Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole with Self-Improvement | Ryan Christensen DSH #1164

thing that's possible is that your mind is kind of using that as a metaphor to help you understand the principle.

It's like, okay, maybe it's not necessarily safe for you to understand what really happened in this life, so we're going to put it in this other context to give you the same kind of general idea of what was happening.

So it's easier to understand and deal with, right?

Because your mind is only going to show you things that it feels is safe for you to see.

All right, guys, we are going to talk hypnosis today.

Excited for this one.

We got Ryan here today, hypnosis expert.

Thanks for coming on today.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's an honor to be here.

Absolutely.

When did you get into all this?

Back in 2019, 2020.

I was doing a lot of work on myself back in 2019, got some friends' groups.

One of the guys there was talking about emotional baggage and

that sort of thing.

And I was like, you know, raised Catholic, got some of that.

So I went and did a session with him.

Just kind of felt lighter.

I was like, if you're carrying around 50 pounds of stuff, get rid of 30 pounds.

Everything's easier.

I was at that point in my career where it's time for the next big thing.

I was thinking about becoming a psychologist, but that was going to take about six years and a half a million million to get done.

And that's unappealing in your 40s.

So I got certified as a hypnotist.

It took about six weeks and two grand, and that was in February 2020.

So right after I got certified, everything shut down.

Right.

And I was working intelligence work at the time.

So I couldn't work from home because everything I did was classified.

Ended up working with a bunch of guys online.

I found out I kind of had a talent for it.

Got some more training, started my business in April of 2020, went full-time in October.

Nice.

So pretty recent, though.

Yeah.

2020, four and a half, five years.

Nice.

And were you able to use it on yourself or how did it develop for your personal development?

Well, it's kind of interesting is that that

when you're talking about personal change and working on yourself, if you're kind of at war with yourself, your mind doesn't really let you do a lot of changes on its own because it doesn't actually trust you in a lot of ways, right?

If you're at war, then it's not doing what you say it, what you say it should for a reason.

A lot of the changes you want to make are to allow you to do stuff that things are bad or dangerous.

So in my own journey, it was really kind of frustrating because I know exactly what was wrong, exactly how to fix it, not be able to do it.

So I had to hire somebody else to fix it for me.

But a lot of things in that journey, you know, I was working working about three or four years there trying to figure out what was going on in my head.

I was talking about before the show, it turns out I have autism, didn't get diagnosed until last year.

So, you know, growing up autistic in Kansas, really kind of hard.

New the world worked for everybody else and not for me.

So for a very long time, the way I kind of kept myself going in life, kind of make life worth living, was to be in service to that greater good.

Kind of worked for that Knight in Shining Armor, kind of that kind of stuff, trying to save the world.

And that worked up until 2020, realized the world rather suddenly does not want to be saved, which is kind of when I started to work with people one-on-one.

But that still put me in a position where I couldn't get what I needed in life.

I sort of started that whole personal development journey to try and figure out how to get that done.

And along the way, I kind of realized that, you know, I tried everything, psychology and CBT and psychedelics and spiritual stuff, energy healing and all that kind of stuff.

All of it helped, but none of it really fixed the problem.

Right.

So I kind of had to dig in deeper and figure out why that was and kind of figure out what things actually worked.

and how things actually worked in the back of your head in order to find out a way to kind of fix myself.

Yeah, you got to get it to the to the root cause.

And a lot of of times you don't even know what that is.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

You're forming these thought patterns from ages zero to six for the most time, most

100%.

And the other thing is, it's very much a rational mind, like sort of left brain versus right brain issue.

Okay.

When you're going through that space of like zero to six years old, you really don't have your intellectual capacity online, the rationality.

So you're doing everything from a very emotional kind of perspective.

The emotional mind is looking at things kind of like a series of events, patterns over time, looking at that forest rather than the individual trees.

But as you grow older, we tend to focus so much on that left brain sort of perspective because this is what we can identify.

It makes a lot of sense.

It's rational.

We can understand, we can reach out and touch it.

It means we leave behind those emotional complaints.

And that's kind of what I realized is we had to do is we have to understand where these emotional high-level beliefs come from and fix those because they're creating the context that we interpret all of this stuff from.

So it's kind of like, I'm not good enough being applied to individual situations.

Something wrong with me being applied to individual situations.

If we're always focusing on this, focusing on this, we're basically playing whack-a-mole for the rest of our lives.

But if we fix these things up here, now all this stuff changes.

Right.

So if you think about having like a big box in your head, it's labeled on it says, I'm not good enough.

There's a million different events in that, in that box,

a million different things that made you believe that.

This typical way to do is take the stuff out, put it in a different box.

That takes forever because there's millions of stuff in there and more stuff gets added every day.

That's why we kind of get stuck in this process of always self-improving and fixing trauma and so forth and so on.

But there's a label on the box.

So why not just take the label off, put a new one on?

Change, I'm not good enough to I am good enough.

Now everything in there means I'm good enough.

You don't have to deal with it anymore.

That's a good point because a lot of stuff happens to people and it's on them how they want to interpret it, right?

Exactly.

So they could say that's that's a bad incident or they could reframe that mindset.

Exactly, exactly.

But it's not a conscious thing, right?

Because all those emotional responses happen before you become consciously aware of them.

So the judgments can be made in the back of the head based on those processes.

So you have to fix those things in the back of your head in the first place.

Got it.

So that's where hypnosis comes in.

Exactly.

So you're not able to consciously say, these millions of things that happened to me, maybe I should look at it differently.

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Conscious.

Exactly.

Exactly.

The problem is that we have this thing called, talk about in hypnosis being the critical factor, kind of the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

What that means is in your waking state, when you're conscious, your unconscious mind judges true and false based on what it already believes.

So if that's the case, then anything that doesn't match what you already believe is false by definition, gets ignored.

So how do you prove it wrong if it's ignoring all evidence to the contrary?

Right.

So you can consciously say this is the way it should be, but if it doesn't match this, that part doesn't change.

Hypnosis gives you access directly to that unconscious mind, kind of lets you bypass that, right?

Which means I can now have that conversation directly with that part of your mind, do that persuasion work and that reframing to get it to see things from a different perspective.

That's so interesting.

What are the more common issues people are coming to you trying to solve?

What I do is very sort of programmatic and kind of like total transformation.

A lot of times people are coming to me because of one of two reasons.

Either, number one, they're just kind of blocked in life, right?

They know what they want to do.

They've got this big vision.

They know they have a lot of potential, but they're here and they should be here.

So there's a lot of of stuff that's just simply off limits for them called this uh talked about this in my book being the cage right things are good there's a roof over your head lights are on food's on the table but everything's kind of like relatively mediocre compared to where you should be the second one is actually trickier it's called the treadmill okay these are people who are typically highly successful highly performing but they're stuck in this like constant cycle of chasing goal after goal after goal comparing themselves to the next guy higher up on the ladder right those people it's a situation where they're not able to actually be satisfied what they're doing they never actually get to feel that reward.

They never actually get to enjoy their full life.

And quite often, that's the only part of your life that's really working.

The rest of their life happens to be as usually master relationships and their health and so forth and so on.

So for them people, for those kind of people, it's about being able to step off that treadmill, still be able to perform and do really cool things, but live a more full life.

That's so interesting.

Yeah.

A lot of people just get stagnant in life, whether it's business, dating, you know, health.

Exactly.

And it's probably these blocks that they don't even know about.

Yeah, well, it's a, it's a,

it's like when you're growing up and things are bad, it's almost like you're playing a game that can't be won.

The rules are always changing, goalposts are always moving, never seem to be able to win.

At a certain point in life, we hit a point where it's like, okay, now I have some agency.

I start getting high school, able to do some of your stuff on your own, get into college, okay, great.

You started to build your life.

So essentially, select a game to play that you can win.

Find something you're good at, start cranking down that road, start cranking up the wins.

At a certain point in life, that kind of stops working for you.

Right.

Because it's not actually delivering the real satisfaction you want.

Yeah, I'm a successful entrepreneur.

I've got millions of dollars, but I still don't feel like I'm good enough.

I still don't have that, you know, that insecurity, that anxiety is still there.

That's at what point where we realize this isn't working.

It's not actually solving the problem.

That's when you have to start digging deeper, figuring out, okay, what exactly is that problem and how do I need to really solve it?

Absolutely.

Have you ever had a client that was immune to being hypnotized?

Not exactly.

People talk about suggestibility and people are harder and easier to hypnotize.

And that's kind of based upon a bunch of academic studies and the way they do it in like Stanford and Oxford when they're studying hypnosis.

The way they do it is they kind of run people through a standard hypnosis induction to see how they respond.

But hypnosis is kind of a very voluntary process, right?

I'm leading you through a series of steps, kind of like a guide of meditation, just taking you mind.

So if you want to follow along, I can get you there.

If you don't want to follow along, nothing I could do to get you there.

So if I'm sitting there trying to do a test on you and you don't want to play the game, you're going to come across as not suggestible, not able to be hypnotized.

Whereas if you want to play the game, it's easy to get you there.

So it's more a question of willingness, capability.

If you're talking about people who are like schizophrenic or psychotic, kind of out on that edge, or you just don't have that intellectual capability, I mean, that's obviously a different story.

But for the vast majority of people, it's more a question of willingness than capability.

Yeah, because you see those magic shows or whatever, and they're on stage, and some people knock out.

So they're just super open to it.

Yeah, they've decided they want to play the game.

So they're going to play the game.

Right.

And I've seen them tell them to do whatever and they'll do it.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

It's hilarious.

Yeah, but that's for sure.

What you do is very completely different.

Right.

I like what you do.

I've also tried past life hypnosis.

I'd love to hear your theory on that.

What do you think is going on there?

Man, could be a number of things.

Like it could be that there are past lives.

You're actually being able to go back and experience those.

The other thing that's possible is that your mind is kind of using that as a metaphor to help you understand a particular principle.

It's like, okay, maybe it's not necessarily.

safe for you to understand what really happened in this life.

So we're going to put it in this other context to give you the same kind of general idea of what was happening.

So it's easier to understand and deal with.

Right.

Because your mind is only going to show you things that it feels it's safe for you to see.

So if you've been through something really traumatic and it's like, okay, this is too much.

Okay.

Let me give you this other story over here.

This happened to somebody else.

It happened to you in a different life.

It's not really happening to you.

That makes it easier for you to be able to understand and experience it and still get the gist of what's happening and the understanding that you need without actually having to push all those traumatic buttons.

Interesting.

Have you ever tried that form of hypnosis?

Would you, are you opposed to it?

No, it's just not something that's really interesting me.

Okay.

You know, Because you've tried psychedelics, you've tried other energy healing stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

And every single thing that I've tried is fascinating.

I had all kinds of interesting things, right?

But I'm worried about what's happening in this life, what I'm doing now.

Right.

I don't really care what happened then unless it actually applies this now.

And I find that focusing on what's happening in this lifetime has given me so much more information, understanding, and agency to change how I'm living this life.

Yeah, because you're getting down to what's actually

running the shots.

Yeah, energy healing feels good.

I agree.

I've tried tried it, but then a week later, I'm back to the same problems.

Well, it's kind of like

I'll often ask my questions, my clients, this question of like, okay, what part of you is you?

Right.

You got your conscious mind, your rational mind, your emotional mind, your instinctive mind.

Got your neurochemistry, got your physical body.

Start talking about like the body keeps the score.

Now you've got an emotional body.

Talk about energy healing.

Great.

You've got an energetic body.

Are you getting a little more esoteric?

You got an astral body.

You got a soul.

And so what that is you?

And to me, I'm all of that and probably more.

And you can see a problem in your life as originating in any one of those aspects of self.

So a lot of the stuff that's happening is in your unconscious mind, that's your emotional, instinctive, and your rational pieces, right?

But if you've got a problem in your energetic body, trying to fix it there, exactly what you want to do.

But trying to fix a psychological problem from the energetic space is probably not going to be effective.

So it's actually the first step is trying to figure out where the problem really is, where you can address it where it actually is.

I saw some article yesterday.

They're getting close to proving that there is a soul.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

Which is exciting.

Yeah.

That's been a huge debate like forever between religions, right?

Absolutely.

So that could be major.

Yeah, and it kind of comes down to your concept of reality.

Is like three dimensions plus time, material reality, all there is, or is there more to it?

Because if there's more to it, then soul isn't actually material, right?

It's probably reflected in some way, but how do you measure something?

It's not here.

Right.

Right.

What's been your belief of all that?

Oh, I 100% believe that there's a soul, that the divine exists, that there is more to life and reality than three dimensions plus time.

My personal opinion, I'm not entirely sure that consciousness exists in three-dimensional.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, you can't touch it, see it, hear it, taste it, smell it, can't measure it.

So how do we act?

Like if we're making a decision, isn't that the conscious mind though?

Yes.

So you don't think that exists?

I don't think it exists in material reality.

I think everything's connected.

Right.

And so things are sort of reflected into material reality from some of those other places.

Interesting.

It's more like this physical body is translating stuff for that part of us to be able to understand and it's kind of being translated back and forth.

Yeah, that's a great idea.

No, there is a theory of everything's just light, right?

And we're kind of manifesting like this microphone right here.

It's just light.

Yep.

Yeah, I have heard that.

Yeah.

Cause third dimension, everything is different here.

Yep.

That's interesting.

Yep.

I want to talk about addictions.

I saw a lot of addictions growing up, mainly my father.

Alcohol, he was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

And once he got off that, he was on the vapes and the nicotine.

It was just constant addiction after addiction.

So have you seen hypnosis help with addictions?

Yeah, it's not something I specialize in personally, but yes, hypnosis is incredibly effective for addictions, especially like smoking.

Usually quit smoking like one hypnosis session.

Wow.

It's one of the most effective ones that's on the American Lung Association.

They actually have a list of hypnotists to actually help you quit smoking.

Really smoking.

Yeah, absolutely.

Side effective.

Now, in terms of addiction in general, the way I kind of look at it is that the addiction that you have is kind of like the tool you're using to make a miserable life worth living, right?

Life sucks.

Everything's terrible, but this gives you some kind of hope.

It gives you some kind of out, right?

So to me, there's kind of two pieces that you need to do.

There's a physical actual addiction piece, but there's also the psychological and all that other stuff you need to do to actually make life worth living on its own.

Because until it is, you're going to still need some kind of crutch, whatever that happens to be.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I wish I could have just told him to try hypnosis out.

He spent so much money on those nicotine, those gum things.

Oh my gosh, they smell like shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just hoped one addiction to another.

It seems like a lot of people these days have social media addiction, porn addiction.

It's more digital now.

Yeah.

You know, even cannabis, I would say, you could be.

Some people think you can't get addicted to it, but I think you can.

Oh, 100%.

100%.

Yeah.

We're straying away from alcohol, luckily, but I feel like there's always going to be something something people are addicted to.

Yeah.

And I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, right?

Because when you look at something like social media addiction or like porn addiction, you're talking about like poor identity stuff,

right?

You know, alcohol is a physical addiction.

Cannabis is physical, right?

But when you're talking about things like information environment you're consuming,

the world you're kind of comparing yourself against, like that gets really dangerous because that's actually like psychological impacting.

your view of who

that you are.

When I was first on social media the first few years, I just compared myself to everyone else.

It was really bad.

Yeah.

Really bad.

Yeah.

I had to get out of that mindset.

And even just like watching likes and views, like that, that's pretty bad too.

100%.

To tie your identity to that.

Yeah.

A lot of that kind of comes down to self-esteem, right?

If you're kind of coming into the world, if you've got this idea of like, I'm not good enough, or there's something wrong with me, that's not an answer we can accept, right?

So we try and find a way to prove it wrong.

And metrics like likes and views and everything else are a nice little scoreboard to use to prove that, okay, I'm good enough, I measure up up and so forth and so on.

Go back to that whole idea that the unconscious mind only believes what it already believes, and it's hard to prove that from the outside in.

That belief never changes, which is why that comparison is so toxic, because that never ends.

You can never get enough points.

Yeah.

Right.

I want to talk confidence too.

I had massive confidence issues growing up and I still have some today in certain things.

Have you seen hypnosis help with building confidence?

Yeah, but I think that we kind of get confidence wrong in a certain way.

We think that confidence is something we gain, right?

This idea that confidence comes from competence, right?

The more capable you get with a skill or something like that, then the more confident you become.

And that's true.

Like you start out driving, you're really young, nervous and everything else.

And as you drive more and more and more, you get more and more confidence easier.

But if that was the case, confidence comes from competence.

Everybody's already 100% confident of being them.

So everybody should be 100% confident in themselves.

They're not.

Right.

So the way I look at it is confidence is about what you gain.

It's about what you lose.

You lose the fear and the doubt certainty along the way.

So So if you don't like who you are, it's really hard to have actual confidence.

Parts of you are doubting, you're uncertain about, that you're afraid of in some way, shape.

So the confidence comes from actually getting to know what you actually are, understanding it, accepting it, forgiving it, and integrating.

Wow.

But when we don't like who we are, we try and be somebody else.

Love this.

Got to be somebody else.

So a lot of the ways we improve confidence is by being better at the thing we're trying to become and convincing ourselves that that's who we are.

But again, go back to the believe what you already believes,

which is why there's always that tension.

Yeah.

You got Alex from Mosey talking about having, you know, building a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.

Right.

But if you got one piece of undeniable proof, that should be enough.

So why do you need a stack?

Why do you keep adding to that stack?

That's that trap you get in of constantly having to prove you're something other than who you actually are.

I love that.

That's so spot on.

Because when my confidence was at low points, I was pretending to be someone I wasn't 100%.

I was trying to fit in with people I wasn't meant to fit in with.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But once you get to a place where you can accept and own it, who you are, then you just get to be you.

There's no questions anymore.

That's where you get that full confidence.

Right.

That's so cool.

Yeah.

It's about what you lose.

Wow.

I never thought of it that way.

That's so spot on.

Wow.

When it comes to dealing with emotions, is that something you think can be trained?

Like how you react?

Maybe, maybe not.

Okay.

Because for one thing, that's a subconscious process, right?

There's a great number of studies back in Germany in the 1970s that prove that we consciously understand something or experience something about a half a second after it happened.

So there's about a half a second where your unconscious mind is doing all this processing and taking action and so forth and so on.

That's the place where the emotion is generated and then you experience it.

If you can't train your subconscious mind from the outside in, a lot of what it's emotional control and so forth and so on is actually like emotional suppression.

I don't want to feel this.

or I'm not going to react that emotion.

But you can't actually change how you feel the emotions or how those emotions are generated unless you get in the subconscious mind to figure out how they're being generated in the first place, what they mean,

change how that actually works.

Talking about things like meditation, that's kind of a way of training yourself to distance yourself from your thoughts and emotions, training disassociation.

I look at that as like a very bad thing.

Really?

Meditation?

In terms of disassociation,

the reason why is because I look at every emotion as basically a signal or a question, especially negative emotions, right?

Fear and anxiety and so forth forth and so on.

Each one of those emotions, and I kind of go into this in my book a little bit, has a reason, right?

It has a question it's asking.

If you're angry, it's because something out there is messing with you and you need to make it go away.

You're forced to do so.

Figure out what tool, right?

If you're anxious, that means there's a problem out there in the environment, hasn't found you yet.

Figure out what that is, right?

That's that freeze response from a survival perspective.

If you look at depression, basically you're a situation where you're out of options, right?

You just kind of have to endure.

That's that flop survival response.

Okay.

So each of these negative emotions is trying to tell you what's happening in the world around you and how you need to fix it.

So to me, the better way to do it is to learn how to engage with your emotions.

Because if each emotion is trying to help you navigate the world, it's trying to help you figure things out.

It's trying to help you get to where you want to be, even if it's a negative emotion.

The difficulty is we define negative emotions as pain.

Something is painful, you have to avoid it.

More of that negative emotion you experience, especially when you're young and you're looking at it as pain, the bigger that survival response is, that survival trigger, right?

Right.

So while emotions are pain, you have to avoid it.

You You can't actually use them to help you.

So one of the things I do with my clients very, very often is to redefine emotions from pain to signal.

And once emotions are no longer pain, they become useful signals.

Now you can engage with them as long as you need to, figure things out.

It also does an interesting change.

If emotions are no longer pain, then they no longer come from emotional wounds, right?

Now there's nothing to heal.

Wow.

It also means that trauma takes on a very different perspective.

It's not something that happened to you.

To me, trauma is a situation where you weren't able to find a way to win.

You're stuck in a situation, can't figure it out, your mind is screaming at you for helping.

You don't have an answer.

That's it.

Yeah.

But even in those situations, you're still breathing, which means you found a way to navigate it successfully.

That's a win.

If somebody tries to destroy you, throws everything at you, including the sake of the sink, and you're still standing, one.

So even in those situations we define as highly traumatic, they're extremely difficult to navigate, they're extremely painful from an emotional perspective, we still came out on top.

Doesn't mean we didn't take our hits.

But if you look at guys like Connor McGregor or Mike Tyson to get in the ring, even when they win, they get the snot kicked out of them.

Right.

Yeah.

And part of the problem is we're looking at life and survival terms in terms of fight and flight.

Fight something off, you don't get hurt.

Successfully run away, you don't get hurt.

So there's that underlying assumption that if you got hurt, you lost.

Throughout your survival, right?

Yeah.

Wow, that's a fascinating take because I think as men, we're like running away from emotions.

We're suppressing them.

We're not dealing with them.

But you're saying to use them as a signal.

Yes.

And then find out what's going on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're tools helping you navigate the world.

And for men, it's kind of a little bit different because

we're built for violence.

We have to learn how to not respond emotionally because it's too dangerous to do so.

Right.

But that tends to express in, don't cry, don't be afraid, so forth.

So on the suppression, which means you're actually not allowed to even fully human.

Right.

If you're going down that road.

Whereas me, the better way to do it is be able to fully experience and engage with those and still control the way you respond.

I love that.

Yeah, my dad had a bipolar disorder.

So same here.

I think I had some trauma from that, to be honest.

I'm sure.

Because I didn't know if you'd yell at me or if you'd be happy.

I never knew I said the wrong thing.

Exactly.

And that's kind of one of the situations.

I talked about this with my clients a lot is this idea of the game that can't be won.

You're in a situation.

Nothing you do seems to get to what you need.

Nothing you do really seems to work.

So after a while, it seems to start blaming who you are rather than things you're doing.

Right.

Victim mindset.

Victim mindset.

Right.

But at the same time, if you're a kid, you don't really have any choice about the environment you're in.

You can't change it.

Right.

So you have to find a way to navigate it.

Can't do that.

Must be you because you're the common factor in all these situations.

Right.

But the situation is that your dad is bipolar, doesn't know it.

It's uncontrolled.

And nothing you do or don't do is matters.

That's true.

Right.

It's going to happen regardless.

Yeah.

Doesn't have anything to do with you.

The game is rigged.

Losing an expected outcome.

Right.

So there's nothing wrong with you if you're losing a game that's rigged.

But we don't think that way as kids.

Most of us don't even think that way as adults.

No.

I will say a little side note uh microdosing mushrooms helped him oh i bet yeah he uh in his later years he was very not amazing with his emotions but a lot better yeah you know i love psychedelics i think that those are such amazing tools you can do so many really great things with it and one of the best things about it i think is kind of opening new pathways and opening new possibilities just kind of like expanding what's possible for you just doing that makes a huge difference yeah because there's a lot of limiting beliefs oh million you know we attract them growing up yep yeah i remember just aiming for like like when I was growing up, I was like, I want to be a millionaire.

Yep.

Like, that's, that's just a belief.

And then when you get there, what's next?

Well, it said, it goes back to that treadmill.

It's continually moving targets.

You say, ah, if I get a million, then I'll made it.

That'll prove that I'm good enough.

So forth and so on.

You make a million.

That feels good for a minute because you succeeded.

That's that accomplishment, right?

Got that pride.

All of a sudden, that fades, and now you're back to still not feeling good enough.

Right.

Great.

Got to make two million.

Made that two?

Same thing happened.

Never ends.

Make that five, still feels that same way.

Trying to prove that feeling wrong.

Doesn't work from the outside in.

Got got to do inside out.

All right.

So what's the proper goal setting technique then, you think?

I don't set goals.

You don't?

I don't.

I build systems.

The reason why I don't is, number one, if I choose a goal, I'm kind of eliminating all that possibility.

Right.

I say, this is the thing I'm going for, which means I'm not going after any of the other thing.

Number one, the goal I set today is based on what I can conceive of today.

What if next week or next month I came up with a better idea?

Right.

Right.

So for me, it's more about building a system of like, okay, what am I I trying to achieve in life?

What's my mission?

What's my purpose?

Let me just figure out ways to do that.

Kind of having a North Star and kind of a mission to take you there is a way to navigate.

So for me, my North Star is like greatness.

I choose greatness.

I'm pursuing greatness.

And the mission to get me there is to end human suffering and lead to the fullness of human potential to the maximum extent possible for me to engineer in this lifetime.

Figure if I'm starting to do that, it's going to take me to the greatness.

And I don't have to figure out how that looks or feels.

I love it.

Yes, you have a general direction.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I like that more than specific number goals.

100%.

Yeah.

100%.

Because the goals, if you're setting them to specific numbers and so forth and so on, is you're playing that game.

You're playing life like a video game, trying to hit a high score, right?

Trying to measure things, trying to prove to yourself again.

But if you're at that place where you like who you are, you got the self-esteem, that value you've created for yourself, don't need anything on the outside end, create it.

It's going from playing life like Alex Ramose, trying to make millions and millions of dollars, build that stack of undeniable proof, playing like Elon Musk.

He's not trying to make the millions.

He's trying to change the course of history, course of human development.

It's a very, very different game, but you only get to play that when you're not measuring things, don't have a scoreboard.

That's interesting.

A lot of people have a scoreboard.

I'd say.

Oh, yeah, so much.

So much.

I mean, they teach it to you growing up as a kid, sports and just social media followers.

Yep.

Yeah.

And it comes back to that idea of I don't like who I am.

So I got to be somebody different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I got to be aware of that.

Cause I, even myself, I'm like, I want to climb the podcast rankings and everything, you know.

Yep.

And there's, it's not that that's a bad thing when you go up that mountain and so forth and so on, but there's a difference between doing it because you're trying to prove something to yourself or doing it for the love of the game.

Good point.

How far can I go?

What can I accomplish?

You got the guy like Michael Phelps, Olympic swimmer, crushed like a million different records, came out with like 30,000 gold medals.

Why?

Because I love what he's doing.

How far can I go?

Yeah.

I love that.

You mentioned purpose earlier.

Do you get a lot of people coming to you struggling to find their purpose?

Sometimes.

Sometimes.

A lot of these guys that do come to me with that kind of thing, it's because they've been on that treadmill.

They've been playing life like a video game.

They know that's not what they need, right?

But my job is to help them figure that out.

My job is to help them become fully them so that the purpose becomes obvious.

I like that.

You served in the military.

Did you have a lot of trauma from that?

No, not really.

So when I was in the Marine Corps, I was a Russian linguist.

I never really went anywhere to diploid or anything like that.

I was there from 97 to 02.

So right around the time 9-11 happened was about the time I was getting out.

From there, I went to the Air National Guard supporting like Predators and U-2s and working at Intel for F-16s and F-22s.

But again, never really saw a lot of stuff.

A lot of the things that traumatic were from working in the intelligence world where I was working like counterterrorism and counter-proliferation.

Yeah, I'm sure you saw some stuff there.

Saw some stuff there for sure.

Yeah, I had Chris Voss on the show, FBI negotiator.

He lives here.

He's heard and seen some stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He said he still sees it daily.

Yeah, you're you're dealing with the worst parts of the world and the worst parts of humanity and some of the worst conditions.

So yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna affect you.

Yeah.

That's kind of why I had to get out of that world after after a while is just simply to was it too much on you mentally or yeah, mentally and emotionally because you would get late night calls, right?

Well, I was working shift work and things like that.

So it's kind of like you roll in and all of a sudden you're dealing with all kinds of horrible stuff.

And then after that, you get off work and you go hang out at the bar with friends doing a happy hour.

And you can't talk about anything, right?

There's no support for you.

And again, I'm bipolar or sorry, autistic.

I can't lie to myself about what was happening.

Right.

So I just had to carry the full weight of what I was being involved with.

And you had no one to talk to.

Were you married at the time?

I was.

Okay.

Were you talking to your wife at least?

Can't.

Wow.

It's that.

How are you supposed to talk about classified stuff with your wife?

How's the stuff they did at work?

That was good.

Some cool stuff.

Wow.

Right.

How are you supposed to explain that?

That's a tough job.

Yeah.

I think any job where there's a lot of secrecy involved and it's just dramatic.

Really hard.

Damn.

That's why you see, like, you know, police, EMS, doctors, you know, military a lot.

Why?

Because you can't talk about it.

You can't share it.

There's no place to let that out.

So you just carry that full weight yourself and often it just really tears you apart.

Yeah.

Getting married next year, any advice for that?

So I'm looking to get married again myself and I'm kind of looking at two things in terms of compatibility and alignment.

Compatibility is like being compatible and having that

kind of commonality and that ability to communicate around like intelligence or communicate or consciousness, you know, your emotional state, sexual compatibility, right?

But there's also alignment around like values and vision and lifestyle.

have to have both right having one without the other is going to be a mess

right so it's all about making sure sure that you're on the same page right are you do you have a shared mission a shared purpose are you heading in the same direction to create something together if you are things are probably going to work out two reasonable people trying to make the same thing happen moving the same direction you're going to be able to figure it out if you're not on the same page not moving the same direction you don't have the same vision everything's going to be a mess

that's what happened to you often yeah yeah well i didn't find out that was bipolar or autistic until last year so pretty much every relationship up until then was destined to fail like it can't be anything other than a train wreck when you've got somebody with you know undiagnosed serious mental health issues that's not being treated.

You know, why do you think it took so long to get a diagnosis?

Ah, man.

For the autism, you know, I was growing up in Kansas in the 70s and 80s.

Like nobody really had any idea what that was back then.

And I figured out a way to kind of navigate the world with it.

I basically turned my brain into a machine that reverse-engineered human behavior and it worked well enough.

As far as the bipolar goes, it's kind of combined with the ADHD.

You know, I've got very low dopamine levels to begin with.

So my mood is typically low to begin with.

So a lot of the things I was experienced was depression.

I never had that high manic episode until I started getting the ADHD treated.

So that's why openings came up to normal.

Now it opened up the space for that manic episode.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

So after about three months of doing, like, you know, playing around with things like Adderall and Walbutrain, that's what triggered the manic episode.

And because there were no brakes on the train, I just went off the cliff.

Damn.

Are there a

medication right now?

Yeah.

So you're still relying on it?

Yeah.

Well, it's when you've had as severe an episode as that, you can't go without because the

odds and the probability it's going to happen again are extremely high whoa yeah i didn't know that about manic episodes so once you have one it kind of opens the floodgates it's like getting the first concussion 100 yeah damn so it took me about 14 15 months to figure out the right medications that to keep me stable and actually allow me to like function so that was a that was a gauntlet to go through holy crap sorry to hear you went through that man you know it sucks but at the same time it's just kind of cranking through and trying stuff out until you find something that works yeah luckily for me i'd done all this work on myself beforehand to get myself to an extremely solid state so it was just a situation of like okay this is frustrating.

It's annoying.

There's nothing I can do but go through it.

So why feel bad about it?

It's more about the frustration.

It's like, why am I out of there?

Why am I out of there?

The hope of having it work for a few weeks and then all the side effects kick in, trying to figure out what's next, right?

But it wasn't a terribly stressful or difficult situation.

You know, obviously, like my business took a big hit.

Yeah.

Lost my girlfriend, all this kinds of stuff happened, but just something you're going through.

And all you have to do is just keep on going.

One day you're going to figure it out.

As soon as you do, you're off to the races again.

Yeah.

So I finally hit that point where I'm about 100% about two, three months ago.

So now I've been back on that track, rebuilding things, getting things back up and running, getting myself out there.

And it's been fun.

Let's go.

How aware of you are you with the bipolar stuff?

Like, was that a shock to you when you got the diagnosis?

Yeah.

It was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I had no idea that was down there.

Whoa.

No idea.

Because again, I'd never really had that hymenic episode that in a way that I recognized.

Kind of looking back at my life now.

It's like, okay, like, yeah, probably there.

Yeah, probably there.

Yeah, probably there.

Did you get in a lot of fights growing up?

No.

Never been in a fight in my life.

Oh, well.

Not really.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

Well, I've never really put myself in a position where I had to.

Okay.

You know, and after I got through like the Marine Corps and so forth and so on, I've got a certain presence, right?

Where you don't look like a victim.

You don't look like a victim.

So people tend not to mess with you.

Yeah.

What are you working on next?

Ooh, well, there's a lot of different things.

Based on what I've kind of understood about how the mind works and focusing on that kind of emotional belief set and so forth and so on.

There's a lot of things I'm working on to try and get that out there and explore a lot of different ways to apply it.

One of the things I'm doing these days is working with a lot of veterans groups, kind of locally as well as around the country, to sort of see how we can apply this to things like PTSD and stress disorders and things like that.

Because a lot of that is correlated with high neuroticism trait, your tendency towards negative thinking and negative self-image.

So if we can correct that negative self-image and that negative worldview, that makes all that other stuff a heck a lot easier to deal with.

Kind of the techniques I use make that pretty quick.

I love it.

I'll put you in touch with some veteran groups.

That'd be great.

Yeah, absolutely.

Are you working with any right now?

There's an entrepreneur group in Austin that I'm working with, and I'm kind of putting those failures out with a couple other groups nationwide and one in the UK.

So I'm still in the initial stages.

That's needed, man.

I'm learning about all the trauma these veterans are going through right now, having them on the show.

It's

crazy.

Yeah, it's brutal.

And there's just not the support from them.

They do not get taken care of the way they

not at all.

I mean, maybe money-wise, but not mentally.

Not even money-wise.

Really?

Disability?

Disability, like

so hard.

Yeah, it's not nearly enough.

Yeah.

Not nearly enough.

I mean, with inflation these days, yeah.

Yeah, definitely not.

Man, a million, a million today is not what it used to be.

No, not even close.

Like, you used to be able to make a million live off it.

Yep.

Now it's like that's a house with interest.

Yep.

Crazy times, man.

Well, dude, we'll link to your socials below.

Anything else you want to close off with?

Yeah, I wrote a book called Winter Peace: How to End Any Conflict, Make Success Inevitable.

It's kind of this whole process that I developed, start to finish, all the theory behind it.

As much as I can, get through the benefit work from one-on-one in a book format.

Maybe as much as I can.

Perfect.

We'll link it below.

Is it on Audible?

It's on Audible as well.

Awesome.

I'll check it out.

Thanks for coming awesome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yep.

Thanks for watching, guys.

See you next time.

Cheers.