown anything before. I love that you just buy books whenever you just want to learn you should buy as many books you can once you get into something new yeah like you did it when

you got into direct response you did it when you got into finance you're doing it now you're getting into hydroponics for agriculture all the answers are out there yeah so that's literally where I started and I had a concept in my head which was we need a system that's fully automated you will have in your home it'll look nice and that you will have in your home. It'll look nice and that you don't have to have any expertise to actually use a run or grow because if not, then that doesn't disrupt the ag industry. That just becomes a hobbyist product. The second thing is that it needed to grow enough food to replace somebody's run to the grocery store. There's a lot of little plants at the time that grew three, four, five plants of basil

or little tomatoes, but that doesn't change the ag industry. We need something that can feed an entire family in their home. And so capacity was another question. And so I needed, I had an idea in my head. I needed to communicate that to potential design firms. Never developed a physical product in my life,

let alone a tech-based one. And i got a vos water bottle picture of a vos water bottle online hired a photoshop guy on 99 designs and i said hey take this vos water bottle put it in this i stock photo of a kitchen remove the logo fill it with plants and put the little logo on the top and he did that. And then 200 bucks later, I've got this beautiful picture of this futuristic tube cylinder in a kitchen full of plants. And then I just started cold calling industrial design firms. Looked up Google industrial design firms in Austin. Sent cold calls, emails.

Here's the concept. Here's what I want to do. Can you help? And didn't know what I didn't know. But I just started. And we ended up partnering with a company called Whipsaw in Silicon Valley, which for me was kind of cool. Like, oh, man, I've got a startup in Silicon Valley. This is really neat.

And they're like, yeah, this should take about a year and $500,000. I'm like, all right, let's do it. Got a hold of Peter Diamandis, had dinner with him in Austin, brought him on as a business partner, which was really neat to be able to work with Peter, brought on Arby Marcus from Onnit as an advisor as well to the board. And let's like, let's change the way people eat and grow food and disrupt that industry. Two and a half, three years later, well over a million dollars into the product. I have a working prototype in my living room here in Austin. We're growing food. And it almost killed me to get that done because now I'm having to run an internet business

to fund that business. And you know this, a million dollars in net liquid to put into a project is going to require five to six million dollars in top line gross revenue. Right. Minus taxes, minus internet, minus refunds, minus all of this other stuff. Right. To leave a million bucks left. Right. So it's a lot more than just a million bucks, really five or six.

And I asked him, okay, guys, we've got a prototype. We've still got to do package design. We've got to do safety testing. We've got to do the molds for the assembly line. We haven't even started on the website or the app to run this whole thing. And what's that going to take? And they're like, probably another year and another $2 to $3 million. Oh, my God. And I'm just like, crap.

At the same time, that that same month a competing company called click and grow came out with two new products traditionally they'd only had a little countertop that grew three plants and i was like they just don't get it man this is an awesome product yeah uh they came out with a product that grows nine plants 34 plants and 51 plants that oh my god and it's a much more elegant design. They were going to be able to sell for a third the price that we would. Ours looked better. If you go look at it online, there's pictures of it in a video and it looks like this futuristic thing that Apple would make that you'd want in your house and it just blows people away

when they see it. Right. But as a marketer, I'm already putting the side-by-side checklist together and I'm like, they win this, they win that, they win that, they win that. Oh crap. putting the side-by-side checklist together and i'm like they win this they win that they win that they win that oh crap and so there was no way i could go out to friends and family or invest ask for investing capital knowing that we would be launching a second category product yeah so that was a really big pivotal moment for me it probably took three months to think about what to do talk to every advisor that i could

and they're like hey man find a way to turn this into a win for you no matter what so i ended up calling the founder of click and grow and i'm like hey you've got a team tech vc funding they're out of y combinator they've been in business seven years it's like we've got this great design you've got the team and the money and the funding let's find a way to work together unfortunately they didn't that my product did not fit their business model and i'm like okay how else can we work together like well we're raising an a round i was like okay i'm in so i ended up writing them a check for six figures uh pulled the plug on my system wrote the entire thing off as a loss tax-wise. And now we are helping them grow their business. And they're just going like this growth-wise.

So it was not the outcome that I was looking for. Lost a ton of money on it. But at the end of the day, by the time Click and Grow has an exit in the next five to seven years, I'll likely make all of the money back that I put into that business. And I didn't have to kill myself trying to bring it to life anymore, but I still got to accomplish the original mission, which is to put clean organic food on people's tables. Yeah. So that was, that was that plan. And it was an amazing adventure to go through. Unbelievably stressful, uh, almost took me out, but, uh, but it's something I'll never forget. And it was a, it was a cool experiment. So you've had, you've had quite a few stressful things pop up, man. It keeps going. We're about to get into the craziest of all of them, which is like,

unless this, I'm like, Jesus, I just feel so bad for you, Mike. Like it's been, it's been good. There's been a lot of good in there, I'm sure. But there's just like, it is an entrepreneur journey. They're like, people look at people like, oh, I just, I want to have the nice car. I want to have the nice place like Mike has. But they don't realize that, you know, I would say being an entrepreneur is almost like signing up to get punched in the face every morning. Like that's kind of what it is a lot of times. Yeah. Our friend Josh Bozzone says, you know, he's like, it's a full contact sport. And he's right. Yeah. And there's a reason why so many entrepreneurs die early and have heart attacks or

whatever because the amount of stress that we put ourselves under is insane and our tolerance for risk taking with our money can compound that problem which i'm not old enough and i've been through the cycle enough times to see it but i've always believed in myself enough to put all of my chips on the table and go all in. I've done that three times now. Some of the times it's worked. Some of the times it hasn't worked. Twice it hasn't worked. That's a tough position to find yourself in. And so managing our tolerance for risk

and frankly our desire for it, because that's essentially what it is it's an adrenaline rush is something uh that i hope to educate new entrepreneurs about so that they can avoid putting themselves in that situation yeah so um so the past couple years have been a journey for you as well which i would assume that's been hard that was harder than all of the other stuff yes you say okay okay so um this is a, I really want to dive into this and educate people on it. Cause we've talked a good amount, you know, a lot of, I mean, majority of what we talk about here is, is with, with mindset, it's all early childhood

development, it's traumas, it's overcoming it. It's how you look at everything, your perspective of life and, uh, take us through the past couple of years how everything's been and uh and let's dive into your your journey that that that you've been on the past couple years because it gets interesting after evergrow i was like okay i just lost a million bucks on that and i don't know what to do with my life again it's like i i'm gonna get back to what i'm really good at which is teaching and i want to build a platform like skillshare or creative live for specifically for entrepreneurs can i interrupt you on there yeah do you do you feel like um like there was a lesson in that of what i'm really good at i should probably start i should stick to instead of switching because you said what you're really good at is teaching yeah so is there some sort of lesson there where you

realize maybe i should just stick with my strengths and just go on all in on those? Well, what came out of the work that I've done the last year and a half that we're going to get into in a minute was realizing that I ran away from what I was good at because of the trauma I went through during the blow up of being essentially run through on social media. Yeah. Okay. It was traumatic. And so I didn't know that at the time, but that's why I went into physical product and I didn't want my face out there and I wanted to not be in the public spotlight anymore. So, um, so that takes us to the self-made man platform. I was like, okay, I'm going to get back into information, which is what I know, but I still don't want to be the face of it. So I'm going to make classes with the best entrepreneurs out there and we're going to create a platform that competes with Skillshare and creative live and make it just for entrepreneurs. So that's what we did. And this Los Angeles, to build the tech platform.

I'm like, I want this built for, you know, at least a million user capacity. No one's ever done this before. We brought in, you know, the best entrepreneurs out there and flew them into Austin, rented studio spaces all over the city. Had a 14-person film crew doing every shoot. Filmed everything in 360 VR. That way, if, you know, that format takes off in the next coming years, great. You can put on your helmet and you'll be sitting next to me in the studio as an audience member, literally doing this and watching all of our content. And the whole model was based on Skillshare, $19 a month. So I'm like, there's no way that this can lose. The amount of value

that this thing is going to provide uh is going to just change the industry so all in another million bucks 500 000 on tech 500 000 in content development we launched the platform and it did well by most people's standards i think we did 250 grand in our first month uh and then the tech got in the way meaning this was a big lesson that I had learned previously. I'd always used really simple technology. Platforms that I can go in and personally mess with and set up a split test or set up a product funnel, set up a shopping cart, and this was not.

This was Fortune 500 custom code. And so I'm like, hey, hey guys we need to work on the optimization of the customer journey and the customer flow we need to increase conversion rates here and like yeah no no problem that'll take three weeks and 25 grand oh yeah i'm like oh no and so okay we'll do that three weeks go by 25 grand go by i'm like hey guys okay now that didn't work out let's try this okay another three weeks another 25 grand yeah i used to be a nimble and that didn't work out let's try this okay another three weeks another 25 grand yeah used to being nimble and that doesn't work when you don't have 70 million dollars in vc funding like skillshare and creative life have i'm finding this out of pocket still and we always do our marketing to what we're breaking even or in a profit from day one and when you're selling

something for 19 that's not possible two years ago which which is when this is going on. Right. So now I'm caught stuck in a hard place, literally where I know what I need to do to make this work. I can't do it because it's so expensive and it takes so long. So now I'm trapped and I don't know what to do. And at the same time, I start to get more and more anxiety. My sleep starts to get worse and worse. I start having to take sleeping medications to fall asleep at night. Normally, I'm like a solid eight-hour guy. I'm having to drink more and more caffeine every day just to wake up and turn on and get stuff done. My tolerance for stress is decreasing dramatically where it's all my life it's been super high and i just find myself starting to get super emotional

about stressful stuff that i just normally had never experienced before i would always take breaks and play video games uh just you know gosh just xbox stuff stuff stuff on the iPad, in between work, take a break. And normally that would not be an issue. And all of a sudden now within five minutes of playing that game, I could just feel my body's stress go through the roof and I'm not able to handle it as I normally would. And one day I'm playing PUBG. I got really good at that on the iPad.

I think I was like one of the top 100 players in the world at the time so i was distracting myself from all of the stress with pub g all day yeah and all of a sudden i felt a little click in my brain like a physical click back here i'm just like whoa what the f was that because your brain doesn't have any pain nerves right how do you have a physical sensation back there and i was like i remember thinking to myself well that's that's not good um that night i went to bed couldn't fall asleep at all next morning got up flew with some friends out to aspen for food and wine couldn't fall asleep at all out there despite drinking wine for like 10 hours a day i was just up so i was up 24 hours straight and then 24 hours straight and then 24 hours straight and then 24 hours straight so four days straight flew home like

okay maybe that was that i'm still up seven days go by i haven't slept a single minute in seven days oh my god uh i can feel my body starting to shut down. And the craziest thing was, is I would get to a point where you're just going to go unconscious. Like my body would, would soften and relax. I'm like, oh yes, I'm so there. I'm so there. And then as soon as I get to that point, I would have this fear response. My heart rate would speed up. My breathing would speed up and I get an adrenaline rush that would shoot down my legs to my toes.

And then you're up. And it was literally as it felt as if the neural pathway to sleep had been blocked or cut. My breathing would speed up and I'd get an adrenaline rush that would shoot down my legs to my toes. And then you're up. And it was literally as it felt as if the neural pathway to sleep had been blocked or cut. And that's not a feeling you want to have. It's the scariest thing I've ever gone through. And I'm freaking out. I call my doctor and haven't slept for seven days. And I'm like, here's what's going on he calls in

a prescription for Xanax and Ambien which I'm not a pharmaceutical person I haven't take pharmaceuticals and since 2008 and I'm desperate so I take them that night I get I get some sleep I'm like ah thank God awesome and then next night took the medicine again our maybe sleep I'm like motherfucker i'd go to sleep at 9 9 30 and i'd wake up at 11 o'clock and i'd just be up and couldn't go back to sleep again so i'd take another uh ambien pill so now i'm taking 20 milligrams of ambien which is not good yeah and that still didn't work uh so that was a very quickly deteriorating state to be in. Maybe I'm getting an hour of hour and a half of this twilight sleep where you just disassociate you, but you're not getting any

kind of deep restorative sleep. So I'd black out for an hour and a half and then wake up. And that was enough to keep me alive, but it was not enough for me to function in any capacity. And really odd things started to happen. I would start to walk down downtown Austin. We were neighbors at this time. And I would get this crazy sensation that the buildings were about to fall on me. Or I'd be driving in the car and a car would go by and I would just like, and I race cars as a hobby. And we're going down Mopac, which is not a fast highway in a car

Go by and I would just whoa and just get that adrenaline rush on edge all day long 24 7 just adrenaline and cortisol and I can you just feel it. I can my hands were just doing this with cortisol. Yeah, and I Can't work. I can't think straight I can barely drive. I can't take care of my son All I can do is lay on the couch all day and watch television Go in and out of this Twilight state and then move to the bed and then do the same thing the next day and then move to the bed and that Became my life for over six months There were no videos or content that I could find anywhere online that talked about the symptoms that I had Everything I looked up about insomnia. was not insomnia mm-hmm I've worked with Michael bruise best

sleep doctor in the world been on Oprah all that stuff like he's like I don't know what to tell you he had no ideas before well went to a neurofeedback doctor don't know what to tell you we did a whole EEG gets the results back from the neurologist he's like good like, good news and bad news. Uh, good news is I think I can help you. Bad news is I've never seen anything like your brain scan in 25 years. Oh my God.

Like, awesome. I went to a transcranial magnetic doctor. Anyone was like just asking friends, where should I go? Who should I talk to? And I went, uh, do probably 15 transcranial magnetic sessions where they put a magnetic pulse through your head and it helped kind of reset things.

Because we were trading this as a nervous breakdown essentially at this time. We get back to scans. It's not working. He's like, I don't know what to tell you. I've never seen anything like this. And I'm like, and so I can't find any answers online. I can't find any answers from doctors. And I'm just in a broken

state and the balcony starts to look really good at that point. Um, and so I just didn't know what to do. And that was the scariest feeling of all because he didn't have any hope. Yeah. I didn't have any hope. I didn't have any answers. If a, at least we knew what it was that would give me a direction and something to go attack and go after. And right now everybody was like, we don't know what's wrong. No idea. So no hope, no solution, no money coming in, no business anymore. Uh, and my life was just falling apart. Um, about 12 months in nine months in, uh, Aubrey invites me over to an event at his house, a fundraiser, ironically for maps.org psychedelics. And I must've looked like just dog stuff.

Yeah. I knew I felt like it, but I just, I wanted to go and I was like, I just, I just need to go and I want to see my friends. And I just say hi to this woman. And I'm like, hi, my name is Mike. My name's Christina. And she's like, you don't look that well. And I was like, yeah, I haven't slept in a few months. She just said it out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I was like, yeah, I haven't slept in a few months. I felt this click in my head back in June and I haven't been able to fall asleep and no one knows what's wrong. And she's like, I went through the exact same thing five years ago. And she's like, my husband is a sleep doctor and you are officially

the only other person either of us have ever met or heard of that has gone through this as well. Oh my God. And she's same thing. I was taught, given a speech on stage, super successful entrepreneur. She's speaking in front of Microsoft. If it feels a click in her head as she walks off the stage, physically can't ever fall asleep again after that, uh, for over a year. Um, and I just went like, Holy crap, you understand me and what I'm going through and you're doing well. And you at least felt like finally someone there's some sort of information

hope yeah there was a sense of hope and she was alive and she made it yeah and so she really helped save my life um she started me down a path of different therapies that helped her hers was caused by heavy metal poisoning and we'll get into what caused mine in here in just a couple of minutes but we were both exposed to something a toxic substance that physically damaged our brain and that caused our bodies to go into a stuck state of fight or flight yeah 24 7 uh so it took her over a year year and a half to recover I was coming up on the year mark and what had the final dose of medicine that had helped her get back to sleep for the first time was ketamine I was like I don't know what ketamine is but tell me where to go I'll go do it and so

she hooked me up with a doctor here who administers in Austin I go into her clinic and I'm like I don't know what this is, but it helped Christina. It's what I need to do. Let's get going and do it. You do anything at that point. Anything. Yeah. Absolute desperation.

And so I go in for my first ketamine session and it's an intravenous anesthesia that's been used for 70 years. It's extremely safe as an anesthesia. It's literally horse tranquilizer. But they give it to you in a certain dose where it puts you in twilight, so it doesn't black you fully out. It just disassociates your conscious brain and your subconscious. And it's also very dangerous. Ketamine can be a recreational street drug, And it's also very dangerous. Ketamine can be a recreational street drug, if you will, that can be very dangerous.

So if you take too much ketamine, it's lethal and it will kill you and there's no antidote. My friend here in Austin is a nurse and he's watched a young kid die because the anesthesiologist gave him too much ketamine. My God. And even though the kid's crashing and shutting down, there is literally nothing they can give him to stop that process and you're dead. So, okay. Did you know it at this point about that? Did you know that much about it? Yeah, I knew that, but I still felt safe enough being in a doctor's office who'd done this with hundreds of patients that I'm in good hands. Right. I still didn't know what to expect and they don't tell you what to expect because they don't want to taint whatever might come up or produce what comes up for you right and so it was done in a clinical setting you know a nice

little side room they had in the office with a recliner and a blanket and little candlelight and some nice music if you want it and they tap your vein with an iv and they ask you if you're ready to get started and you say yes and they open up this valve if you will and about 10 minutes go by and I feel it hit me and I just go oh no you get like this is not what you wanted thought it was going to be because you start to lose control yeah and I my limbic fear fight fight or flight, is already at 100%. And so that kicks into overdrive, and I'm now losing control of what little grasp I have left. And I didn't expect that.

And I just grabbed the nurse's hand, and I'm just like, I just need to hold your hand. This is not what I thought this was going to be like. And then I went under and into this altered mind state, if you will. I've never done psychedelics before. That was the first time I'd ever done it. And you are gone. You are in another world.

You're falling through molecules. You're seeing crazy, crazy stuff. My first two sessions were unbelievably traumatic. I came out of them literally in tears. I was, they were, they were so traumatizing. Uh, the first session I went through the dying process twice. So I had to say goodbye to my family and my son and, and apologize for everything that happened and that I put myself in this position and that this was a mistake and et cetera. Uh, and it felt that hour long session felt like days. And then I thought I was essentially trapped in this effed up world and I was never going to come back. And you're just completely dissociated

from your body, right? Isn't that normally how your body? Yeah. Yeah. You can't feel your body. You can sense that you're breathing. And that's the only thing that you can sense is that if you take a big, big, deep breath, you're like, okay, well I can feel that. And you can sense that you're breathing and that's the only thing that you can sense is that if you take a big big deep breath you're like okay well i can feel that and you can crack your eyes open and see your room but you're not sure you're actually still in the room if you're imagining that wow um and uh yeah so about 45 minutes in i remember eking out the words because it was unbelievably difficult to speak like make it stop make it stop and the nurse turned off the medicine and then you come through very quickly it's about 10-15 minutes and you start to come back to reality and you're just like i don't ever want to do that again so what made you do it another time because i know you did it you've done it even more times

but what if number one was so traumatic what made you do number two if it was so traumatic and then you also did more after that right it was what worked for christina okay and she did nine sessions okay and so i was like all right you gotta do what i gotta do i'll do nine sessions yeah and i ended up going back and doing two a week uh what's really interesting is the second was also very scary like i'm seeing visions of people stabbing themselves i'm seeing visions of me stabbing myself i'm seeing people like cut in half i'm seeing visions of people stabbing themselves i'm seeing visions of me stabbing myself i'm seeing people like cut in half i'm just seeing this horrific stuff and the third one as soon as she put the needle in i just started crying i was like i don't want

to go back to this place it's the scariest place and i don't want to go back and she's like you don't have to and i was like no this is, this is what I got to do. Let's do it. And ironically, that third session was kind of neutral. It was a little bit more positive. When I came out, I was like, you know what? That wasn't that bad. There were some scary moments in it, but there were also some not scary moments in it. Four, five, and six got kind of positive. Like a lot of every session had a common theme and ketamine

speaks to you in sign language and symbology uh unlike the other stuff that we'll talk about so you'll get this vision of something taking place like for me i got a very very clear vision several times of being in a room in this giant balloon just inflating inflating and pressing against my face and pushing me into the corner against the wall it's like a horror movie as a child yeah my biggest fear as a kid that that message for me was that was the pressure that i had been putting on myself and that the world was putting on me and the expectations that i had on myself to always perform at this level and be this person and achieve to be achieve this and achieve that yeah or if not who am I yeah because that's who Mike Dillard is yeah and all of a sudden if I'm not that anymore who am I

and so that was very clear to me what that message was uh and then they started to get really positive and then like you know five six seven super positive it was about friendships family tribe i saw you know visions of all my friends who had been supporting me through this process and i started to have a lot of visions around regrowth and a renewed life it started being a little speck of dirt and soil and then it moved into water and then it's you know this giant sprouting plant thing it was like being reborn basically was that message and so uh went through nine sessions of that by the ninth eighth and ninth it was just boring like it was bored it was boring um my brain was like yeah man we've processed all of this and there's really nothing else to do you've done all

the work and we're done and that was really interesting for me and that it started super super scary that stuff got processed and addressed and then and then it just tapered off on its own and you're you're like hey man yeah we're good you've done the work there's nothing else we feel like you lived your a lot of your life in fear or always under pressure which because because usually what they say is is what happens in some sort of ceremony is is really just what happens in real life times a thousand so do you feel like there was a lot of pressure or fear that you really lived your life in before yeah i went through extreme bullying in middle school and high school like extreme bullying so uh always being physically threatened i was the smallest kid in my school um and always on alert and always adrenalized and you know so yeah um so that was you know that stuff started to come up as well uh this the bad the frustrating part

about this was is it didn't work. So nine ketamine sessions and I still couldn't sleep. God. What worked the best in the interim was a friend of mine who had gone through chemotherapy gave me a THC pill. And again, I don't do drugs. I don't smoke. Gave me a THC pill. I got three hours of sleep that night.

That's the most you'd had? That's the most I'd had. And it was actual actual sleep um i was just like dude this was a game changer i need to i need to get more of this uh and so i was able to get some started using just one pill a night and that allowed me to start getting three or four hours of sleep a night it also allowed me to get off the xanax and the ambien which was making me me suicidal. And I knew it was the Ambien and the Xanax because I went through another difficult period at some point. I got back on that medicine. Within three days, I was suicidal again. I got off of it.

Within three days, it was better again. I had it gone away. So I'm like, okay, that's what's going on there. No more of that stuff. The THC pills changed my life and really helped save me because it gave me enough stability and enough rest for my body to still figure out what's going on. Because at this point, we still haven't figured out what's causing all of this. Serendipity keeps playing such a big role in this process. I just keep asking questions.

I keep asking people for help. And I went and had lunch with my friend JP Who was back from our financial education days? He runs a real estate investment group and that's how we met as I interviewed him and the financial education company. Well and Here we are full circle, you know roughly Seven eight years later and we're having lunch I break down tears at that lunch because I'm just it's over a year now and I'm still stuck in this mess. And he's like, you need to go talk to Ann Shippey, Dr. Shippey. And I was like, okay, I'll do whatever.

I go schedule an appointment with her. She runs a ton of blood tests, but she ran one test specifically that none of my other previous doctors had run, which was a mold test, a mycotoxin test. And mycotoxins are the toxins that are the byproduct of mold if it gets in your body. And the mycotoxin test, you know, tests for all different varieties and species, but they usually go on a scale from zero to 50. Anywhere from zero to five is safe. Anything above five is in the red zone. Literally, zero to five is safe anything above five is in the red zone literally you don't want to be in right yeah the scale stopped at 50 my result came back it was 21 000 oh my god uh so what had happened is mold my building that i was in downtown had flooded uh about three months before

the brain click happened all the way down the elevator shaft for three days and i believe the whole building is contaminated with toxic mold i don't know that for a fact i just pretty much my best estimate as to what happened because less than three months later i feel that click and i'm sick um and so essentially i had leaky gut i think most americans do these days uh and that mold had gotten through that and through the blood-brain barrier if you have leaky gut you likely have leaky blood-brain barrier and so things that are not supposed to get access to that part of your body are able to and so mold had gotten in and literally started eating uh my brain and also causing an autoimmune

response with my body and so my immune system had started to attack my brain and eating away the myelin and so my body's literally under attack and it knows it and so that's why it's in always fight or flight yeah but i don't know why and nobody else can see that until we got this one test result back and then all of a sudden it was like oh so uh the same thing had happened with christina with heavy metals heavy metals have gotten through her blood-brain barrier caused physical damage and an autoimmune response and that's what had happened with her yeah so and isn't gluten one of the main reasons why people have leaky gut it breaks the the barrier. Uh, most of it's candida Okay, so the primary cause of leaky gut is candida, which is a type of fungus and it's candida feeds on sugar

and so As an american diet if you're drinking alcohol if you're just having bread or whatever You're you've likely got a candida issue and that's literally poking holes in your gut lining, which is only one or two cells thick. Um, and that's it. And so, uh, I just been exposed to such a high level of mold that my body's normal auto immune system was not able to fight it off. And it proliferated to a point where it literally just took over my body. Uh, that was the best news that I'd ever gotten because now I figured out what had happened.

Yeah. And so now we had a plan of action still leading up to that time before we had that diagnosis. Uh, I was still trying different, different medicines. One of which was MDMA never done in DMA. And this was not an,

obviously in a recreational sense, this was in a therapeutic sense. We're still treating this as a nervous system issue. And I was desperate and I was just like, I need, I'm losing my mind and I need help. Uh, I heard this can potentially help. And I'm asking a friend, uh, can you help facilitate this for me? And he said, yes. So had my first ever MDMA, uh, ceremony with him. And that was the single most profound event for three, four hours of my life. Like the amount of clarity around the trauma that I've gone through from being, you know, being bullied or the, the, the fraud stuff, uh, from, you know being bullied or the the the fraud stuff uh from you know being defrauded and everything else was clear like that yeah it was as if you had instant x-ray vision

into your life all the way back to as a child to forefront and you are you automatically saw the truth of every single situation without any bias. Yeah. And I remember had a blindfold on. I remember raising my hand and being like, I can see everything. And it's just like, this is unbelievable. Yeah. So it was an extremely insightful experience. The most insightful experience I've ever had.

The most healing experience I've ever had, the most healing experience I've ever had, because it allows you to go back and process those traumatic events and painful events through a lens of love and forgiveness, which is a very unique aspect of MDMA. You don't get that from a lot of other medicines. You certainly don't get it from ketamine, which is a man-made chemical. And rather than going through this terrorizing experience of losing of losing your brain it's it's like you're on a waterbed being kissed by puppies that's how i describe it um and so that felt phenomenal because it it put my nervous system back down to normal for at least a little while and i was just like even if all of if i had to go through all of what i've been through up until now just to have this experience with these insights it was worth every single minute of pain and suffering to learn what i've learned and you're saying that whole year 18 months whatever it was going through all of that shit was worth those four hours of being able to process everything because i was still carrying

40 years of baggage yeah from my childhood and a divorce. And it was just stacking up in this giant effing bag of pain. And that experience allowed me to let that go. And so now, even though I lost a year, year and a half to this mold thing, I gained back another 40, 50 years of essentially living free of that kind of trauma and emotional pain yeah great deal yeah i always say to people it's the the way it was easiest for me to explain because people like well because it's it's a psychedelic but psychedelic psycho means mind delict means clear it's clear mind a psychedelic is not a hallucinogen which people always think

well if i take it am i going to see a bunch of stuff like i'm doing some hallucin. But what it is, is, is I say, it's kind of like your entire life, you've taken this desk and you've just been piling shit on top of it and piling shit and piling shit. And you're trying to see the truth of everything. And when you do it, it's kind of like, you just throw all of the shit on the floor and you're like, oh my God, I can see how everything finally connects. But like you're saying, it's, it's kind of like you look at everything in such a loving, trusting way, because what it does is it releases the serotonin that's in your brain, which makes you feel incredible. So you're there and you're like, you get this feeling of like, Oh my God, everything is amazing. This is beautiful. This is one of the best experiences I've ever had in my entire life. And now I can go back and look at these very

traumatizing events that happened throughout my life. But instead of looking at them through the lens that I've looked at them my entire life, I can look at them with love and go, well, maybe I should let this go. Or maybe that wasn't exactly the way that I saw it. Or maybe that person was hurting and that's why they treated me that way. Right. And it's an incredible substance to take because it allows you to reprocess trauma in a loving way. substance to take because it allows you to reprocess trauma in a loving way. And that's one of the reasons why it's so good with people who have PTSD is because you can go back and you can look at reprocess things and see them a different way. So you can now be a different

person after it. Yeah. So the same time I'm doing EMDR therapy, which is eye movement desensitization. And that's, it's, it's kind of like traditional talk therapy with this tool, if you will, where you're looking back and forth and it helps connect both hemispheres in your brain and helps process fragmented memories and emotions. It was very effective, but it was still dealing with the conscious mind. And if you're dealing with the conscious, your mind is unbelievably good at dodging and defending its reality. What it knows to be true or thinks is true. The single best thing about MDMA and other medicines like it is that it takes down that conscious wall. And so you access the subconscious, which is really where all of our programming is,

where 95% of everything we see, believe, and feel is. And it allows you to access that directly and again see things for what they are and reprogram it within a three or four hour window and come out of it and retain that and you're a completely different person yeah four hours later yeah so for me I just tell people it's like going to five hours of therapy every week and five out you know five years and five hours yeah and it's like going to five hours of therapy every week uh and five hours you know five years and five hours yeah um and it's just feels great and you're going to have epiphanies and realizations about stuff that you didn't even know were issues yeah like whoa i didn't know i was holding on to that or that that was a problem for me or whatever. Um, and it's just

life changing. Yeah. I think that the way that I described it, that's, that's easiest is I've done ayahuasca five times and that is beautiful and amazing, but also can be really freaking scary. Um, but you get this incredible level of clarity in your life and everything that's happened to you and where you should be going. I feel like it was almost the exact incredible level of clarity in your life and everything that's happened to you and where you should be going. I feel like it was almost the exact same amount of clarity by taking MDMA. But I felt incredible the entire time. Well, you're not puking. I'm not puking.

You're not shitting. You're seeing this crazy visuals. Yeah. You're in a safe place. You're listening to music or you have a weighted blank. You have a blindfold on. You feel like you're being cradled by your mother again. Like the whole thing is just beautiful,

but the level of clarity of everything is just the highest you've ever had. Yeah, and you're speaking to yourself. You have full faculty of your consciousness still. It's not like you're off in some other world. No, essentially even greater clarity of your current situation and what you're saying. And so unlike ketamine where it's just symbology MDMA, it's like, no, we're having a conversation with our subconscious here in ourselves.

And it's really easy to understand exactly what we're thinking about, why we're thinking about it, what we need to do. And, uh, again, it's, it doesn't surprise me that this has been fast tracked as a treatment for all kinds of mental disorders. For sure. Uh, so that, that was awesome. me that this has been fast-tracked as a treatment for all kinds of mental disorders for sure uh so that that was awesome we we you know eventually found dr shippy found out that it was mold started immediately treating that which ironically can just be done through holistic supplements antifungal supplements i'd say after a month started feeling dramatically better and it's been probably

seven months now since I started detoxing. So it went on an autoimmune diet, no gluten, dairy, you know, uh, alcohol, anything like that. That was one of the best things that I've ever done. Uh, health wise. So you, every time we see each other, like, dude, you look how much weight have you lost? I don't know. Cause I haven't measured it, but, uh, I have had to buy all new clothes and it was just all of that inflammation. Yeah. And so I think this also saved my life physically because I was, you know, headed in a direction where I probably would have had a heart attack in the next two or three years. Um another real this ended up being the best thing that's ever happened to me um and so we're a year and a half into this now uh we're still working on it

i'm still doing mycotoxin tests every two months we just i had to move into a new house that's the number one thing you have to do is to get away from a toxic mold situation is leave the environment that's toxic yeah uh so moved into a new house was there for four months got it tested because i stopped getting better i like plateaued yeah and the the initial mold that had caused the problem was down dramatically but now five new types of mold had showed up in my blood and had the house tested and the new house was contaminated so now i'm moving again literally in two weeks. So it's been a beast of a situation. The hardest thing I've ever gone through by far. I honestly really didn't think I was going to make it for about a year,

but it ended up being the best thing that has ever happened to me. So, yeah. So, you know, obviously we talked a lot about a lot about a lot of things to talk about business we talked about this whole thing we talked about mold which grows in pretty much everywhere yeah so um have you come in contact with people who have you know you put this out on your podcast which you uh you put this out on your podcast and i'm sure tons of people listen to it did you have any people reach out to you and it started to click with them of, oh, I think I might've had some sort of issue with the mold in my house

and that's caused something in me? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've definitely had some people who've had, what's interesting about mold is it usually manifests in different symptoms for everybody. So if you're having any kind of health challenges and you have these weird symptoms and nobody can figure out what's wrong with you, absolutely go get tested for mold immediately because it's different for just about everybody and how it manifests.

their life and knowing that I was going through that and that I was pursuing these resources and found these therapies gave them a ton of again hope and direction and resources for them to go pursue and so eventually this will be a book or something really designed to help provide people who are going through a life-threatening challenge with a playbook that they can use to make it through that successfully because the biggest blessing that i had throughout this entire thing was the training that i had gotten throughout my entire career as an entrepreneur when it comes to personal development and mindset yeah positive mindset goal setting writing down every night i'm healing i'm getting better affirmations uh all pieces that i think are the difference between making it or not making it in that situation that 95% of the public are not aware of.

For sure. And that to me needs to be out there. So whenever I find the time to do that, I think that's going to be one of the bigger reasons why this happened is to help me share a message of hope and a playbook to a lot of other people. Well, I appreciate you saying the story because it's, it's the good thing about, about you that you can hear through this entire thing is you've been through shit. You've gotten through, you've been through shit, you've gotten through it. But the thing that's great about it is that never once did you actually give up. And I think like you were saying,

the mindset helps, the affirmations helps the, the working on yourself over years and years did. But it shows that, you know, throughout life, there's always ups and downs, no matter what's going to happen. There's going to be good things, there's going to be bad things. And we always, when it's good, we always think it's going to be good forever. When it's bad, we always think it's going to be bad forever. But if you can learn to play in this area of, okay, it's good. And I want to keep it here as long as possible. And if it does go to bad, I can always get it back. And there was never thing that that's amazing. What you said is there was never any quit. Like you had two extremely traumatic experiences with ketamine, your first two, but you still did nine because of the fact

that you were just like, I'm going to do everything that I possibly can. And the other thing that I think is really good about you sharing the story is, is you also even said that you were just like, I'm going to do everything that I possibly can. And the other thing that I think is really good about you sharing the story is, is you also even said that you kept reaching out for help. You kept asking, you had, and you noticed that when you were on your academy journeys, there were so many people there that were supporting you. And so I think when people are on these types of journeys, don't keep it in and just have to deal with it with yourself. Like people around you want to help. Yeah. Yeah. No, I've had a couple of friends die, uh, you know, at the age of 40 from cancer, like entrepreneurs in the 40, like what the of yourself like people around you want to help yeah yeah no i've had a couple friends die uh you know at the age of 40 from cancer like entrepreneurs in the 40 like what the hell's going on yeah and i

was really pissed because they were friends and they didn't tell me or anyone else about it until it was too late i'm like dude what were you hiding this for like we could have all been supporting you in whatever way we you know you needed and the big piece, so this is something that is important for that. You have to be really, really careful. You do not become a victim of your situation. And this all comes down to language patterns, which again, thank God I knew this from entrepreneur stuff, which is i realized sometimes i catch myself saying i'm sick or it's impossible for me to sleep or uh just these definitive negative

statements and i'm like oh that's just reinforcing that belief set subconsciously i have to stop that so from that point forward uh it wasn't i'm, I'm sick. It's I'm healing from, I'm healing from a brain injury. Uh, I'm healing from this. My sleep is getting better. Uh, you know, whatever I could say to reframe my situation in a positive light was how I would talk about it from that point forward. Even if that wasn't actually true, even if I wasn't sleeping any better, I still didn't know what was going on that's how I would still trying to speak it into existence yes yeah so that was really important and then you know as entrepreneurs were very self-reliant we go out and get whatever we need in life

for ourselves and I've never had to reply rely on anyone since I left my parents house and so being forced to have to rely on other people was a very humbling experience but it opened up an entire new world for me because it helped me repair my relationship with people and my level of trust for people that had been eroded in middle school. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, it's, it's been a hell of a journey, but, uh, a really powerful one. Yeah. It's amazing. Now it looks like you're in a beautiful relationship and things are going in the right direction. You've lost a ton of weight. You're the healthiest you've probably been a long time. Yeah. You back to racing. Did my first race, uh, about a month ago after a year and a half.

And that's my biggest passion in life is racing cars. And so I didn't know if I would ever get to do that again. And so for me, getting out there behind the wheel, even though in hindsight that wasn't a good idea, was another affirmative step that I was getting better. And so it was worth it to go do it just to, again, provide that evidence to my brain and my subconscious that we're heading in the right direction and we're making progress. I got out of the car and collapsed from adrenal fatigue and it was, you know, going 160 miles an hour when you're in that state is not probably the smartest decision, but, uh, but we recorded it, you know, we made a movie about it that we'll put out here shortly. And it was all about friends and family and just that milestone. It's awesome. It was, it was. So yeah. It's great. So how can everybody

find you and your, uh, your podcast journey? Yeah. Just everything's at Mike Dillard.com. Yeah. The podcast and in the blog, and I've got some blog posts up about the prior interview I did with my doctor, uh, and Aubrey and Christina, we i've got some blog posts up about the prior interview I did with my doctor Uh in aubrey and christina. We all did a four-person round table about this whole situation Uh a list of all of the resources that i've used the doctors that i've used the medical tests that i've used Are on there as well. So yeah, that's all on on the blog at mike dillard. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, brother Thanks for having me. Yeah, sure.