Dr. John Demartini - Human Behavior Expert, Author & Speaker | How to Master Your Life

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scotty Clary. The success story podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. The HubSpot podcast network has other amazing podcasts, like NoStraight Path hosted by Ashley Menzies by Batunde. And by shedding light on the stories behind the shiny resumes, social media highlights and job titles, NoStraight Path aims to human eye success from the millennial perspective featuring guests from all walks of life, NoStraight Path aims to inspire conversations around the nuance perspectives of success. Now, some of these topics at home you're going to love this show. Success is all about maximizing happiness. An interview with Esther Akbaji about finding your voice. Success is communal with Yvorn Doc Aswad. Now, if these topics are interesting to you, make sure to check out NoStraight Path wherever you listen to your podcast. Today, my guest is Dr. John D. Martini. He is a human behavior specialist. He's an internationally published author, educator, and a profound authority on maximizing human awareness and potential. Dr. D. Martini uncovers how business owners and leaders can gain more balance and clarity of purpose by aligning themselves with their highest values. Dr. D. Martini has been featured internationally. He was in the acclaimed film The Secret Exploring the laws of attraction, power of thought, and application in achieving entrepreneurial success. But before you jump to conclusions, he is a science-based, logic-based, and data-backed individual who can actually show you how mindset and value can deliver success through changes that actually occur in your body. He debunks myths on motivation and explains that negative self-talk and procrastination is really the result of unrealistic expectation, a sign that we have to get real and properly understand ourselves. He's worked extensively with successful business leaders, multinational corporations on professional development leadership, finance, entrepreneurship, scalability. He reveals key teachings in all of his content, his YouTube, his classes, his courses, when he consults for entrepreneurial success and self-mastery. He has been doing this for over 40 years. He is a well-known name in personal and professional development and mastery. What do we speak about? We spoke about his origin story, a certain point in his life when he was homeless, which transitioned into a point in his life when he almost died, which then pushed him towards this moment in his life, pushed him towards learning and teaching and doing what he does now, which is ultimately helping people discover their values, why it's important to discover your values, why you have to align your values with what you're doing in your life and ultimately how to understand if your values are actually serving you as well as they possibly could and if they're not, how to change your values so that everything you do is, I don't want to say effortless, but it just feels like everything you do is aligned with who you are as a person, which ultimately gives you more energy, more clarity, more enthusiasm, which will lead to undoubtedly more success. So let's jump right into this. This is Dr. John D. Martini. He is a best-selling author. He is a educator, a speaker, an authority, and ultimately a human behavior specialist. My journey as a professional speaker and educator for over 49 years now, I just full-time research, write, travel, and teach. Every day, pretty well every single day of my life, I'm doing that. So I started that journey at age really 17 and I think that was a perfect expression of some of the childhood challenges I had. When I was born, I had a speech impediment, and I went to a speech pathologist from age one and a half to four and had to wear buttons and strings in my mouth. So I think that was probably a void that made me want to learn how to speak properly. I was also born with an arm and leg turned inward kind of a deformity and had to wear braces on arm and leg and had probably that constraint probably want to make sure I traveled. Be free. By the time I was six when I started elementary school, my first grade teacher, Mrs. McLaughlin, had my parents come to the school and told my parents that I'm afraid your son's not ever going to be able to read or write effectively because I wrote backwards with dyslexia. And not a mounting thing, not go very far in life. Probably won't do much in life. If I were you, I'd get him into sports because when I got out of my braces, all I wanted to do was run. She said, he can run fast. And I only made it through elementary school by asking the smartest kids questions, which allowed me to pass enough to get through school until I turned 12 to 13. And my parents at age 12 moved to a small town where they went a lot of smart kids, low switch economic area. We lived kind of a farming area. And I dropped out of school and I was just became a street kid. I lived in a bowling alley and I lived in a park and I lived in a car and, you know, typical street kind of kid. But at age 13, I started surfing at nine. Texas wasn't the surf capital, but I was able to do that. I wasn't able to do much of anything else. But I took up surfing and the place to go surfing was California. So at 14, I hitchhiked to California and down into Mexico. At 15, I made it over to Hawaii and I lived under a bridge first to come in. I made a highway bridge, sunset beach. Then in the Yucca Beach park under a park bench, then in the bathroom there, then finally in a band and car, then a tent. So I kept social climbing and I became a pretty good surfer. I got to be in some surf magazines and surf movies and surf books. I got to ride big waves and then almost died at 17 towards the end of 17. And then the recovery of that, I was led to a a health food store and then onto a yoga class where I met Paul C. Bragg who was a guest lecture there. And in one night and one hour, this one man inspired me to believe that maybe I could overcome my learning problems, learn how to read and speak properly. I knew I could make a surfboard and ride a board, but I didn't think I was going to be articulate. But that night I had a dream to overcome my learning problems and with some of the ideas he'd said, I thought maybe I could pull it off. So I ended up flying back from Honolulu over to L.A. Hitchhiking back to Texas, taken a GED test and guest and passed that thing. I have no idea because I couldn't, I didn't read the questions. I just guessed with my close my eyes and put a little pencil on them thing and miraculously passed the thing, tried to go to school again, failed. And then I said, I don't want to give up on this. And I went to my mom's saw that I'd failed and was really distraught. And she said to me, son, whether you become a great teacher and travel the world or whether you go back and ride big waves or you live on the streets, I just want to let you know your father and I're going to love you no matter what you do. We just love you. And I needed to hear that at that moment. And my hand went into a fist. I looked up and I saw the vision that I had the night. I met Paul Bragg and be speaking in front of a group of people. And I said to myself, I'm in a massive scene called reading, teaching, learning. And I'm going to do whatever it takes, trouble, whatever distance, and pay whatever price to give my service of love across the planet. I'm not going to let any human being stop me not even myself. And I just got up and hugged my mom and went in my room. And I got a dictionary out and I just started memorizing 30 words a day until my vocabulary was strong enough to pass school. And then if you do 30 words a day, at the end of a couple of years, you got 20,000 frigging words in your head. And I did pretty well with that. I just became like a ritual. I just a machine memorizing words and learning words and applying them. And so I could start reading. And that was one of the most invigorating things of my life. I never stopped the reading thing. I've read over 30,600 books now. And I just read and I just learned and I just started. And people started asking me questions and I started answering them and my teaching career began. And it started out with one woman who was an African-American woman asking me questions and then another Persian man and then a group of kids getting out of class way me to teach them on mathematics as I was learning it. And then by the time I went to the University of Houston, 150 sometimes 400 people would gather in a park in the park area at the school and listen and ask questions. And I had classes every day when I went on to professional school. I continued that. And then when I got out of there, I started lecturing locally and then the city wide, state wide, nationwide. And now I've been blessed to speak in 163 countries. And we reached, you know, a lot of people. And any opportunity to speak and anybody that would listen to me who meant something may instill to us. And I just full-time teach, write, read, travel. I write books. I um, anything to do with mastering life and human behavior and doing something extraordinary with their life and doing what you really love in life. I really believe the people deserve to do what they love and love what they do every day. And I do everything I can to try to find a ways of helping them achieve that because their life goes by pretty quick as you know. And now I want them to do what they love to do because I was blessed, really blessed by a gentleman to help me do that. And when did you decide to because obviously your love for teaching, your passion for learning and teaching has evolved over the years. And now it's manifested into what you're doing now, what you're teaching now to people that are looking to better understand and perform in their life. When did you realize that this particular, I guess topic, like teaching people how to upskill themselves, how to determine their values, how to optimize their life, how to be happy, how to be in sync, how to get the most out of life. When did you choose to go down that path? Because that's a particularly difficult thing to teach. A lot of people probably find it very easy to teach a very tangible thing with a math or a science or a history. But you're trying to, you're trying to move mountains. You're trying to get people to live a better life in business and outside of business. So why did you go down that road? Well, there's a number of things. Paul Bragg, the Knight of Menim, said he mentioned the word universal laws, natural laws. And I didn't really understand what that meant. But I eventually looked that up. And that led to a concept called the logos, which is kind of a mystical thing. And it meant the order and reason of the universe kind of thing. And that led me to allergies. I just kept using the dictionary. And I'm an etymologist, so I love to study the origin of words. And in the process of doing it, I then made a list of every known discipline and knowledge you could study. And then I looked and looked and realized that the average PhD as you do multiple PhDs is about 100 books. And so I just made a commitment that I would read 100 books in every knownology to try to gather the most universal principles that I could get to build a body of knowledge that I could share with people that I could rely on. And so, and I at 18, I decided I wanted to master my life. It sounded cool, the word mastery, masters at the universe kind of thing. And I thought, wow, that's cool. I want to master them. So I then had to go, what exact does that mean? And I then decided that I divided life into seven areas. Our intellectual pursuits and waking up our genius and creativity and innovations. We can create original ideas that can serve people. Our vocational quest where we can create some sort of a sustainable business and sustainable fair exchange with people that meets people's needs that remunerates us. So we have a great income. I want to master business and have a global business, which I'd be blessed to do. I wanted to have financial independence where I'm not working for money. My money is working for me where passive income exceeds active income. I'm about 50 times that now. So I'm doing pretty good there. And then I want to also have a global family dynamic, which is why I live on the on the ship called the world, which goes all over the world. I want to have a global family. I always I learned that from Socrates that Plato wrote about that they asked him was he, you know, he said, I'm not a man of Corinth and not a man of Athens. I'm a citizen of the world. And Einstein said, I'm not a man of my family or community or city or state. I'm a citizen of the world of the universe. And I always thought that's cool. I wrote that down. I said, I want to be a citizen of the world. And I wanted to go around the world. And so I want a relationship and family dynamic that was global, which I do have that I want to have social influence. I want to meet the most amazing people on the planet and hang out with them and influence them and participate in people that are the greatest to what they do. The greatest Olympic medalist, the greatest Nobel Prize winners, the greatest to, you know, religious leaders. So I set out to hang out and interact with them. I think about three, three thousand nine hundred of those people now. And then I also want to have a vital body and energized body. I'm 67 going on 68 and I'm, I usually work circles around most people at less age and age. So I'm doing pretty good there. And I also want to create an inspired movement, not a religion. I didn't, I, I'd let people do whatever they do with religion. But I just want to do, help people live inspired lives where they feel that they had some sort of inspired mission. And so to me, all seven of those areas can be empowered. And I, in any area of our life, we don't empower some of those overpowers. You know, if we don't empower ourselves intellectually, we get to what to, to think we go to them, don't empower ourselves in business. We told what to do. If we don't empower ourselves in finance, we told what we're worth. If we don't empower ourselves in relationship, we're doing honeydew stuff around the house that we could be delegating. If we don't empower ourselves socially, we'll be told propaganda and misinformation, which we certainly say. And if we don't empower ourselves in physical, we'll be told what drugs to take and what to register, though. And if we don't empower self-spirits, who'll be following some, you know, geosynthetic Aristotelian construct that's probably finite. And instead of a universal scheme that the James Webb Telescope's going to give us and continue our mystery studies. So I'm a firm believer in doing something extraordinary with our life and empower those to whatever level of what every area that you want. If you want to do them all, I'm all for that. But I wanted to study everything I could that would allow me to help myself and others master that and do something extraordinary with those areas. That's been my dream and still my dream and I work on that every day. I mean, that's made me study a lot of disciplines to help that economics and financial management, wealth building and business management. And I've met a lot of people in all those fields, Nobel Prize winners and British leaders. So I've been blessed to, you know, because of that one pursuit, gather information that I feel, you know, strongly that can help people. And I love that. That's the, you know, I know you, because you have a podcast, you know what it's like to have somebody say, you know, transform our life. That's the most inspiring thing that I get to do is to get in thousands of letters by people saying, you know, you've helped me do this or that, you know, I've been able to do this. My gratitude journal that I watch I write every day is mostly filled with students accomplishments. That's the thing that inspires me the most. So I love that. You've taken, you've taken these seven things that you want to empower in your life. And the way I see it and correct me from oversimplifying, but the way I see it is now, that's actually what has turned into what you teach over. You're teaching over the steps that you've actually implemented in your, in your own life. So this is when you speak about determining your value. Everything you just said right there is a value that you internalize, that you have built out and extrapolated on and learned about and investigated. And that's what has made you fulfilled, happy, successful, all the things that people want to be. Now, let's talk about those, let's talk about those, let's talk about the framework. Let's talk about the framework. If somebody's trying to do what you've done, because that's incredible, a lot of people do not have clarity on maybe like two of those, one of those things, any major focus in their life, a lot of people lack a lot of clarity in business and in their personal life. So let's walk through that framework, because I think that's incredibly useful. And that's sort of the core teaching when I, when I consume all of your content, it's to figure out what those values are. So how do we do that? Yeah, how do we get clear on that? Well, first, first, every human being, regardless of culture, age or gender spectrum, lives moment by moment, by a set of priorities, set of values, things are most at least important in life. Every perception, every decision, every action that underlies their behavior is an expression of their values. And whatever is highest on their value, hierarchy, they're spontaneously inspired from within intrinsically to do it. And whatever's lower on their values, they extrinsically need motivation incentive or something to push them from the outside. So you're going to excel and be more effective and efficient and be more fluidic and graceful if you are living congruently with what you value most. That's why the principle, if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, your day fills up low priority distractions that don't. And you raise yourself worth when you live by the highest values, and you lower it when you're in lower. You create symptomatology and blood glucose and oxygen goes down to an amygdala if you're living by lower values, which is where our survival mode is. And if we live in our highest values, it goes into the executive center where we have self-governance and mastery. And I could go on with that. I just did a presentation yesterday on on the executive functions of the preformal cortex. And I'd elaborate on it until everybody was ahead with smoking, I think. But I'm a firm believer that prioritization is one of the keys of mastery. And people who do prioritize their life and master the skill of delegating everything other than what they're inspired to do can live an inspired life. But if you're trapped and you haven't been willing to let go of things that weigh you down, you hold yourself back and you scatter yourself and then you devalue yourself. So I've now applied that in each of the seven areas of life. A human being has a pulmonary nuclei in the thalamus, which is a gating and filtering center of sensory information going into the cortex. So that means that anything that is high on your value, the very highest, we extract and literally filter our physical spiritual reality through that value system. And that's why you know, if there are a mother and you have three kids under the age of five and you're 35 years old and your focus and highest value is mothering and taking care of beautiful children. If you go to mall, you're going to spot children's items, children's health items, educational items, entertainment items, clothes, etc. That deal with children. You're not going to notice business things, sports things. You're going to see children's things. But if you're an entrepreneur and your highest value is raising and running a company, you're going to see business entrepreneur material in that mall. You're not going to see children's stuff. So you filter your reality according to the higher-cutter values and you learn and absorb and apply information most effectively when you can perceive that whatever you're perceiving is helping you fulfill that highest value. So the quality of your life is basically quite the question to ask. If you ask a question, how specifically is the information that I'm studying, let's say, helping me fulfill what is deeply most important to me and meaningful to me, and what inspires me. If you can make links in the brain, neuroplastically, and remilinate the brain by heavy and rule, you can liberate yourself with a tremendous amount of energy and you will literally awaken a photographic, not a graphic mind. And your conscious information is expanded, your focal fixation point is expanded, your ability to absorb and apply that information goes up, and anytime you're studying something, even information that was unconsciously given in, surfaces the second you link that information to what is valuable. I've proven that in studying unconscious learning. And so just in the learning and waking up genius capacities, and absorbing information, if we link whatever it is to the highest value we engage and we empower our learning capacities, wake up genius and creativity. Geniuses and creativity emerges in maximizes where pursuing challenges of solving problems for humanity in a way that is serving what is most important to us. So we can't wait to get up in the morning and be a service, and people can't wait to get that service because it's meeting a need. And that's where genius creativity occur. In the business world, nobody goes to wake to work for the sake of a company, they go to work to fulfill what they value most. And so if they can perceive that their job description and duties and responsibilities and the vision, mission and primary objectives of the company are helping them fulfill their highest values, they'll be engaged, they won't need micromanagement, they are not going to need breaks, they'll just be inspired to go to work and do what they love doing. And so I have developed whole systems on how to maximize engagement to reduce the probability of health issues and wanting to get away and take breaks and all that and stuff, and entitlement and showing how to empower their career. So they're absolutely a career orientation, not just a job that they're having to do. And if you hear people say I've got to, I must, I should, I ought to, I suppose to, I have to, I need to go to work, they're not engaged. But when they say I love it, this is what I've dreamed about, this is what I love doing, that's totally createable. I've proven that and I can take anybody in a job and I can turn it into that type of state by asking questions and holding them accountable to answer those questions to make neuroplastic links and they're into the cortex. So we can take that and when we communicate with people and managing people or lead people, if we communicate in their values, what we value most in their values and respect them, we get them and get them more engaged and we don't have to be an autocrat and end up with a union counterbalance in the autocrat. We actually have an empowered leadership that's where people are doing what they love to do and there's less management, less micromanagement, kind of like Buffett does with his, all the people running his company stays out of it because they're able to do their job and they love it and they're doing it because they love to not because they have to. And then when it comes to business finances, your hierarchy of values will dictate your financial destiny. And if you have a higher value on buying consumables and depreciate and you do buying assets and depreciate, you're going to be working your life for money as a slave instead of having it work for you as a master. And so I have ways of changing the value hierarchy so we can increase the probability of building well because otherwise money will circulate through the economy from those value at least to those of value at most. If you don't have a value on wealth building and you have a value on the media gratifying consumables, then you're going to have your life be run by consumables and fill up all your space with a bunch of junk. Instead of actually going out and doing something that contributes that makes money, you'll be living by currency through other people's brands instead of building a brand that draws in opportunities into your life. And when it comes to relationship, nobody wants to be told what to be or told what to do. They want to be loved and appreciative who they are and their identity, their ontological identity is an expression of what they value most. And so if you can communicate what you value most in terms of what they value most and they feel that you're helping them fulfill what's important to them, they go into their executive center and they end up functioning with more true fair exchange communications, a dialogue instead of alternating monologues and they are appreciative and they want to be around you. They will call you charismatic because you care enough to respect them to communicate in what they value most. And when it comes to society, it is same thing except now it's on the scaled positioning where you're actually working and learning and respecting the people you're going to lead by doing what you can to help other people get what they want to get in life. So you get what you want to get in life. So the executive taught me that when I was young and 20 or so and I think that that's a great principle. So the leadership is being clear on your vision and mission of what you want to dedicate to and communicating effectively in terms of other people's values. And when you do that, when you live by your highest values, the blood glucose oxygen goes into the forebrain, the executive center, which is underneath the media prefrontal cortex, is right in front of the, you know, the lamina terminalis and right in front of the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. And it's actually correlated to a maintaining homeostasis to the autonomics, which then manages epigenetics, which then helps the immune system regulate its surveillance. I mean, I could just go, I could go a full week on just the physiological impact of living concurrently by your highest value on just physiology. And you get the most wellness quotient. When you're doing what you love and are inspired and living by priority, your wellness quotient goes way up. You have use stress, not distress. Your telomeres grow, you can expand your space and time horizons, you expand your your contribution and your love for work. It's just amazing. And of course, that's an inspired life. And I think spirituality is not subordinating to some anthropomorphic deity that's going to rescue from your your fears, but it's realizing that the divine nature inside you of being inspired and living with equanimity within and equity with other people and contributing vastly on a scale that inspires you that makes a difference in leaving a mark in a legacy of contribution to me is a great spiritual contribution. That's subordinating to someone of the past. It's about being present in the moment of contribution and realizing your potential and exemplifying as Einstein said, what that is as a human being to planet earth. And so I believe that those all those areas can be empowered at. I love helping people one or two or all the above wake those up and gathering information to show me how to do that. That's just most inspiring thing I get to do. Absolutely fascinating. Fascinating. I appreciate you breaking that down. And I guess the two the two paths that I would like to go down and step to you to choose which one you'd like to tackle first. I have sort of two main questions out of that. One would be how can you identify your values and then two would be how can you potentially change your values if they're not in line with for example wealth and assets that appreciate versus depreciate or potentially the career that's actually going to benefit you. So how do you identify and then how do you change if they're not in line? Well I was I got into you know aware of how significant values are many years ago. I've been teaching value applications for 43 almost 44 years. So I was probably in my early 20s when I started to realize the significance of those. But would you ask somebody what their values are? I'm guarantee you because I've done it for many thousands of times. They will tell you injected values of outer authorities. Their mothers their fathers their preachers their teachers their conventions traditions and arrays of the social collective that they are part of the herd of will infiltrate and inculcate into their consciousness and they will tell you things that have nothing to do with what their life demonstrates. You know they'll say peace and this and that and honesty and all these things they don't realize anything about human behavior. So they just say what they think it's supposed to be many times even to themselves they're not even aware. You ask the average person how many want to be financially independent they'll all put their hands up but their life doesn't demonstrate that. Only 1% or less demonstrate that. Rest I'm not dead. So I'm not interested in what people say I'm interested in what they live and what their life demonstrates and because their perception decisions and actions are governed there. So I had to come up with the ways of determining values that went through that filter and the one of the most significant one was space proxemics. Every human being if you give a child even in a crib an item if they value it and it's intriguing to them and they value it they will put it in their mouth taste it they'll play with it look at it they'll explore it and they'll keep it next to them they and you try to take it away they'll cry or do something and they'll hold on to it because they anything that's valuable goes proximal and they keep close to them you give a woman a diamond ring that usually stays close to them right and distal distance is something they push away so if you give a child something doesn't want it'll kick and scream and whatever and push it out. So even a child at a young age already has a set of values in fact values already occurring in this I go to the very first stage of first my tonic division from the sperm and egg uniting values already being developing in cells but by the time we're born we already have our set of values and we're developing them as we go and involving them but the first thing I do is look at space how we feel our space most what are the three most significant most consistent items that we keep in our personal or intimate space personal is four feet intimate to foot and half around us in proxemics and we get an idea what we actually fill our space with and this tells us what we value like I'm sure that you're probably like me a bit you probably have a computer in front of you a lot and my computer is where I research right travel through zoom and teach so my computer is probably the most significant thing if a fire was to break out and they say I couldn't take the the I was on a plane or my ship or when you can't take that I'd hide it in there and you know hide it with me because my computer life it's your life it that that's the closest thing to you yeah yeah so and then not that I wouldn't grab my kids first but I would I'd grab my kids with my computer yeah but it depends if they're teenagers you might get the computer but anyway I'm joking but but space is number one the next one is time you make time find time spend time and create time for things that are really valuable to you to run out of time and don't want to take time and I don't have time right now I can't do that on things that aren't and the more valuable it is you make time for I mean if all of a sudden you know I'm just gonna pick a name if Bill Gates or or maybe Jeff Bezos or Richard Brandt or somebody that's an icon in the business world if all of a sudden they call and said I can do an interview right this minute you'd say probably John I got I got to go I got this opportunity I'll call you we'll reschedule this because you get an opportunity to grab it yeah so you would make time find time spend time on something that's very very valuable to you and so I look at how you fill your space most top three things how you spend your time most top three things and I don't want to go and write and you're not here to write what you wish you would be or hope it would be what it used to be you're right now what your life demonstrates your life demonstrates your values that's what's so crucial to look carefully at what you're objectively doing if I videotape you from a hovering you know thing above you looking down on you and I watched your life it would tell me what you're doing and that tells me watching that over a period of a month and months and months and months I can see what your pattern is and I'm looking for that because that tells me what the third one is what energizes you whenever you're doing something that's high in your value or energy goes up and whenever you do and your mitochondria go up they're mitochondria actually spit out that energy and you know do fossilization and oxidation much more efficiently when you're doing something high in your values and demonstrate and then if you don't if you go down into lower value your energy goes down if all of a sudden somebody said look I want you to go and repair your car we with no mechanics so you gotta go out and do your car you're gonna procrastinate hesitate frustrate doing that and you're gonna go oh crap you're gonna fall sleep probably your reticure activating systems gonna shut down but if somebody says look I want you to interview Jeff Bezos today can you do that if you didn't get any sleep you at rally because you automatically would get that reticure activating system going so what energizes you and what do you always have energy for and what is it that you and when you do it you got more energy than when you started that's a sign of a high value and they and by the way they'll be when you do the space time and energy you're gonna find that those patterns are the same they're gonna see the same thing repeating if you're honest I've done it thousands and thousands of times the fourth one is money you find money you make money spend money get money for things that are valuable to you if I said to you right now you know you have a 10 million dollars in your pocket you know not I might have to go and get that and work you know do something get my 10 million dollars but if I said okay I've got a guaranteed return a 10 to one return in 30 days you'll find a 10 million dollars you would find a way of getting 10 million dollars you do you find you'd call all your friends you do whatever it takes to do it so when you really really really value something you find money for it that's that's what's amazing when people say I can't afford things it means somebody hasn't sold it to him in a way where they feel their values are being met that's all there's no lack of money on this planet to any human being when they really have a value on something so how do you spend your money and where is that money going if you look at their disbursement cheats it tells you if it mostly goes to a house then obviously a house and whatever that represents to you is and then you look at what is it really represent just like what do you fear space with what's its dominant use because if I said my computer right well the computer's not valuable it's what you're able to do with it so what's the utility of it what's the purpose that item and the same thing for what you spend your money on what exactly you're doing with that money what do you trying to accomplish with that that tells you what the value is the fifth one is where you most organized and ordered you know knowledge is organized in my mind I have a vast amount of knowledge you know gathered from all the reading and watching YouTube and stuff so that's all organized on my computer and in my head and wherever you have the most ordered organization that tells you what your value and the next one is where you're most disciplined and reliable now as you can rely on me to be teaching you can rely on me to be researching and writing but you can't rely on me to socialize at a party or you know go to a social event or you know I do work out once a week I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now while you're listening to this podcast you're probably doing something else too mastering the art of working out shaving like no one's watching we get it when you're having conversations with your customers the same is probably true for them they're I aming their teams mentally planning date nights so growing conversations beyond that moment can be challenging HubSpot helps you go beyond the moment by connecting you and your teams so you can access the exact same data and see the full customer picture what motivates them what their expectations are and how you can blow them out of the water with powerful tools that connect marketing sales ops and service HubSpot's powerful CRM platform powers you and your teams transform customer moments into extraordinary customer experiences learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com or do your own or do your own tech support that's not a that's not a priority that's that's something that you know you don't want to take that I haven't cooked since I was 24 I haven't driven a car in 32 years you know I delegate everything that's low on my values I even joke with my girlfriend said look you know you know I'm not that great at love making if I was to get George Clooney or Gerard Butler or you know Brad Pitt or you know something like that if they if I was to get them to make love for with you on my behalf would you still love me every single time my girlfriend says yes every time so you know I I delegate everything I'm joking about that I don't know I know I know but I go friends pretty hot she's just she's a cool I'm not gonna delegate that one I've been stingy on that one good good but I delegate that so so you look at where you spend your money you look at where you you're ordered it and you look at where you're most disciplined and I'm very disciplined when it comes to research and teaching I do it every single day now the next one is what are you thinking about what are you visualizing and what do you internally dialoguing frontal and pridal cortex occipital cortex temporal cortex what are you visually auditarily and in that you know what are you thinking about visualizing and affirming inside about how you want your life that shows evidence coming true so I've said since I was 17 that I want to travel the world and be a great teacher on the planet and study the philosophy and the sciences and and be you know leave a mark in teaching and and so that's my internal dialogue that's my vision I actually have a painting I could show you a painting of me standing in front of a million people with every iconic building around the world and the background that a really amazing painting five by four foot that guy painted with a million people there me speaking to him so I have a visual image of that I've got an internal dialogue that I've got that you know hundreds and hundreds of internal dialogues and I think about it daily and so I look at what I think and visualize and affirm every single day that is showing evidence of coming true about what I want in life not not my fantasies you know I thought about being an international sex symbol but there's zero evidence of that one so I can't put that down that's a zero evidence but but if I look at what I do have evidence of it's teaching and then I go and then I look at the next one what do I want to keep bringing conversations to and I want to talk to people what do I lead the conversation to people come up to and said how's your kids how's your business how's your health how's your golf game they always want to talk about what's in their highest values so I look at what you want to converse most consistently with people when you can spontaneously socialize and then I look at what it is that inspires you brings tears to your eyes and what's common to the people who you've been absolutely inspired to watch and interact with and then I look at what are the most consistent goals that you have that's persistent persistent consistent that you're achieving and you're getting to come into reality and then I look at what you spontaneously want to learn study read about watch on YouTube and absorb and information wise what's the most common thing you want to learn and if you look and answer the three answers for all those 13 questions I guarantee a pattern will emerge and you'll sit and go whoa now I know what I'm really committed to not what I fantasize about and the degree of those inconsistency are setting real goals with real times realistic expectations for setting unrealistic goals that are on met that lead to frustration so finding out what that is and summarizing that and determining the top values to me is like a starting point in mastery of life the last point that I wanted to pull out of you is we've now established how we understand what our values are so the follow-up is how do we change those values if we know they're not serving us well there's no such thing as values that don't serve you but what most people do is and I wonder if it's an implicate this you don't make mistakes in your own values you only think you make a mistake when you compare your actions to some outer authorities values that you've subordinate it to and you only think other people make mistake in your business when you project your values onto them and expect them to live in your values they're not going to futility is a byproduct of expecting others to live in your values are you expecting you to live in other people's values that's why the mastery of hiring people is screening people according to what their values are and finding out whether the job description really matches their values because if there is you're going to have a high engagement level and you don't need to micromanage them and you don't have to judge them because they're just going to get the job done and they're probably going to do it more effectively than you could do but when you hire somebody that's not congruent with that you're going to think they're making mistakes all the time you're going to think they're disobedient but that's because you're righteously projecting your values onto them and they're supposed to read your mind and expect to live in your values and nobody can that's why the idea of a cultural value system is murky and not really well educated out there so you want to make sure that when you're filtering and you're looking and hiring people that you basically get somebody that really is congruent with the job description and that you can do and I've got a whole science for that on how to do that that's just amazing and a lot of companies using it so that's one thing once you identify the values then to change them now first you find out what it is because you sometimes want to change your values when you're expecting to live in somebody else's life envy is ignorance and imitation of suicide is said Emerson but if you do let's say you're 50 years old you've raised beautiful children you've had a great family and everything else and you realize oh emptiness syndrome time for me to run a business or grow my wealth because oh my god I don't have any money saved I could get involved with the kids take care of their college take care of this lived bigger for the sake of my kids now I'm going to get Alzheimer's condition and pretend like I don't know their names so I can put some focus on what I want to do that's a joke but I if you want to change a value system you identify the action steps that are proven to master that area you know success leaves glued find out the action steps that prove to get a result and now what you take those action steps and then you stack up and you use operative conditioning from Skinner or Pavlov condition reflexes and you ask the question how specifically is doing those actions helping me fulfill what I value most and how does it help me spiritually mentally career financial family social and physical so you empower all areas of your life and if you ask that question and answer that question and don't say I don't know I can't find it but answer me accountable you'll blow your mind if you stack up enough advantages over the disadvantages once the advantages outweigh the advantages of what you're doing currently your brain will neuroplastically remodel itself and go in that direction with stimulus responses you'll start doing that action but it's got to be enough where it overrides that because of heavy and rule and in a neurology that it basically has to you know the the oligodendrocytes and the brain come on and myelinate all the cells and they they myelinate a new pathway it's like a blazing a new trail if you add enough benefits to it so you go in there and stack it up until you can see a change in behavior so you just keep doing it I tell people 200 benefits and so the brain is completely rewired in a direction where you now stimulus and you now save your money you now invest your money you now doing things and then you you look at all those things that are proven to work and I've helped people that have never been able to save money or never be able to keep any money and change that and I've seen that done in in a 200 answer response I've seen that done as quick as a day I've seen some people do it less than a day but usually about a day's work of effort and all of a sudden they're now noticing in the mall different things and they're now taking different actions because your your decisions are based on whatever you believe will give it the greatest advantage of a disadvantage at any moment in time according to what you're valuing so you can shift the values and I could remodel the values to move in directions that you want if you want more healthy you want more wealth if you want more business savvy or whatever it may be it can be but I usually don't start to I start with first identifying what the values are so they quit living in a fantasy who they are and get grounded they may not have to have a desire to change anything I may just finally realize hey I'm pretty magnificent the way I am I just never saw that because I've been comparing myself to others I think that the most interesting thing about you as an individual before we go into some of these topics that I want to dive deep into an unpack you as an individual are an exceptional individual and the reason why I say that is because when I do even research for this podcast a lot of the people that I speak to their experts in one particular topic and you hear them enough and they repeat a lot of the same things on maybe one two three different topics the one thing that I find is fascinating about you and I think this is a hopefully a useful skill that the audience can pick up on if they can dive into your research process your ability to assimilate knowledge on a variety of different topics and understand it and then provide context to it so you are you are I don't want to say jack of all trades but you do so many different things in you and you help people in so many different lanes between mindset and and psychology and business but everything you teach is valuable so for you how tell tell us about your learning process and and how you go about becoming an expert in so many different fields that have some similarities but ultimately are not in the same lane because I think that's what's the most impressive thing when I look at your body of work. Well thank you for seeing that. When I was 18 years old I had a number of objectives that I went out for and a gentleman when I was 17 mentioned the word universal laws and that sounded kind of cool and at age age and I watched David Caridine on Kung Fu and he talked about his Solan master and I thought wow I'd like to be a master and those two things stuck in my mind I also was told by the gentleman when I was 17 about waking up genius so I had a dream at 17 and then again at 18 to want to master my life and to tell you universal laws so I went in the dictionary and I said what's a universal law and that led me to natural laws by Aristotle that led me to the study of the logos which was the study of reason in the universe and then I realized that that was the the source of all the allergies you could study so it could be any discipline that an individual could study was under that category and so what I would did I went through the dictionary and encyclopedia and look for every knownology if you discipline the person could study because I figured if I was going to build a body of knowledge I would want to have a foundation of the most consistent principles that were found throughout the different disciplines so I made a list of all the different disciplines andologies you could study I still have that list on my computer today and I made a commitment to read 100 books in each one so I just figured I'm going to study these things and I'm going to read you know I'm going to try to go to the original thinker who is the founder of that discipline so I want to study you know magnetism I have studied Gilbert if I want to study a different field I go to the founder of that field astronomy I mean I may go back to an axiomand the Greek philosopher for instance and I started to vow or as much information because I figured that an average PhD would get about read about a hundred books and if you start stacking up PhDs you'd end up with a hundred books in each field and they'd overlap up to a lot there's a lot of duplication so that was the dream I want to do it because I want to have a body knowledge that was solid and I wanted to have polymathic understanding I want to be an auto-diadactic polymath and that really was inspired by René de Carr when he was reading the European philosophers in the west world there's a textbook that had any mention that he wanted to be a man of letters and he wanted to have a universal knowledge and stuff and cyclopedias say some people called him and I made a commitment to write an encyclopedia the idea I did wrote an encyclopedia with another fellow that took 20 years to do and so I decide I was going to do that and work 30 pages a day on this massive piece of work that landed just so I could have a better knowledge I started reading eight complete sets of encyclopedias from comedy cover to try to get a better understanding of this but I want to find the most universal loss to build a body of knowledge with that was the original objective and so now after 30,662 books I keep records of them I have been doing that and people go well that's insane you know why would you want to do that and you know one specialty is you know sufficient and I was told all the way through this time you know so you had a specialization especially right so well okay but if I specialize and I work a hundred times more than the other person I can do a hundred of those so I when I was in the health professional I studied medicine I studied dentistry I studied chiropractic I studied osteopathy I studied astronomy I studied cancer and oncology I did lectures on oncology I did lectures on us I actually spoke to dentists and to conferences for dentists all the way up to the American Dental Association when I was 24 and I spoke at Rice University and University Houston astronomy and I spoke on oncology to MD Anderson hospital conferences and people thought that this is a freak this is a weird character but he's got something to say and so this has been my dream and I and I kept asking how do I more effectively and efficiently retain information and absorb information and I experiment with all different types of things you know from speed reading and photo reading and all kind of things to try to accelerate and I averaged in my 20s around 47 books a day on average about 19 to 20 25 books a week and and I started accumulating this this body of knowledge and I want to find I linked everything I studied to the evolution of human consciousness the maximizing human awareness and potential and so if I was studying mineralogy under geology I studied geology and then I would go into the minerals and I'd look at the microorganisms are involved in the transformation of minerals I looked at the minerals that's keylators inside the enzymes inside the physiology to look at the metabolic pathways and so people go why are you studying geology it's because your energy is going to be based to mitochondria which are bacteria and many of them originate as lithophiles and extreme of files and so I want to know how they how they metabolized and one of the mechanisms of metabolism to burn a maximize energy so studying that field was part of one common thing maximizing evolution human consciousness maximizing awareness potential and helping people master their lives and evolving consciousness and so anything whether I'm studying astronomy and now I'm studying the origins nucleosynthesis from the Big Bang nucleosynthesis to stellar nucleosynthesis to supernova nucleosynthesis to create atoms that are involved in building the body and studying physiology of how those things work and study so I I broke the body down I took gross anatomy down until I could take it to quantum level and I'm writing right now a textbook on physics now I'm about to present in November so I'm constantly trying to take it from the macro to the micro and in between to study the most universal laws I could build a body of knowledge that I could when I deliver something I can rely on it so that's been my dream since I was seven to eighteen and I'm just as inspired fifty years later that's today as I was then to expand my body of knowledge and so people think I'm kind of a weirdo my girlfriend calls me a freak I just got introduced I spoke at lockdown university from the lady who heads up the Guggenheim Museum the other day I'm one of the guest speakers the keynote speakers they introduce me as you're about to listen to a freak listen I think that's not a good intro first a good not a good intro but I appreciate that what you've done is incredible and probably uncomfortable for a lot of people to to to to even like look at right like that's not a that's not a comfortable path to accumulate knowledge for a lot of people that say well listen I want to become a specialist in my field I don't I don't even I don't even read like you know a hundred books in that particular topic let alone thirty thirty plus thousand so it is it is it but it just goes to show you that there is no necessary well maybe there are better ways to assimilate knowledge and maybe you found tricks to be able to go into a book and get the most possible out of it in the shortest period of time but I mean ultimately there are no quick hacks to level up your intelligence really I mean it's been 60 whatever 50 years of reading researching finding new bodies of work to go into right yes I just never ending I love it you know something happened to me when I was twenty four I um I well when I was twenty three I started into professional college and the very first day there was a neurology class and there was a there's a mention of pinfields homunculus which is a little image of a creature that shows the different percentages of distribution of neurons to the representing of the different parts of the brain in the century motor expression and uh when I thought I saw that the the somatic nathic system of the jaw was the most highly represented part of the brain and I thought well if I'm going to specialize in neurology and joints and the body and stuff and what the pedics and things I'm I'm going to study that so I went to the library I got everything on the somatic nathic system which is a TMJ temporal millimeter joint and it was very little and so I went over to the University of Texas dental school and I went to their librarians talked about every book that was there and I went to the dean and I said if I was to specialize in TMJ what would what would be in my curriculum and what books and what everything I would do he said well that's all listed down in the bookstore go find it and stuff he wouldn't much help them so I then devoured it and I read like 400 books on that field and um and I got the opportunity to lecture in a at a little dental study group after meeting this guy at a party he said why don't you come and speak about what you know on this thing and at the end of it they said well that was three hours of the you know deep dive you got a more and I said I got plenty and the TMJ was kind of a new field at the time there was only Harold Galeb and Nathan Shore and John Baldwin and a few other people that were leading the field and I got to meet all these guys I got to break bread with these guys and all of a sudden he goes you know we'd like to have you come back and so for 10 months every single week I was doing a presentation of the dentist and one of them said we we got a south-width cranium inhibitor society we'd like you to speak to can you come and present there and I said yeah so I got this opportunity and then after one guy came from there he says I got the Tri County Dental Association conference we'd like to have a guest speaker great I mean I'm 24 years old I'm not even a doctor yet but I'm I'm I'm hanging it I'm going for it you know and I now love it and then I was at this conference the Tri County Association and I was supposed to speak for 30 minutes right after lunch and they got up and introduced and said well we got this young man he's not a doctor anything like that he's not a dentist something else but he's going to do a special presentation and people go what what would I go this guy and people start to walk out I had like a mass exodus of people going why were we in a sit we're we're going to go out and just have some coffee this is ridiculous and the guy gets backed up there and he introduces me again he says hold on a minute my introduction wasn't sufficient you know Harold Gelb as you know at a New York and Nathan Shore as you know is written textbook on the field and John Baldwin right here in Houston has said they learned more from this young character than they've learned from their professors and they said they they were the one to recommend him it's really so they all stood by the door that's all these guys are standing by the door with their teams and I started speaking and they started to come back and sit down after a while because like you know I started talking about this this the brain to be interesting yeah and then all of a sudden that three of the speakers for the afternoon gave up their time and let me speak for four hours I got four hour presentation wow here's what was cool there's the best part during the presentation there's a real heckling guy real skeptic guy and he just really does upset that you know how dare you let a guy there's not a doctor in our field be a speaker and he threw out a challenging question and out of the blue mysteriously a photographic image of Gray's anatomy the answer that I get to give him an answer I saw this page and I started to share it and read the page as he been sitting in front of my eyes and I started reading on this page the top of the thing under this caption I started reading this thing and 75 I guess pieces of paper from all the different attendees they started throwing paper at this guy and said let the guy speak quit hassling him and when I did that I went I didn't know I knew that and then I learned something really cool about speed reading there's an explicit memory and an implicit memory an explicit memory is what you remember what you read and there's an implicit stuff you went into your brain you didn't remember it but once somebody asked you a question that's highly informative and important it comes out and I learned a whole nother thing about learning that I didn't know before that I hadn't read anywhere that every human being has a set of priorities a set of values in their life and whatever's highest on their values and intrinsic value and whatever's low as it becomes more extrinsic the things that are lower you need motivation to get you to do but the things highest is spontaneously inspired to do it that once you make a link between the knowledge you've absorbed through your senses and that highest value it comes to the conscious it goes from explicit implicit to explicit and I didn't know I knew things so then after that I said okay I don't need to remember while I'm reading I just need to get my eyes exposed to the page and then when I need it and it's important to me it'll come to the surface and that was a big turning point at age 24 on accelerates so I started reading I one day I read 11,000 pages of material just to find it out what I was capable of doing and then I used to do presentations or nothing but Q&A just to find out ask questions I had no idea what I was going to get involved in I'd push myself to to go on to conferences and talks and things that I hadn't really read about it but you know didn't know what I knew and boom all this information would come out when I needed it and that was a major breakthrough and then I developed a way of helping people absorb information retain information apply it and use it creatively and started teaching kids this and you know other people I've gone into colleges and universities and high schools and stuff to help people absorb information so that was really a turning point at 24 so I didn't have any anxiety about learning and didn't really worried about it and people go why are you doing it I said because I want to know I'm like the man who wants to know that's all I just love learning and whether I get to use it immediately or not I know it's there when I need it and what is and over over the years now you've discovered that when you were 24 what what is the strategy to I'm some sure you figured this out as well improve the recall of that subconscious information that you've assimilated or read because you mentioned one thing interesting that was interesting you a lot if that information aligns with your highest values easy to recall almost instantaneously even if you haven't remembered it the second you close the book it's going to come back at some point in time and you're going to be able to pull it up but there must be some strategies that you use now to purposefully pull it up so that even if you're not in a high stress situation you can still get that information out of you I found out a really interesting principle and this a couple of no more prize came out of this on the place cells and grid cells in the hippocampus and an interrhyne complex of the brain and how we store social information and other information and I found out that since you have a sensory and a motor system if you take in information and disseminate that information spontaneously your retention goes up so the faster you give out what you learned the higher the retention another words the more the more you add space in time to your mind the more distorted subjectively the information and the more you extract out space in time it might become really present and disseminate the information to somebody just after you got it the faster that is like greater and more longevity the retention so once I learned that at at 23 I was learning part of that but 24 I really got that uh I started to get up at two o'clock in the morning I used to sleep four hours a day for 35 years I did that and I get up at two o'clock in the morning I would do yoga and meditation and just visualize my my day what I'm intended to accomplish and started reading so I would have a stacks of book with a sheet of paper on for the day we I'd freeze to think them for that that way I could advertise my presentations for the night and I would speed read four to seven books on average in the morning in a four-hour period go jogging run it through my mind as I'm jogging come back go to my classes I some of the classes I got to place out of it some of my got to teach which was great that helped me retain more information and then I go to clinic and then I come back and then I would start teaching at seven to ten p.m. every single night and there were so many students there I made my first hundred thousand dollars as a student when I was 23 doing classes every night at seven nights a week but what they didn't realize is I was doing the classes on what I read that morning to make sure that I didn't go to bed without sharing what I just learned and I found that that accelerated my my learning capacities passively and so I would buy the books 40 to 70 books a week on average and put them in the thing and stack them up and pre-think them out and think the topics put the topics out there advertise the topics and then organize those books by the by the day throughout the week and then share that information each night and engage in questions as much questions to bring it out of me so I I purposely structured it when I would maximize my learning and most people were interested in passing tests I never even factored never thought about tests the tests were not my thing because test I always say or instinct in fact when I was studying neurology I read a way more books than what we required there's like you had this textbook right I read like 50 books by the time I took that class and so the teacher gave out these questions again A or B or C and two of the above and three of the above you know that kind of questions and I wrote in answers that weren't on the question that weren't unlisted and crossed out things and answered according to what I knew about neurology at the time and the teacher failed me he failed me and I walked into him with 49 books on neurology and I walked into his office and said how dare you fail me how could you fail me he said you can't answer a test by crossing out the answers and throwing in another answer and doing it you can't play tricks like that on a test and I said I can too and I said who you is the authority to tell me I can't and I brought in all the authorities and show me where the answers that I did on the the neurology text and he goes you read all these books I said yeah and they're all underlined and here's my reference to why I put it in there why you were outdated on some of this and he goes you're out of my class you're placed out I can't have you in my class isn't ridiculous and I said well I don't want to be out of the class I want to be in the class because I'm gonna learn something but at the same time I'm I'm serious about neurology so I don't want to just read one textbook that's not enough that's just an opinion I want to get a body of knowledge he says that's insane I mean you're you're you're freak and I said I said but I came here to learn I didn't come here to pass a test so three weeks later he got in trouble because he had a little fling with one of the ladies at the school and he got suspended for a month and he said John can you take over my class do you think do you think that no I was gonna say I was gonna say that's first of all that's incredible um I want to I want to also understand sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you keep on with your story but I also want to understand when you look at the way that you've learned over your career versus the way people learn now which is Audible's podcasts YouTube videos for example which which way do you think is a more permanent way of of taking knowledge implanting it in your brain and making sure that it's with you for the long term because now you put out a lot of educational videos and content too but and you can still go through your story I didn't interrupt you but I'm just curious if you see an issue with the way that people try to almost conveniently learn new things in terms of effectiveness. Well that's a good question you know I stay with Banderink Grindr in 1978 nine NLP and there in those days you had this this idea that you had visual oriented auditory and kinesthetic oriented learning process and access and cues and stuff and I found out that those are wounds that are creating that we're all gestalt but if we have a wound in our life that's emotional that's we've associated pain with visual we've seen something visually as painful we'll shut down that learning accessing system and we're going to kinesthetic or we're going to a different system and I developed later systems on how to dissolve those wounds you could access information and gestalt wise all through all of them in more integrative knowledge but I noticed that I did them all I that's in fact what what made me what Bander was interested I was at a seminar and asked him a question and and then confronted him on the answer because it was bogus answer and he he said how did you get I mean your process he's watching my eye movements and seasons is he wanted to talk to me about high processing information because he said I'd like to duplicate that but I found out that when I was in school I there were audio cassettes in those days and there were video those big video whatever they were called and the big ones you know yeah yeah yeah VHS I think VHS DVD DVDs didn't come until the 90s or whatever you know or the late 80s and 90s so I had them all going I didn't I didn't waste my time if I was showering I had an audio on you know if I was a I would speed read and I'd still have an audio going and I sleep at night I had audios and I didn't care I used every vehicle I could so I didn't have any waste of time I didn't waste any time I used to I calculated that I could go by the time I walked from my office to the bathroom I could read 10 pages and come back another 10 pages and then if I went to lunch I could read you know 40 pages and 40 pages and then while waiting for food I could knock and and I figured I could knock out a book an extra book easily during a day during breaks so I was using my time efficiently and I was also listened to audios and I was if I was on a car I you know I could read but I would listen to audios or video watch videos or something I did whatever I could to feed my mind because I learned that if I don't feed my mind with what I love in it it feeds up with what I don't just like if you don't prioritize your day and fill your day with high priority actions it fills up with low priority distractions and if you don't spend your money on assets you end up with liabilities and consumable depreciables that fill up your house with junk so I learned about prioritization and I use all of them and some people will probably think that they're audio-oriented or video-oriented the real them the real authentic self is installed but they'll use that because they got wounds and stuff there but they clear it they'll absorb information through every vehicle smell taste every one of them so I just say use them all you know that I don't I don't try to exclude any of them I use every access you can to get feed yourself knowledge you want to prioritize what you do I I asked people when I taught speed reading courses years ago I asked people you know write down how many books you read a month and they write down one or they write down ten or what if twenty or whatever it is and I said now multiply how many months in a year twelve multiple how many years you plan on living left and they go 40 years or 50 years okay 50 years times one a month that's 12 times 50 that's you know 60 books 600 books and they go okay so now the question is what's what are you going to feed your mind you're only going to read 600 books at the rate you're going if you don't speed read that you're going to you're going to limit it to 600 books what's the highest priority 600 books you're going to feed your mind to give yourself an advantage reading for a purpose is way more powerful than reading for pleasure because that's using an escape from an unfulfilled life reading with a purpose gives you competitive advantage so what are you going to prioritize so I teach people to prioritize what they're feeding your mind fires prioritize what you if you're going to watch something on videos prioritize it you know many people just turn on a TV and allow whatever goes in there and to me that's that's unless I don't watch TV unless I'm on it I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode NordVPN now if you've ever missed out on your favorite shows because it's not available in your country or if you're trying to keep your private time private you don't want people spying on what you're doing well let me introduce you to NordVPN if you're bored of US Netflix why not take a spin in the UK use NordVPN click of a button you can do just that you want to watch your favorite anime you don't have to travel to Japan NordVPN brings it right to you with five thousand plus server options no show is out of reach and of course we all love to binge TV and Netflix but privacy is a big deal too NordVPN keeps your information encrypted so you never have to worry about your IP or location getting out they've also double down on keeping you safe with their new threat protection feature say goodbye to intrusive web ads and malware even if you download an infected file threat protection kicks in and deletes it before it makes the mess of your computer don't forget if you're trying NordVPN there is literally no risk to you they have a 30-day money back guarantee give it a try if you like it great if you don't the list of you are refunds you can pretend it never happened they gave a special discount for success story podcast listeners they gave a special offer so go to my link at nordvpn.com slash success story to get your subscription started today chaotic and wasteful almost I hear what you're saying and the the follow-up question would be what you originally did which was found the leaders in every single allergy in every single field how do you recommend people find those leaders that produce the works that are the original works that are the that are the 600 that they should prioritize who should they look for who are the people that you default to as like the leader in that field had what's your process of finding that person well where I live here the the guy from google who's the brain's mind google I chat with him quite a bit and he uh today you go on google or you go on you know Microsoft being or some sort of search engine or whatever and you just look up founder of originator of and you get there really quick but when the old days before you had that um you'd sometimes have to go to encyclopedia and try to find it or what you do is you go to the start by looking at the field in a library you go the library and look at the area and then go to the books and look at all the references and then the reference would start lead you back to the original people usually in a in a college course they start from the originator and they worked away forward so I would go that that route originally by going into backup books and looking at the bibliographies but after while the encyclopedia say founder or father or originator of and then I'd go geology right or whatever it is and then I'd go that way and I'd start there because I wanted to create original ideas that served that's been my affirmation I create original ideas that serve humanities throughout the world I create original ideas that serve humanities throughout the world and so I wanted to go to people who are the originators that create original work they created the new newologies that founded those things that had the courage to step out and not be you know part of the herd but be heard and so that's why I went to those people and I have a young young man who was a eight-year-old savant when I met him he's now 20 he was just on the front cover of disruptive magazine the other day he's read 14,000 books he's 20 years old and he's a bright guy's one of my top students and he he did the same thing I told him that when he was eight because he was reading going to the books book store in his dad would buy books but he would read them by the time he would get to the checkout counter because he was I saw him read of 800 putts I took him to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and we met with Freeman J. Dyson who's an astrophysicist and took over Albert Einstein's position and we went and had a dialogue for four hours with this nine-year-old kid and myself and Freeman and we were discussing things and there was a book there from a Hungarian guy who had on astrophysics that Freeman was just getting a start and read who he knew and so the kid as we were doing it while we were waiting read the book in four minutes and then we had a discussion on that book and Freeman just went oh god so when you say something like reading speed reading a book in four minutes I find all this fascinating and funny enough this is actually none of the stuff that I wanted to actually speak to you about but I think that the concept of learning is probably the most fundamental thing that we can teach over to the audience I mean if they can understand the concept of optimized learning then everything else will flow from that so I think it's a good use of time so when you even speak about reading a book in four minutes everyone listening is like that's absurd so maybe even explain the concept the speed reading concept and how to actually accomplish that so that you can still get that level of understanding from the book and you can pull it up later on and then even teach it over and all the other tricks to make sure that I can't I can't say that I pulled that off myself this kid no no no but this kid okay so the kids this kid is but somewhere between the kid and you and the rest of the world yeah I've never done a four minute book not not that size well maybe maybe I did a 10 volume series in one evening in about four hours so that's that's good as I get on it but but this kid just photoed he just turned pages to we're watching right to and he just photos it photos it photos it and he can produce it and it's like it's a bit freakish but kids you know some aren't and they're really people out there they can do this kind of stuff it's just like how does the average person how does the average person you pick up a book the average person what's what's the concept of speed reading how fast can they go through things so that there's still some retention if you can't just photograph pages well if you practice it I have a friend who's in South Africa that teach people speed reading and frankly you can train your brain to do it it's not impossible to do most people read is because they're taught by phonemes they're taught by sounds so as fast as they can speak as fast they can read if you're a fast reader because you're a fast speaker I'm a fast speaker that's helped but I also had to do photo or visual reading but this guy in South Africa trains people how to photo read and she later also teaches people that there's a number of people that teach that I didn't learn that I didn't pick that up much later I just asked what worked what didn't work every day but you can move from a you know a verbal reading to graduate of visual reading by doing some exercises very simple if if I was to have you move your eyes in a circle really slowly your eyes would make jerky movements as it went around in a circle you can't make a smooth circle but if I put a finger in front of you and I make you follow my finger your eyes can do a perfect circle so a visual guide guiding your eyes has less of backskips and back wanders and forward skips and forward wanders and most forward wanders and backskips and things are due to phobias associated with words and symbols and things about the author that make you want to go back and avoid moving forward fast and sometimes things you feel guilty in your life make you move forward and so if you have emotions phobias and philias or prides and shames you're not present when you read and your focal fixation point gets really narrow and you can't absorb information effectively and that's why you go well I don't even remember what I read but if you're inspired by it you've linked it to the highest value you're using a visual guide and you're getting present and you actually love the topic your focal fixation point can grow and you can start snapshotting symbols and then words and then you can get a bigger vision and just with training you can make it where you can just snap shot a page that's totally doable people do it so it's a training process and if you have a value on doing it you'll do it the kid loved to learn this kid was unique when he was eight months old he was already pointing to thing is spelling at eight months old and was spelling and it was just a phenomenal thing this kid was doing it and he still has difficulty speaking but he can read and absorb information and consult he consults with consult major consulting now at 20 years old gets paid like 1300 an hour to do consulting I love okay so I want I want to go into two more topics that we did not go into yet this is fascinating I appreciate you a lot the two topics that you speak on that are probably the most widely viewed in your repertoire of all the content you've put out are intimidation and depression and I think that these are interesting topics because everybody deals with them and they all they all experience I'm excuse me they all deal with them in different ways so I'd like to go into both of those so first let's start with and obviously these are probably topics that could take their own podcasts but for people listening let's do like a a Cole's notes as much as possible so that they can at least get some value about if they're dealing with these feelings in their life how can they go about better preparing themselves and handling their reality so intimidation first um how can you deal with intimidation okay that's that's really quite fun um so I'll give a story first and then I'll elaborate I had a lady who was standing up about to give a speech and she froze and she just froze the whole room is like waiting for her to do it and the person that introduced her was like walking back towards this thing and going she's just standing there and so I took it upon myself to walk up onto the stage and when I did I grabbed a piece of paper on my way up and I rolled it up into a tube and I said you're freezing and and there's an anxiety about speaking and you're freezing and she goes yes I said I'd like to help you because this is a great opportunity and so I rolled up this tube and I said you're not frightened of speaking in front of this group you're frightened of speaking around in front of only certain people in this group let me show you so I did this little tube and made a look through the audience at each face in the audience one by one it wasn't a big audience and I said which one of those people is the intimidated the person you're intimidated by because you walked into a room and you spotted certain people and you immediately froze because if you're because if you went up to somebody and said I want you to speak and do a presentation in front of kindergarten class you'd have no problem for me there's somebody calling the room that wasn't anticipated no way but if you're in front of a kindergarten class and you wouldn't have a problem if I went and took you in front of first grade class you wouldn't have a problem I went to the second grade class probably would have a club but the second you get to a somebody where you think they have more knowledge than you and more specialty than you you now freeze the moment you are too humble to admit what you see in them inside you you'll freeze because you'll give them power and then you'll put them above you and you'll minimize in relative terms and that's all public speaking furious it's nothing but that so I went up there and she found this lady in the audience that was an expert and she was talking about something and felt intimidated by this lady because she thought that lady had more knowledge in her so I said all right so you perceive that that lady has more knowledge and more credibility credentials great where do you have knowledge I asked her where do you have knowledge everybody has a unique set of values of whatever is highest on our value we have knowledge in whatever is low on a value we have less knowledge another is a guy could go and get a PhD I met a guy in Tennessee that he got a PhD on William James life so he studied a tiny little fraction of a human being's life and got a PhD and had more knowledge even though I need to say to a fraction of a person's life but this lady had a whole life she was a mature lady had a whole life so she has multiple PhDs worth of knowledge but is not honoring the topic she's speaking on acknowledging her knowledge she's given more power to this other lady because of the specialty so I asked her where does she have knowledge and I made her stand up and we took about 10 minutes where's the knowledge where's her knowledge where's her knowledge until she saw equal quality and knowledge and she looked and she got a tyranny ice goes I'm not frightened by that lady now what go around and we found this other lady and she says she's sophisticated and she's very wealthy and she's very thin and I'm going to the topic I'm talking about is going to I would feel intimidated by that I said where's your wealth everybody has wealth in the air their highest values they have a wealth in their children they have wealth in their social contacts they have wealth financially and wealth in business knowledge wealthy academically wealth spiritually wealth is in different forms and if you compare your form to somebody else's and think their forms better than your form you're going to minimize yourself so I made her go and identify where her wealth was and this is an education of the group people were into it you know we were working together on this and then we had another person who had social influence and where does she have social influence so it took about 20 minutes to do this when I got through and I had her own every one of those and realized that she's no longer too humble to admit what she sees in them inside herself and she had reflective awareness with the seer the seeing in the scene with the same and no longer too humble and minimizing herself to somebody at that and I got a tear in each one of those in in the realization of that I said now look out she's kid in any end or intimidation she says no I said thank you very much I got better off the stage and she did an amazing presentation and got a standing ovation wow so that's so her intimidation yeah intimidation is nothing more than the assumption that somebody has something more than you in the area that you're going to about to present that's it and the second you realize you have it in your own form not therefore I if I was to compare myself to Arnold Schwarzenegger I and I admire him for his diligence in his workouts and stuff like that I'm intimidated because I'm comparing myself to his workouts but if I do look at his diligence and his dedication I can immediately go I got the delegation the dedication and the diligence in my studies that he doesn't have so we have equal in that trait he just happens to have it in his specialty once I level the playing for I'm not intimidated but I'm just speaking about what I know so it's about a reflective awareness reflective awareness transcends exaggerations and minimizations of other people I I've developed a whole science on how to transcend that that I take salespeople through and they go I can go to any any major player and I can now do a sale because I'm no longer intimidated but but there's a science behind it and it's basically asking quality questions to make you conscious of what's unconscious because nothing's missing in you I always say at the level of our most authentic self nothing's missing at the level of our senses we are too proud or too humbled to admit what we see in others inside us and that's where we get intimidated or we try to intimidate and both of those are unproductive non-sustainable fair exchange mechanisms of communication so yeah I just show people how to do that intimidation is not that difficult to transcend you find that after somebody goes to this exercise a few times that it starts to become their their de facto they're almost like they're their default state of approaching intimidating situation is this something that gets ingrained in them no if there's anytime they have that perception I first learned this I was 27 when I first learned this process I got asked to speak to 70 of the leading former oil executives in Houston Texas at the Hyatt Regency Hotel I was 27 I just opened up my shingle and opened up my office and the topic success and achievement these guys are in their 70s and their 70 of them in a room I'll sit around round tables right after lunch and I'm supposed to speak on success they're retiring and they've had ultimately an honor of businesses I'm just starting out just started my practice and I'm thinking I'm standing behind stage and I'm going what I imagined I self speaking about just doesn't look exactly appropriate now that I see the audience these guys are seasoned I was expecting you know a little bit younger guys and so I'm merely thought okay I'm now feeling a little anxious and I'm thinking what am I going to do and as I was walking down the thing and they were introducing and I'm stepping up onto the stage this ingenious idea came out I realized that everybody just about has a fear of public speaking that's a big thing so what I thought I'd do is my my speed started out this way I said everybody repeat and then write this down so they they they took command and they they just got a piece of paper out again piece of paper out write this down as long as you're green you're growing as soon as you're ripe and you're rot that's my opening line and paper going what is this and I said as long as you're green you're growing as soon as you're ripe and you're not if you're committed to doing something you're growing but if you've ripened and you're rotting then that's it so if you're 70 years old and you're retired and you're not doing anything you're rotting you're rotting you saw them all out if you're if you're if you're green if you're green you're growing if you're that means you're growing you're learning something so I got off the stage I took the microphone I knew they had a fear of public speaking probably in front of their peers and I said so what is your biggest fear that you're breaking through right now and then what is the mission that you're on now that you've retired and now they got the fear of public speaking and I'm in the microphone and all of a sudden they're going oh my god what will people think if I don't say the right thing and they're all I and I went around the room and made them all do on their life right and be in the next person in line to you know and I did the whole thing at the end they gave me a standing ovation I never gave a speech I just put them through all the fears that I was starting with it's all about it's not again it's about it's about reframing your expertise and your specialty against the audience that you're you're stressed out about and intimidated by that's that's yeah but if you want to do really well in the speaking is make sure you have at least four times the amount of material presented so there's no M's and L's and so if you got a half-hour talk or an hour talk have four hours of material ready where it's just comes rich rich you want to pour out with it and you won't him and hall and only talk about what something you know about until you gain confidence to be able to do that implicit to do what you did know that's not fair you didn't know about it you just you just learned about it very quickly okay I just only have I mean only have I mean knew about me knowing about it all right the last top last topic which I want to go into which is very important um you have a controversial I well I would say controversial take on depression I want you to understand I want you to understand I want the audience to understand what your view on depression is it's one of your most watched YouTube videos of all time so obviously it's topical so what is depression what isn't and how do you deal with it well I work with thousands of people with depression so I feel very confident and tackling it and you saw two weeks ago or two and a half weeks ago the biochemical model which I've been debunking since 1990 just fell because research just proved that that was a pharmaceutical marketing gimmick and to sell drugs but what was interesting is depression I define as a comparison of your current reality to an unrealistic expectation delusion or fantasy that you're addicted to and you're holding on to an expectation now let me give you some samples of that every human being lives by a set of priorities and set of values and whatever is high in the value they spontaneously make perception decisions and actions accordingly and every action they take is based on what they believe will give them the greatest advantage of a disadvantage in that moment so you can only expect a human being to live in their values and to do what they think with the information they're presented with whatever is going to give them the greatest advantage in that moment that's that's what you can expect some human being to do anything else and that's great if you hire somebody in a job and you don't know what their top values are then you're probably going to end up with problem because you're going to expect them to be doing something they're not going to do you got to know what that is now what people do is they have unrealistic expectations on other people to live in their values not the individual's values and then they end up with anger and aggression blame and betrayal criticism and challenge despair and depression desire to exit and escape futility and frustration grouchiness and grief hatred hurt irritability and sanity which is the underlying foundation for depression they also have expectations on human beings because of moral hypotheses taught by traditions and conventions and arrays of society that you're supposed to be one cited and perfection is one-sided nice never mean kind never cruel positive never negative peaceful never raffle you know giving never taking and these one-sided fantasies and unrealistic expectations somebody can live by so when you have an unrealistic expectation on somebody to live in your values not their own and to make decisions based on your priorities not theirs and expect them to be one-sided support never challenged you have a fantasy and a delusion that is guaranteed to create the ABCD's and negativity and depression you add those together and compound those you got even more then you do that on yourself you expect yourself to live outside your values expect your and this happens every time you get infatuated intimidated by somebody and fit into society and where you're a little chameleon mask you end up trying to fit into people and do something that's not really yours almost everybody that's ever been infatuated with some new partner will do things they don't normally do to fit in for fear of loss of that partner and sacrifice a whole bunch of stuff and then store that as a memory of what they sacrifice in the relationship so you got to if you're expecting yourself to be living in somebody else's values you're going to end up being angry at yourself and depressed with yourself if you expect yourself to be one-sided always positive never down you're going to have an unrealistic expectation yourself now if you expect the world to be living in your values and the world to be one-sided peace never war you've got unrealistic expectations and these things compound and accumulate and they're stored in the subconscious mind and they're running our amygdala's impulses and instincts and they're basically making a search for the fantasy to avoid the predator and try to avoid this challenge and it's self-imposed so I take people and ask them a simple question if you're depressed if you have the feeling of depression you have content in the mind you can't have fear of the unknown you can't have depression of the unknown you can only have what's on the mind at that moment because people can be depressed and then all of a sudden something else that happens are preoccupied they're not focused on their depression they're not because the content changed if I go and find out the content I ask them a question what do you compare your current reality to that anytime you compare your current reality to anything other than your current reality you have a delusion if you think that it should have been this it why isn't it this why am I not doing this you're you're comparing it to some idea about something that's not even real it's something you can contribute in your mind abstractly so you ask yourself what exactly you comparing your current reality to that's not fulfilling your your fantasy and then I find out what the fantasy is and then I find out what's the drawback if you got the fantasy and what's the benefit of the current reality and bring those down what's interesting is as you do that dopamine levels change serotonin levels change and capillans change osteocalcin change testosterone estrogen I can take every one of the signal molecules and transmitters in the brain and I can ask questions and I can rise them and make them rise and fall if I ask you questions and make you feel more pride I can make your serotonin go up if I ask questions at home at home will you and humiliate you I can bring your serotonin down I find it make you ask you a question where have you exceeded your expectations I can make dopamine go up I can make every one of those transmitters go up and down with question because the quality of your life is basically quite the questions you ask and the ratios of your perceptions are determining the ratios of these transmitters when I taught embryology I looked at all the signal molecules and epigenetics and trace them all the way into endocrinology and found out these patterns and found out what turned them on and turned them off and I guarantee you we can do that without having to take a drug the pharmaceutical industry is nowhere near as powerful as what our brain is capable of doing if we know how to use our brain effectively so I'd much rather help them see those and break their delusions and unrealistic expectations and fantasies and appreciate their life this life is magnificent the way it is but if you compare it to way it should be and you fantasize I mean I've seen marriages break down because a female or a male has a fantasy and they get this guy or the girl gets this guy and they have a fantasy of how they're going to make them what they're going to turn them into and then they're having an affair with the fantasy person and then position when they're not matching the fantasy and then wonder why the guy has the affair and then you know angry at them for not living up the fantasy and bitter and want to get revenge over something that's cocked it as a fantasy in their own mind men and women do this about how they're supposed to be in their relationships I train people on how to transcend that so they're not trapped in these anger generators that they create self-imposed so unrealistic expectations that are not living up to underlie these things and and psychiatrists don't like that because they're a pharmaceutical model and they're used to giving out a drug but and I've studied neurology I can I can tackle them on the neurology and the neurochemistry I have no problem with that but their model is not practical a therapist is you know a psychologist works with practical therapies psychiatrist is a it basically sells a drug they give you this if that doesn't work try this if that doesn't work try this a serotonin that noriponephrine and the dopamine uptake inhibitors they put those in there to try to get those chemistries a little higher in concentration in the bloodstream in the brain but that's not the most efficient way of doing it my opinion and it's not giving people their power it's robbing of their power instead of giving people their power back and training on how to master their perceptions decisions and actions I love it I appreciate that and and for people that are listening that where this message resonates with them uh who are the who are the individuals outside of yourself is there a certain practice of therapy that falls in line with this type of remedy for depression where would people go to explore more and then we'll also ask this where people go to get more view but for in this particular uh with depression and therapy in gender more specifically how do people go find out more and go get help if this is something that they want to go explore I'm personally trained 7000 people and and using the methods on that so I've got 7000 out there around the world helping people with that but there's there's a psychiatrist that are also starting to study those types of things there's lots of psychotherapist and therapist that are learning those methods there's cognitive reappraisal methods there's a lot of semi-close approaches that are emerging you know and in some positive psychology the problem with that the positive movement is the idea that you're expecting people to get always up and this is this is foolish nobody's going to stay up I did a research for two years I could spend now my I've got another podcast in it and I mean another meeting but I could easily show you that it's a futile thing trying to be up all the time that's a fantasy you know don't waste your time trying to be one-sided bipolar condition is a bipolar to monopolar addiction and subdictions and we go through and we try to be one-sided people and that's guaranteed to let you down so there are therapists out there and there's varying degrees of them varying degree of skills um but not all of them do that summer on the victim model and they immediately sits biochemical imbalance they fell for the pharmaceutical model and they just basically say well you know go go to your psychiatrist on that I don't want to tackle that others work through their complexes and conflicts they have so you have all spectrum of people working with it but I personally trained 7000 people on how to deal with that amazing okay so let's wrap this up so where should people go to get more of you your social your website and then I also want you to answer the one question that I asked everyone after you drop all your all your handles and what not what does success mean to you I don't use the word success I use the word fulfillment because success is a succession and it usually means if you if you I always say success is a depurposing state failure is a repurposing system they're both homeostatic feedback negative feedback systems trying to get you to be authentic and be an individual on a mission in life so I don't pursue success I think that's self-defeating but fulfillment I do but I would define somebody with fulfillment is somebody who identifies what their hierarchy of values is and structures their life according to priority delegating the lower priority things and sticking to the things that are deeply meaningful fulfilling that they spontaneously love do so they maximize their energy fulfillment and meaning in their life and that that may be raising children that may be being a polevolter it may be you know raising it may be running a massive business it may be being an entrepreneur it may be an architect it may be some academic minus teaching if if I structure my life I've delegated everything all I do is teach research and write everything else is delegated out I haven't driven a car in 32 years you know I don't cook I have people specialists doing everything except those three things and doing what you love and loving what you do on a daily basis to me is fulfillment and so I don't like to use the term success on it but some people use that term for where do people go and meet meet you meet you get more of your content youtube social website all of that if they want to go to just drd martini.com they could they're gonna have to be a Buddhist believe me in reincarnation to be able to read everything on there and see everything on there because it's gonna take more than one lifetime.