Pod Insights The Impact Theory Podcast How Society Broke Men - and Who’s Paying the Price | Gabor Mate (Fan Fav) About this episode This is a fan fav episode. In this episode, Gabor Mate explains how easily unconscious traumas from childhood can be identified. He shares years of experience and wisdom with Tom in this conversation that explores the depths of truth and meaning in life, and how that fits in with our physical and behavioral manifestations of broken adult expectations and stressors.
Gabor Mate, is a deep thinker, childhood development expert, and expert of addiction. He shares his unique insights on how to deal with severe trauma and how to get the most out of life by moving beyond mere survival.
ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 3-18-21
SHOW NOTES:
Reality | Gabor on how people view reality and the Johnny Cash song, In Your Mind [1:14]
Emotional Work | Ongoing emotional work that takes consciousness and awareness [9:13]]
Being Sensitive | Advantage and disadvantage of being highly sensitive [12:18]
Beyond Mental | Gabor reveals makes life more profound beyond the mental experience [20:04]
Self-Isolation | Gabor explores self-isolation and the state of pain versus enlightenment. [22:32]
Child Development | Gabor reveals what healthy child development [41:04]
Truth Not Facts | Gabor explains difference between truth and facts [59:54]
Palliative Care | Gabor share his experience and perspective with palliative care [1:14:18]
Suffering From Past |Gabor shares a quote to explain how suffering isn’t always labeled [1:43:19]
CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS
Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511.
ButcherBox: Ready to level up your meals? Go to https://butcherbox.com/impact https://butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box and FREE bacon for life with the Bilyeu Box!
Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory https://linkedin.com/impacttheory
Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact https://shopify.com/impact
Hims: Start your free online visit today at https://hims.com/IMPACT https://hims.com/IMPACT.
SleepMe: Visit https://sleep.me/impact https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping.
Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out
What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here:
If you want my help...
STARTING a business: join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show:
https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show
SCALING a business: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call:
https://tombilyeu.com/call https://tombilyeu.com/call
Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/:
https://tombilyeu.com/ https://tombilyeu.com/
**********************************************************************
If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast, Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you.
**********************************************************************
FOLLOW TOM:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tombilyeu https://twitter.com/tombilyeu
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu
https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 17,263 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tom Bilyeu? Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.
0:45 Tom Bilyeu? Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with the legendary thinker and bestselling author, Gabor Maté. Gabor, thank you so much for joining me today.
1:19 Speaker 01 It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me.
1:21 Tom Bilyeu? Man, I'm really excited about this. You've got such a cool breadth of work that focuses in on an area that I care deeply about, which is, I'll sum up in a way that I don't know if you'll agree with, but when I look at your work, it seems to all slot into how we develop and how we become who we are. And that is an area of deep fascination for me. And especially with your lens of looking at things through childhood trauma, having worked so much in addiction. I think you have a really unique understanding of sort of how we're put together. And I would love to start with something that you begin a lot of your
2:02 Tom Bilyeu? your in-person sessions with, which is the song by Johnny Cash, "In Your Mind", which I had never heard. So I had to, I went and listened to it and I loved it. What is it about that song that's going to teach us about who we are?
2:18 Speaker 01 Well, as people, we always think we're looking at a reality and our view of it sees reality the way it is. But it's been a spiritual teaching for eons that really...
2:31 Speaker 01 Well, the Buddha said it, the very first statement in a collection of his saying, the Dhammapada, is that our thoughts are in the lead. And so whatever our thoughts tell us, that's the reality that we see. So essentially, with our minds, we create the world. Now, Johnny Cash in this song says, "It's all in your mind." One foot on Jacob's ladder, which is the stairway to heaven, which, by the way, wasn't originated with that zeppelin. The stairway to heaven is actually from the Bible, where Jacob dreams that the angels are going up to heaven. Or one foot in the fire. So Cash thinks, one foot on the ladder, one
3:13 Speaker 01 foot in the fire, it all goes done in your mind. So the kind of thoughts and beliefs that we have create the world that we live in. And that's what I get from that song. Now, what the song doesn't say is that before, with our minds, we create the world. The world creates our minds. So this is where development comes in. That given our early experiences, we create a view of the world and of ourselves and of other people that then governs how we are in the world and how we feel about everything. But we forget those early experiences, those shaping influences. And as a result, we mistake our view of the
3:57 Speaker 01 world for the world itself. It all goes done in your mind, which is what Johnny sings.
4:04 Tom Bilyeu? What's the time period of that profound shaping window of development? Is it just a couple of years in the beginning? Is it till we're 15, till the brain stops developing at 25? Like, what does that window look like?
4:17 Speaker 01 It begins in the years. So already, the stresses or the experiences of the mother
4:25 Speaker 01 shape how the infant experiences the world.
4:31 Speaker 01 We know this so that we can talk about it maybe later in detail if you wish, but there's lots of evidence now that the child's brain is actually in his development is significantly influenced by the mother's emotional states. So it goes back that far.
4:47 Tom Bilyeu? Getting into the what I really want to understand is the the foundation of of that. So I've heard you talk before about in native societies, it was always understood that if somebody was angry, you would just keep them away from a pregnant person. You didn't want that anger transferring. But my question is, why not? What? What is it about intense emotions or negative emotions? What is it doing to the substructures of the brain that then make that disadvantageous as the child grows?
5:19 Speaker 01 Well, so there was a study done after nine eleven. Women who suffered post traumatic stress disorder while they were pregnant as a result of nine eleven. A year later, their offspring still at abnormal stress hormone levels. So fundamentally, what happens is is that the brain's capacity to perceive stress and to process it gets impaired.
5:48 Speaker 01 So that means people are now more prone to feel stressed when there's no real threat. Or they may be more prone not to recognize the threat when it is there. So our whole perception of the world and safety and our responses to stress, the physiological apparatus for handling stress is affected in already by what happens in the womb.
6:12 Tom Bilyeu? So thinking about the gym, for instance, so you go to the gym and you want a stressor, you want a certain level of difficulty in order to, in that case, you are tearing the muscle slightly and then as it heals, it grows back stronger.
6:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:28 Tom Bilyeu? Is it that the brain reacts differently to stress in that any amount of stress is bad? Or is there a certain amount that is useful and just we're going too far?
6:43 Speaker 01 Well, this is where I think language becomes very important. What we mean by we use the word stress. So if you mean by stress, the challenge. Life is full of challenges, which will get your adrenaline going and so on. That's a good thing.
7:00 Speaker 01 When I talk about stress, I talk about a threat that the organism doesn't know how to respond to.
7:08 Speaker 01 And it's too much. And so that the the person who actually coined the word stress, who was a fellow Hungarian Canadian, Hans Selye. He's the one who coined the word and his present usage.
7:27 Speaker 01 He really meant pressure on an organism that's too much for the organism to handle. So that's what I mean by stress. I don't, I don't mean the stress of a freely chosen challenge. Such as going to the gym and working your muscles hard and going even beyond what you could do before. I don't mean that, that's not what I mean by stress. I mean by stress. And the, the biggest triggers for stress, according to the research, are loss of control. Uncertainty, lack of information and conflict. So when you subject people to those circumstances, which in this society happens a lot.
8:06 Speaker 01 People are stressed, often beyond their capacity to deal with it. Now that capacity is very much programmed by what happened to us very early in life.
8:17 Tom Bilyeu? And where does that, so it begins in utero. Where is the sort of closing of that hypermalleability phase? Because where, where, one thing that really drives me is the question of, okay, damage has been done. You know, like in your case, where you're born two months after, or excuse me, two months before the Nazis invade Hungary. It's like, not a lot to be done about that. That is what it is. So now the question becomes, can we undo it?
8:47 Tom Bilyeu? Is there a window of hypermalleability where the, you could sort of reprogram the infant? Or is it like, almost like an imprinting machine where it's like, nope, you had this heavy amount of stress in utero. That's imprinted and no matter what you do in the first three years is never going to undo that.
9:07 Speaker 01 It is imprinted in many ways biologically, which we could talk about,
9:13 Speaker 01 that the person is not even aware of. Imprinted in how their genes are turned on and off, imprinted on how their chromosomes function, imprinted in how their stress apparatus responds to the external environment, imprinted in their cells, imprinted in inflammation in their bodies, and so on and so on. And the earlier it happens, and the more it happens, and the more temperamentally sensitive the child, the greater the effects. Having said that, it's never not reversible, it's never not approachable. Now, fact is, people can heal, people can rewire themselves, people can
9:54 Speaker 01 find equilibrium, but the more happened earlier, and the earlier it happened, the more difficult that work becomes, which brings me
10:05 Speaker 01 to my epitaph that I've designed for my gravestone, you know what it's gonna say? It's gonna say, it's gonna say it was a lot more work than I had anticipated, you know?
10:17 Tom Bilyeu? That is a fair assessment.
10:19 Speaker 01 It's ongoing work, like I'm seventy-seven, it's ongoing work. And, you know, when I don't take care of myself emotionally, when I don't do my yoga, when I don't get myself into the swimming pool or on the exercise bike,
10:35 Speaker 01 when I take on too much in my life, it gets activated, so...
10:43 Speaker 01 Yes, it can be dealt with, and it can be healed, and it can be regulated, but it takes consciousness, it takes awareness.
10:53 Tom Bilyeu? Given your perspective with having dealt with a lot of people that have had severe early traumas that have echoed through their adult lives in the form of addiction, what is it, if it's identifiable, what is it that makes some people able to get in there, do the work harder, you know, than expected though it is, and other people that get stuck?
11:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that's the important question. First of all, let me just say that trauma shows up in multiple ways. Addiction is only one of them. So-called mental illnesses, depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, whatever others.
11:32 Speaker 01 Physical illnesses, chronic physical illness like cancer and autoimmune disease very often reflect trauma. And in physiological ways, which we can talk about, and I'm not just giving you a personal opinion. I'm telling you what the research shows. So trauma has multiple manifestations, of which addiction is only one. Now, what makes the difference?
11:53 Speaker 01 I don't think this is one single factor, but there are a number.
11:57 Speaker 01 First of all, has there been anybody along the way that was empathetic and supportive to you?
12:05 Speaker 01 If there was, that can make it, no matter what happened, that can make a huge difference.
12:12 Speaker 01 Earlier in your life, the better. But if there was a teacher, if there was an uncle, an aunt, anybody who maybe couldn't change your situation, but could listen to you, or just validate you, or speak to you empathetically, that can make a difference.
12:35 Speaker 01 Social class has a lot to do with it, because
12:41 Speaker 01 if you can afford to see a therapist and talk to somebody, that puts you in a advantage. How much stress you continue to be under in your life, that has a lot to do with it. When people are trying to just to survive, it's hard for them to consider transformation. So people that are under economic pressure, or racially oppressed, or
13:08 Speaker 01 under economic threat,
13:14 Speaker 01 political conflict, these make it difficult for people, because people are just in survival mode.
13:23 Speaker 01 People that are highly sensitive, they're both in an advantage and a disadvantage. They're at a disadvantage in that the more sensitive they are, the more it hurts when stuff happens.
13:38 Speaker 01 But also the more sensitive they are, the more likely they might have to have some insight or awareness or some creative outlet. So that can work both ways.
13:48 Speaker 01 I would say the biggest difference is, was there some empathetic support in your life at any time? And even if you talk to people who've been addiction for a long time and say, well, what made the difference? Somebody talked to me like a human being. Somebody didn't judge me, they accepted me.
14:08 Tom Bilyeu? What, what window does that open up for them? Is it, it begins to allow themselves to stop judging themselves and to develop self-awareness? Or is there something else at play?
14:20 Speaker 01 No, it's the very first thing you said.
14:24 Speaker 01 Anybody who's traumatized, and by trauma, I mean a broad range of experiences from abuse, extreme things on one hand, to just parents who are too stressed to pay attention to you or to really see you and receive you.
14:41 Speaker 01 When children are not seen for who they are or when you hurt,
14:48 Speaker 01 they can make two assumptions.
14:52 Speaker 01 One, there's something wrong with the world and my parents are not capable.
15:00 Speaker 01 Or they don't love me.
15:03 Speaker 01 Or can make the, or they can make the assumption, and that's why this is happening. Because I deserve to be loved and I deserve to be treated well, but these people are incapable and they don't care. You can make that assumption, you can make the assumption, I'm talking about unconscious assumption. Or you can make the assumption, there's something wrong with me.
15:22 Speaker 01 Those are the two choices. Now, it's much safer for the child to assume that there's something wrong with them.
15:29 Tom Bilyeu? Why do you say that's safer?
15:30 Speaker 01 It's a lot safer, yeah.
15:32 Tom Bilyeu? Why safer?
15:33 Speaker 01 Why is it safer? Because what, what's it like to live with the danger as a four-year-old living in a world where your parents are dysfunctional and they are perhaps hateful towards you? How could you endure that for one minute?
15:51 Speaker 01 So you have to make the opposite assumption. If this stuff is happening to me, it's because I deserve it. Something wrong with me. Now, we're back to your question. Somebody comes along and treats you compassionately. Oh. Maybe I'm not that bad person. Here's a person who's here's somebody who's treating me like I was a worthwhile human being. Maybe I'm a worthwhile human being. So that compassion, that reflection that you get from this other human being, subverts your image of yourself as worthless. And that's what makes the big difference.
16:30 Tom Bilyeu? Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag. But Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories. They skip the middlemen and sell 100% Mongolian cashmere, starting at just 60 bucks. 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Now, I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else. I've got their joggers and a couple of their tees as well. And I can tell you their whole line is high quality. Give the gift of quality this holiday season.
17:12 Tom Bilyeu? Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time. And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material.
17:54 Tom Bilyeu? It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number. To anyone willing to pay. Incogni goes after that supply. They handle removal requests across 420 plus harmful broker sites. And they keep checking back as brokers constantly try to relist you. On the unlimited plan, the exposure scanner hunts down your information. Send a link and their privacy experts handle the takedown. Track your progress in the app and get a monthly risk assessment showing exactly where you stand. Go to incogni.com/impact and use code IMPACT for 60% off an annual plan. Incogni is I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com/impact.
18:39 Tom Bilyeu? Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk free with a 30 day money back guarantee.
18:46 Tom Bilyeu? So that points to something that is really interesting, maybe a little bit scary. So Lisa Feldman Barrett, who you may or may not know, has really interesting thoughts. So I'm always trying to figure out how much of who we are is nature, how much of us is nurture? And she told me, Tom, look, you're, you're asking the wrong question. So the reality is we have a nature that requires nurture. And as you talk about this, it, and I'm, I'm going to put words in your mouth. Tell me if they're accurate. It sounds like you're saying our minds are essentially co-created. And we are presenting ourselves and looking for an echo back of, or a reflection back of what people think about what they see.
19:28 Tom Bilyeu? And we're using both of those things, our own sort of sense of who we are, plus what's being reflected back to us to figure out who we are. So if something negative is reflected back, that's actually going to shape my sense of self. And if something positive is reflected back, that's going to shape my sense of self. Now, that to me begs a question. I'm so curious to know what you think about this. So my response to that is cool. I'm going to become totally self-sufficient. I'm going to get to the point where I don't need somebody's reflection back. But I can feel the danger in that. It seems like a risky game to say, I'm going to totally withdraw. I'm going to do all the work internally.
20:09 Tom Bilyeu? I'm going to make sure that I know who I am, that I don't need that reflection back. But knowing how Important loving relationships are and things like that. I can feel while there would be some upside to totally knowing who you are, believing in yourself, but you're also walling yourself off. How do you conceptualize handling that?
20:31 Speaker 01 Well, it's a question of who's doing it and why? Because you can do that walling off in two ways. So the Buddha, you know, the story. He goes through all these teachers and he wants to get enlightened, then he goes through all these very rigorous, self-denying, aesthetic practices and he just doesn't, the truth doesn't come to him. And finally, he goes off by himself and he sits under a tree, by himself. And he just sits there and he meditates. And he contemplates everything that arises in his mind. And then after a while, he has his nirvana, he has this
21:13 Speaker 01 enlightenment experience.
21:17 Speaker 01 And then he's got a decision to make. He understands his own nature. He understands the nature of reality and he really does. He's one of the outstanding minds in history.
21:32 Speaker 01 But then he's got a decision to make. So do I just
21:37 Speaker 01 revel in this
21:40 Speaker 01 spiritual liberation that I have
21:45 Speaker 01 worked so hard to attain?
21:48 Speaker 01 And no, he decides he's gonna go back and teach other people because he wants to be connected to humanity. And he wants to enlighten other people as well.
21:58 Tom Bilyeu? What can you articulate what his sort of breakthrough enlightenment realization was?
22:04 Speaker 01 Well,
22:08 Speaker 01 It'd be presumptuous of me to do so. Because I've not had that realization myself. I've only read about it. Or I've seen other people talk about it.
22:18 Tom Bilyeu? I don't mind a regurgitation of what other people have said. I actually, so I know Buddhism at a thirty thousand foot view. So I actually don't know, other than life is suffering. I don't know what sort of the key revelations are.
22:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, life is suffering is. I mean, his real teaching is that life doesn't need to be suffering. But the way we set it up with our minds, it is suffering. So it really has to do with. Goes back to the Johnny Cash song. It all goes on in your mind. You disidentify from your mind. And reality is much greater and much deeper. And much more sacred than your mind will ever tell you.
22:59 Tom Bilyeu? That's interesting. Can you say that another way? Even, even. I don't know if, if this is your own understanding of life or a reflection of Buddhism, but I'm curious to know. If life is more profound than your mind, what are the elements that make it profound? Is it beauty? Is it love? Is it? What is it?
23:23 Speaker 01 The problem with the conversation, Tom, is that there's two minds talking about. The nature of reality and.
23:30 Tom Bilyeu? In that we don't use the same words or?
23:32 Speaker 01 No, no, no. It's that we're still in the mind. Whereas. My very modest understanding of the spiritual teachings, not just Buddhist spiritual teaching, but Sufi teachings or. Jewish spiritual teaching, Christian spiritual teaching. I'm talking about the spiritual teachings, not the religion. Is that. There is essence, there's truth. That goes beyond what the mind itself can comprehend.
24:05 Speaker 01 So for
24:05 Tom Bilyeu? But we must have access to it in some way, even if only through pure experience. Otherwise, it would be
24:10 Speaker 01 But that's the whole point. It is pure, pure experience that a great poet like Rumi can write about or Hafiz can write about. But
24:25 Speaker 01 I cannot claim to have had that pure experience. If I did, I didn't recognize it as such.
24:31 Tom Bilyeu? Can I give you one of the experiences I've heard you talk about? And I'll be curious to know if you were grazing along the edges of something. I believe it was your first experience with ayahuasca. You said that you were there and suddenly had this rush of just pure love. And that you, if I remember right, you started crying and you were just overwhelmed with this sense of just, just love in its purest form. And in, in that moment, realized you had closed yourself off to that experience. Is when I think about people talking about there being something more profound, those are the only sort of moments that I can relate to where I think that feeling is so elevated
25:16 Tom Bilyeu? and wonderful that, but that's the only thing I've ever touched on in my own life where that seems like what they could be talking about. Does that, is that getting close?
25:28 Speaker 01 Well, it's, it's, it's heading in the right direction. I think that real spiritual teachers would say that that what I experienced there wasn't the feeling. It was, feelings are like activities of our nervous systems. And they would say there's something deeper than the nervous system. So what I experienced was a state of, of being
25:51 Speaker 01 manifesting in love. And love might not be the only manifestation of it. It might be courage, clarity, compassion,
26:04 Speaker 01 justice, strength, will. I know one spiritual teacher specifically who talks about it in those terms, but these are not feelings. The feeling of love and the state of love are not necessarily the same thing.
26:21 Speaker 01 But yeah, there's more to it than just a mental experience. There is the direct, the, the, the mental thought, um, or even the emotional resonance. It's, it's more like a direct experience of something and, um,
26:37 Speaker 01 you, you know, it's clear that what the Buddha had was, for one, he wasn't the only one,
26:44 Speaker 01 was a direct experience. But to go back to your question about isolation, so there's a way of isolating yourself
26:54 Speaker 01 as a way of committing yourself to re-enlightenment, which mean that you'll stay away from other people for the rest of your life. It just means that you're gonna go deep into yourself and not be distracted by all that the world throws at you. Then there's another way to isolate yourself, which is a defensive one, which is, "The world is so awful and heck with them all, I don't need anybody." That will protect you from some kinds of hurt. Because if you withdraw from relationships, you'll never be betrayed, well, that's true. On the other hand, that itself is a state of pain, that isolation itself is a state of pain. So when you talk about isolation, it depends
27:39 Speaker 01 who's doing it and where is it coming from and, and to go back to the original question. And you mentioned, um,
27:47 Speaker 01 nurture, nature, it's perfectly true that we're born with certain expectations for the world.
27:56 Speaker 01 I mean, every creature is like, our, our lungs are an expectation for oxygen.
28:03 Speaker 01 If it wasn't for oxygen, we wouldn't have lungs. So we evolved in response to the availability of oxygen.
28:12 Speaker 01 Otherwise, we would not have evolved the way we did. There might be some kind of creatures around, but it wouldn't be us. So our lungs are an expectation for, for, for oxygen. In the same way, our nervous systems are an expectation for love, for nurturing, for being held, for being valued, for being enjoyed. That's what the infant is born with, those expectations.
28:41 Speaker 01 And whether we develop well or whether we don't depends very much on how fully those expectations are met. Now, we can survive without them. My God, many of us have. But survival and fully being alive and fully living are not the same thing. And fully and survival adapting to things. I mean,
29:08 Speaker 01 you can adapt. Human beings are particularly good at adapting to vast range of environments. But that doesn't mean that we thrive in all those environments.
29:20 Speaker 01 So one of my arguments, one of my points about the culture that we're living in now is that, yeah, we're surviving, but we're hardly thriving. And we're not thriving precisely because our expectations, I'm talking about our built in natural expectations. I'm not talking about artificial expectations like expect to be
29:42 Speaker 01 wealthy or expect to be respected by everybody or expect to be
29:48 Speaker 01 achieving this, achieving that. No, I'm talking about the natural expectations of a human being. And the less those expectations are met by the rearing environment in the early years, the more distorted we become because the more we have to adapt to something less than what we need. And in my view, as I'm sure you're well aware, much of disease, physical, mental afflictions, addictions and so on. They all arise out of the ways we had to adapt to unnatural circumstances where our natural built in expectations were thwarted.
30:25 Tom Bilyeu? You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, It records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive.
31:08 Tom Bilyeu? My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. Gabor, that's a really useful way to look at things. I like that a lot. So I use different words to kind of describe some things, maybe similar, if not identical, which I call the physics of being human. So there are just some things. We have needs, we have compulsions. We, for instance,
31:48 Tom Bilyeu? there, there is going to be a voice in your head talking to you. There is, I've never met anybody that doesn't have a negative voice in their head talking to them. And we have, we're an active species, right? But we're an active species that also tries to conserve calories. So you get this weird sort of conflict. And that insight that you just gave, I find really powerful when I think about early development. So this notion that our brain comes with, I like to think of it in a biological way, though I'm sure what I'm about to describe will be inaccurate, but that there are essentially neurons in the brain that are looking for that love, the validation, being enjoyed. There was something about the way you said that that really hit me.
32:32 Tom Bilyeu? And that our brain is going to, it's, it comes like lungs expecting the air. It comes expecting that love, that validation, that enjoyment and getting all of that reflected back. And you talk a lot about a child being narcissistic. And so that's part of the physics of being human. It just is, everyone is, and not in a negative way, just it's all about me. That's where their brain is at in their development. And if we sort of run the experiment of saying, well, that's probably the most advantageous thing, at least from a historical context, that you so got that it was so prevalent that to think erroneously, to think that a parent's happiness means that you're good.
33:11 Tom Bilyeu? Is such a great way to establish confidence and a sense of worth and you know, all these things that are going to propel you forward. Gab, are you really making me put things together that I've, I've never have been able to draw the lines between? That is amazing.
33:26 Speaker 01 I bet you say that to all the guys.
33:29 Tom Bilyeu? I say it to all the good ones. How about that?
33:33 Tom Bilyeu? But it's interesting, especially when you put it in context of your upcoming book, which of course I have not read called The Myth of Normal. And how sort of broken our society is. I've always approached it from the, the like, hey, the, this society is, is like any society in time where you can have a path through it that is pathological, or like the Buddha, you can find a path that is beautiful and profound. And you take, I think, a more aggressive approach of saying, no, no, no, there's something uniquely disruptive about the era that we're living through and sort of just walking through what you were saying about the,
34:16 Tom Bilyeu? the X, the brain has expectations of love, the way that lungs have expectations of air. And there's something about the way that we have structured society that is breaking that. And in breaking that, we're dysregulating the immune system and a whole host of other things. That is really interesting. Walk me through then some of the specifics that you've covered in Shattered and in some of your articles and talks. How is modern society dysregulating us? And what can we do to resolve some of that?
34:45 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, it's very interesting. You said shattered. I don't know if it was called shattered.
34:49 Tom Bilyeu? Sorry, sorry. Scattered, scattered.
34:51 Speaker 01 No, but what's interesting is how many people may say it that way.
34:55 Tom Bilyeu? That's interesting. That's very, what, what have I just revealed? Yeah.
34:59 Speaker 01 Well, yeah. And to me, it's always revealing something about the person and their self-image. You know, because I don't think anybody's ever shattered. Um, scattered has to do with the scattered mind. The American, the Canadian, that little scattered minds that have to do with ADHD and, you know, the, the dispersal of attention.
35:18 Speaker 01 Gosh, you say so many things that I want to engage with, Tom. Let me, let me jump back to what you said about everybody's got this negative voice in their heads.
35:25 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
35:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that's not a given. It's just what happens in this society.
35:33 Tom Bilyeu? So you think there are societies where that would not be present, or at least not ever present?
35:42 Speaker 01 I think we haven't had societies like that for a long, long, long, long time. But
35:51 Speaker 01 that has to do with what civilization does to human beings.
35:56 Speaker 01 So I'm sure that voice has been there since the beginning of civilization. But not necessarily in our Aboriginal state, that's hunter gatherer, small band people. Now, we might have a conscience that keeps us in line. But that's not the same as a voice that keeps telling you how bad you are, how worthless you are. I think that's particularly is a that itself is a product of life experience.
36:24 Tom Bilyeu? What, what exactly, if you have a sense, causes that? Like what in civilization leads to that?
36:32 Speaker 01 Kids not being valued and enjoyed and played with for just who they are.
36:38 Speaker 01 Kids having to live up to expectations in order to meet the approval and welcoming of their parents. Well, if that's the case, they better install a little voice in their heads that'll keep them in line. Otherwise, they won't get loved. And there's not a conscious process. Nobody does this. Oh, I'm going to instill a little voice in my head. It's not. It's, it's this, this is, it's a natural adaptation to an unnatural situation.
37:05 Speaker 01 In this society, and I'm not blaming parents. In this society, it's extraordinarily difficult for parents to give those conditions of what the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard. A regard that has no conditions of worth attached to it. I accept you just for who you are, the way you are. That's very difficult for parents to deliver, even with the best of goodwill. But they never had it themselves. And only that, then there's so much stress. So you mentioned my book, Scattered, which is on ADHD, and I was diagnosed with it, you know, in my 50s.
37:46 Speaker 01 And I never bought into the idea that it was a genetic disease, even less do I buy into it now.
37:55 Speaker 01 But the tuning out, that scattered minds that I wrote about, that itself is a coping mechanism. So when there's, when an infant is under stress, because the parents are stressed, as I was, as a Jewish infant, under the Nazis, there's a lot of stress, as you can imagine, for a whole year of my first year of life, and more than that. Of course, I tuned out, as a way of escaping from the unbearable stress that my mother was under. Because as an infant, you just soak in the stress of your parents.
38:30 Speaker 01 But this is happening when my brain was developing. So that gets programmed into my brain as an adaptation. Now, you don't need World War, and you don't need genocide to make infants stressed. You just need parents who are under economic stress, who've got relationship issues, who've got unresolved childhood trauma, who are isolated themselves, who are struggling in their lives, who have depression or anxiety in their lives. And infants, young children, pick up on that, they make it about themselves, it's too much for them. Some of them will tune out to deal with it. The tuning out becomes programmed into their brain, because that's when the brain develops, under the impact of the environment.
39:13 Speaker 01 And then five years later, or 10 years later, or in my case, 55 years later, they're diagnosed with the so-called inherited disease, which it wasn't. It was an adaptation. And it began as an adaptation. It becomes a source of a disorder, but that's my whole point, that these early adaptations have their function, but then, they're only meant to be temporary, but since they've become wired in, now they create problems later on. And that, I think, is a source of much of illness in our society.
39:48 Tom Bilyeu? Let me ask, what would be a worse or what would be a better scenario, depending on how you want to answer it? Would you rather somebody be loved, validated, enjoyed, held, touched? Up until the age of three, but then after that, they're put into foster care with all of the woes of foster care? Or would you rather somebody have a very dysregulated initial three years? Mother is giving the child up for adoption, which basically tells you that the pregnancy was incredibly stressed. Gives the child away, it spends the first three years in, let's say, an orphanage, but then gets adopted to a truly loving
40:32 Tom Bilyeu? family that wants them, enjoys them, validates them, hugs them, and gives them all those things. Which of those is the more distressing circumstance?
40:44 Speaker 01 Well, I mean,
40:47 Speaker 01 I find that a tough one, Tom, because what you're setting up is two tragedies. And you're asking me to choose the least tragic. And I don't know that I know how to do that. I do know, I think my bias would be
41:04 Speaker 01 that if the child had everything for the first three years,
41:09 Speaker 01 they'll probably have some inner resilience to handle what can happens later. Although it would be still be a terrible scenario that you outlined.
41:18 Speaker 01 That total dysregulation in the first three years, I think, would be very hard to overcome.
41:24 Speaker 01 Not impossible.
41:27 Speaker 01 But,
41:30 Speaker 01 you know, it's when you think about it, the scenario of somebody getting all that in the first three years and then ending up in a horrible situation.
41:43 Speaker 01 Totally unlikely. I mean, why would that even happen?
41:47 Speaker 01 You know.
41:47 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, I mean, I can give you scenarios, but.
41:50 Speaker 01 But if your question is designed to
41:56 Speaker 01 look at the heart of what is the most important developmental period? For sure, it's the first three years. From conception till the end of the first three years. Not that it's over then. But that's the template. That's the template. And if our society just understood that, just give the kids three good years and do everything you can. Do everything you can as a society, as a community, to support parents giving those kids those first three years, whatever that takes.
42:31 Speaker 01 We would save so much disease, so much dysfunction, so much crime, so much addiction, so much political conflict for that matter.
42:40 Speaker 01 So that's the importance of that question is if we only. My friend, the children's troubadour Rafi, and you probably remember Rafi. He created something called the Child Honoring Society, you know, Child Honoring Project. And he just says, well, if this society honored children, what would it look like?
43:01 Speaker 01 Well, guess what? We'd pay attention to the environment.
43:06 Speaker 01 We would
43:08 Speaker 01 make sure that parents have the right support, that children are treated well. That parents who need the help, get it so that they don't traumatize their children.
43:20 Speaker 01 So that schools,
43:23 Speaker 01 instead of focused on turning the gears and machines in the form of human beings, focused on promoting healthy self-image and healthy self-development and healthy brain development. What if that was the focus of the schools?
43:40 Speaker 01 It wouldn't be more expensive than what we're doing now. It would be less expensive.
43:46 Speaker 01 So, yeah, those first three years are crucial.
43:50 Tom Bilyeu? There's a guy named Jeffrey Canada who introduced me to a concept that I found both intriguing and terrifying, which goes along, it was why I was asking that question. And he was looking at kids that grow up in the inner cities and why they end up doing poorly the rest of their lives and kids that grew up in middle income families and why they end up doing better. And he said that he believed it could be boiled down to the number of words a child hears by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative. And I thought, oh my God, is it really that simple? And he was basically saying that it comes down to the language centers of the
44:29 Tom Bilyeu? brain developing. And if in that period where those parts of the brain are actually being constructed, if you know that the construction is going to be based in the environment and you give it a paltry environment where there's very little language to interact with, then you get an underdeveloped language center of the brain, which ends up holding them back later where communication becomes extraordinarily important in today's environment. And I just thought, one, that's thrilling news because anybody that encounters that information when they're pregnant or about to become pregnant can do something with it and it will have lifelong positive impact. But it's terrifying to think that you catch a kid at age six and it's like,
45:10 Tom Bilyeu? you can do the work and for sure, like you were saying, you can always like there can be improvement and I would never want people to hear that and just give up. But whoa, the road becomes a lot harder to hoe.
45:24 Speaker 01 Well, I have to say, I don't agree with, what was the man's name?
45:28 Tom Bilyeu? Jeffrey Canada.
45:30 Speaker 01 Okay, well, good name. I don't agree with, I mean, it's not that I disagree with what he's saying, but I think there's a deeper layer there.
45:40 Tom Bilyeu? Give it to me.
45:41 Speaker 01 Because what develops first, see, the language is the left side of the brain. Okay? And what actually develops first, if you look at it, is the right side of the brain, which holds the unconscious. And it's that right-sided unconscious template that's more important than, there's lots of people there with beautiful language development, in particular, they're called professors and academics who are emotionally infants.
46:13 Speaker 01 And sometimes the language centers in the left side of the brain can become a refuge from the lack of emotional grounding in the right side of the brain.
46:23 Speaker 01 So no, what actually matters is how those infants are held, how they're sung to, how they're played with. There's a great neuroscientist, unfortunately died untimely, a couple of years ago, Yak Panxup, his name was, and he distinguished the number of brain systems that we share with other animals. They include seeking, so the exploration of the environment. They include lust, obviously, which is sexuality, necessarily, rage, which is healthy anger to protect your boundaries, caring, so that be careful infants and others. These are brain systems.
47:08 Speaker 01 And what he calls grief and panic, which is what happens when we lose our attachment relationships, so that there should be grief, there should be panic, because they're healthy. When our attachment relationships are threatened. And there was also play.
47:23 Speaker 01 And all animals play. And infants start playing peekaboo at two months, long before they have language. And play is much more important for the development of the brain than languages, according to a whole lot of developmentalists. And so, so, so, because it sets the, um,
47:46 Speaker 01 your sense of yourself in the world.
47:51 Speaker 01 And so it's not that what this man, Canada, says about language isn't important. It's just that, first, there has to be this
48:03 Speaker 01 right brain emotionally grounded template for all that.
48:09 Speaker 01 And even later on,
48:12 Speaker 01 it's not the language skills we have to help people develop, not that we don't, we do, but we have to work on their sense of themselves and essentially rewire the right-sided unconscious brain. So in L.A., there's a very famous psychotherapist psychologist called Alan Shor, who's now working on what he calls right-sided psychotherapy, or right-brain psychotherapy with adults.
48:41 Speaker 01 Who've got all kinds of language skills, but who don't have properly developed unconscious because of what happened to them early on in life. Let me quickly read you a list. There's a wonderful psychologist of Notre Dame called Darcia Narvez, who, by the way, you might want to talk to sometime. And she studied hunter-gatherer societies,
49:05 Speaker 01 which is how we evolved. That was our evolutionary niche, and for millions of years, and for hundreds of thousands of years, and even for until 15,000 years ago, everybody lived in most societies. So that's where we evolved. And he says, "What do these people provide to their infants?" And she lists them: soothing perinatal experience,
49:28 Speaker 01 prompt responsiveness to the needs of the infant. None of this business of letting kids cry it out. Those kids are picked up as soon as they whimper. In fact, they never even put down. Extensive touch and constant physical presence, including touch with movement. So the parents are always walking around, holding the kids, the papoose on the back of the parent.
49:51 Speaker 01 Frequent infant-initiated breastfeeding for up to two to five years,
49:55 Tom Bilyeu? Whoa!
49:56 Speaker 01 with the average weaning age at age four. Now, here in North America, we're lucky if women are able to breastfeed their kids for two months. And about 25% of American women have to go back to work after two weeks. But that's an insult to the infant. I'm not blaming the women. It's the economy. It's the society.
50:20 Speaker 01 A community of multiple warm, responsive adult caregivers. So the whole tribe is there to hold you and to enjoy you.
50:28 Speaker 01 Creative free play in nature with multi-aged playmates. Now, how many kids in our society get anything close to any of that?
50:37 Speaker 01 Then we wonder, why do kids have so many mental health issues and behavior problems and so on? And then we focus on the behavior problems and we try and correct the behaviors. Instead of looking at, well, what is this child manifesting through that behavior? You know, so I think we need a lot, we need to look a lot more at not the cognitive developmental stuff, but at the emotional developmental side of things. So that granted, what your friend says about language is very important. That not being granted,
51:17 Speaker 01 we're barking up the wrong tree.
51:20 Tom Bilyeu? What, so I, I think a lot about what my North Star is, what I want in my own life, what sort of my ideal life looks like. And then when I'm working with other people and trying to help them, I think about, you know, what, what is the North Star? That somebody who's really in trouble, I would advise, hey, adopt this as your North Star. Do you have something like that, that you think that people ought to strive for, for their own sake?
51:50 Speaker 01 The reason I smirk when you ask that question is because it puts me in a position of some kind of expert.
52:00 Speaker 01 Whereas, believe me, every day
52:06 Speaker 01 I still work at figuring myself out and finding my direction and, or refinding my direction and so on. So it's not like I can say, here's this pearl of wisdom, take it and run with it, then this will, you know, it's just not like that for me.
52:26 Speaker 01 Well, look, let me turn the question on just for a moment and, and, and as a way for me to think about your question.
52:31 Tom Bilyeu? Sure.
52:32 Speaker 01 So
52:35 Speaker 01 like I, I don't know a lot about you, you know, but
52:39 Speaker 01 what I do understand is that in significant ways, you've made a tremendous success in your life. A lot of, you know, achieve things that a lot of people look at, my God, if I only had that, I'd be okay.
52:55 Speaker 01 But let me just ask you this, I'm just absolutely curious. Having achieved all that in the material world.
53:02 Speaker 01 Did you come to saying to yourself, oh, I'm okay now? The question is over.
53:08 Tom Bilyeu? Definitely not.
53:09 Speaker 01 So what so what were you looking for?
53:12 Tom Bilyeu? So my North Star in the beginning was wealth. And that was I showed up every day trying to get rich. And at about eight years into that, I was absolutely devastated. Spiritually is probably the right way to think about it. I just felt dead inside. And I, at that point, I was worth about $2 million on paper. So my actual life was not the life of a wealthy person, but I had equity in the company. And I went to my wife and I said, hey, I know that I promised I would make you rich one day. I'm going to need to take a step back for a minute because I am profoundly unhappy. And she was like, hey, what I want for is your happiness. And so do whatever you need to.
53:57 Tom Bilyeu? And so we were going to move to a tiny village in Greece. And I was going to go back to writing, which was my first love.
54:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
54:06 Tom Bilyeu? And just do things that made me feel alive. Long story short, my then business partner said, hey, don't leave. We actually feel the same way. So why don't we build something that would give us what we're looking for? And so if I had to shorthand, what I came to realize I'm looking for, which is very much my North Star, is fulfillment. And I'll define fulfillment as working really hard to build a set of skills that I care about, that serve not only me, but other people. And in doing that, I am addressing what I think are the physics of being a human.
54:46 Tom Bilyeu? Now, I may be misunderstanding that it is the physics only of humans in this era. I'm very open to this is within the context of the civilization that I grew up in. Here are the things that seem to come pre-built into our hardwiring. And maybe not historically accurate, but given the world that I live in.
55:11 Tom Bilyeu? Doing something, working really hard is a big part of, I feel there's just a subroutine in my brain that wants me to earn things. And when I do that, I feel good. When I work hard in the gym, I feel good. When I take a cold shower, I feel good. When I, you know, do something difficult for my wife, I feel good about that. And I definitely enjoy that loop. And then
55:38 Speaker 01 Well, let me, let me, okay.
55:39 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, please.
55:40 Speaker 01 So if I could find one word to summarize what you, what I think I heard you say, it's meaning.
55:48 Tom Bilyeu? Definitely.
55:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, so that's, that's one of those human expectations is meaning, I think. That's a need. Okay. Now, how you find that is a very individual thing.
56:00 Speaker 01 But let me ask you a very scary question, though, because it, it puzzles me.
56:06 Speaker 01 You identify meaning with hard work. Well,
56:11 Speaker 01 I've seen this happen, by the way, not God willing, it won't, but what if you had a stroke tomorrow? Or some idiot plowed into you and you were bicycling and, and, and you, you became quadriplegic. Now you couldn't work hard anymore.
56:28 Tom Bilyeu? Then I love that question. I obsess about things like that. So I've thought a lot about that one in particular. So I would give myself 30 days to mourn, whether I should or shouldn't. I would, and I would be very, I would allow myself to wallow in the sense that it was unfair. And that now I have to change the things that I engage in that bring me joy. But then at the end of that, it, it is what it is. And so getting lost in unfairness is not going to serve me. So then I would immediately turn my attention to Finding a way to have meaning and purpose. I think that that nothing that I have ever experienced in life leads me to believe
57:12 Tom Bilyeu? that I would ever feel fulfilled without meaning and purpose.
57:15 Speaker 01 Okay, great.
57:16 Tom Bilyeu? So finding a way to tap into that. And then I have a sort of safety valve, which is my wife and I remind each other of this all the time because we've already had all the financial success. At this point, to do something for the sake of money would be so crazy. So we definitely don't do that. And what we remind each other of is you should love your life, like just from a joy perspective. And if you don't check in with, is this joyful? Because if you're working hard and it's joyful, that makes sense to me. If you're working hard and it's deteriorating your joy, your sense of self, whatever, then that's just madness.
57:56 Tom Bilyeu? So for even for our employees, what we say is, look, you're an adult. I want you to control when you need a day off. So you have an unlimited vacation policy. Use it as you see fit. I do want people that are hard workers, don't get me wrong. But I know there are some times where on a Tuesday, I'm just like, I'm, I'm burning out like this isn't fun. And so I stop immediately because I know what my priorities are in life. And joy is extraordinarily high, and it is certainly higher than success.
58:32 Speaker 01 Okay. Well, that's great. That makes it easier for me to answer your question.
58:39 Speaker 01 In terms of my new style.
58:47 Speaker 01 Joy is something that for me is an ongoing project, you know? And I really do think that goes back to the lack of play that I received in the first year or two of my life, you know? Under conditions of wartime and genocide, there's just not a lot of cheerful play that happens with a baby.
59:07 Speaker 01 But what really lights my fire is truth. I just want to know the truth, whatever that is.
59:14 Tom Bilyeu? Because you like knowing how the world works?
59:18 Speaker 01 There is no because. You see, truth is its own value.
59:26 Speaker 01 I mean, I could give you all kinds of good reasons why truth is a good thing, but ultimately,
59:33 Speaker 01 it's just a value in itself for its own sake. And so I'm passionate about truth, both internal truth and external truth, and I'm passionate that my work is to, as much as I can perceive truth and as much as I can communicate my perceptions, that other people have access to truth as well, or that they, or that their own passion in truth is kindled in its own right. So that's, that's my, if you ask for a North Star, that's what I would say for myself.
1:00:11 Tom Bilyeu? That's really interesting. Not at all what I thought you were going to say. Can I interpret, when I look at the books you've written and I look at, you know, your willingness to come and do a podcast like this, can I read that all as an exploration of truth, or are these sort of side tangents?
1:00:27 Speaker 01 No, purely that's what it's about. It just so happens that as a medical doctor, somebody dealt with depression and ADHD myself, dealt with terminal illness in palliative care, dealt with addictions, dealt with babies.
1:00:45 Speaker 01 My path to truth has been through my own experience and through my medical, my personal experience, what I've been through as a person, what I'm going through as a person, and what I saw, experienced and learned as a physician. So the books express all that when it comes to physical illness or addictions or child development or whatever, but the lodestar is always the truth. And from that point of view, I never cared much who agrees with me and who doesn't, and to what extent my colleagues value or don't value it, you know, that's just as I see it, folks, you know, and
1:01:28 Speaker 01 in this society, and this is not a personal lament, it's just a general comment that
1:01:36 Speaker 01 Truth is not hard to come by, not easy to come by, because for all the knowledge that's out there and for all the expertise,
1:01:47 Speaker 01 it's also split and it's also disintegrated. So people have a hard time seeing the overall reality of things. And so my attempt always is to look at the context and look at the overall reality. So not just how do you, how do you change a kid's behavior? Well, why is the kid behaving that behaving that way? And what is in the environment that the kid is reacting to? Or somebody is addicted? Not just why are they using a substance or why they are obsessed with pornography or gambling? But what is that doing for them? What is that giving them that they need? What peace of mind, what temporary relief? What numbing, numbing of painful emotions?
1:02:31 Speaker 01 And where did those painful emotions come from? And what happened to them? And what's the context in which it happened? So that everything leads back to everything else. And so I'm always looking for the larger truth of things, which demands a broader look. Not isolating everything, but looking at everything as, as one, which scientifically and spiritually and materially it is.
1:03:00 Tom Bilyeu? I am obsessed with what is true. So I resonate with you there big time. What I don't understand, so I'm going to ask you a follow up question to see if I can isolate what it is about the, the nature of truth, just in and of itself, that is meaningful to you. So I'm interested in the truth for one reason. And one reason only, if I'm really honest with myself. And that is it has so much utility. Once you understand, it's like, it's like physics to me. Because we understand physics, we can send things to the moon. We can create satellites, you know, better manufacturing, whatever.
1:03:39 Tom Bilyeu? Would the truth be as meaningful to you if you were trapped on a desert island with access to all the information in the world, but you could never engage with another human? So you could assimilate the truth, you could learn what it is, synthesize it, maybe even have insights that other people are missing and know to the core of your being that you have uncovered something that is true. Would that be meaningful? Or is part of what makes it matter to you that you can put it back out into the world? And that ultimately, somebody can use it?
1:04:15 Speaker 01 Well, so first of all, let's not confuse truth with information.
1:04:21 Tom Bilyeu? Oh, interesting. So help me understand what I'm missing.
1:04:27 Speaker 01 Well, there's lots of facts out there. But truth is much larger than facts. It's integrating the facts. In a, in a, in a picture of, of reality.
1:04:40 Tom Bilyeu? So that, and I'm maybe putting very clumsy language on what may be a far more beautiful sentiment. So when, when I hear you say that, and I take it in totality of how all these things come together, I come back to this idea of the truth is, that is the way the world works. So don't ask about the, the addiction, ask about what caused the pain. Like that makes sense to me because now you can actually address it and heal. But what makes that capital T truth interesting is the healing for me.
1:05:14 Speaker 01 But, but why do you want people to heal?
1:05:18 Tom Bilyeu? Because of my North Star. So my North Star, which seems self-evident to me, and I'm always surprised that it isn't everybody's North Star, is that there is, the only thing that matters to me in the way that I view the world is your neurochemical state. And your neurochemistry.
1:05:41 Tom Bilyeu? The only thing that's resilient, because joy comes and goes, suffering comes and goes, hopefully, and the only thing that gives you the resilience to even in the middle of a painful moment, a storm, to have emotional equilibrium is what I call fulfillment. So, again, meaning and purpose derived from working hard for something that you have developed a unique set of skills, so you really matter in that situation. And it isn't only alleviating your suffering, it's helping other people. And that, to me, feels so inherent to the human animal, that as a social species, we're just never going
1:06:23 Tom Bilyeu? to be able to escape getting psychologically punished for failing to help others, and we're never going to escape getting rewarded for helping others. And I think that the more uniquely we can do that, so in a way that matters to me, right, so you're not still a high school teacher, you're expressing helping others in a very unique way that, I mean, literally, I've never come across anybody that's got the unique conflagration of things that you have. So that makes your contributions all the more individual, and therefore, I would imagine precious to you. So, anyway, because of my North Star, I want to alleviate that pain by having worked hard to offer something to somebody that
1:07:06 Tom Bilyeu? there go, whoa, like this alleviated my pain, and now I can also go do something that helps other people. So that's why the healing matters.
1:07:14 Speaker 01 Okay, so look, so then to go back to your desert island question, to put himself on a desert island, you know, I mean, metaphorically speaking, isolated in the forest, didn't see anybody, you know, he, no, I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about him, the way I understand that historical figure, he would have been perfectly okay being on his own, because he attained a sense of reality that was complete. And then he made a decision out of compassion to come back and teach others. And you are talking about compassion as well, you're talking about...
1:07:56 Speaker 01 Not truth as utility, you're talking about truth as compassion. So
1:08:03 Speaker 01 it's not just useful because you can build things with it. The way you defined it is you want the truth so you can alleviate the suffering of others.
1:08:14 Speaker 01 And that's part of the truth.
1:08:18 Speaker 01 And like Jesus said, you know, he, another great
1:08:25 Speaker 01 spiritual avatar and teacher, he says, you will know the truth and the truth will liberate you. He didn't say the truth will liberate you. He said, you will know the truth and it will liberate you. So when you know the truth, that's where freedom is.
1:08:40 Speaker 01 So truth goes way beyond facts. Truth ultimately, as I understand it, and as I've been taught, has to do with liberation and freedom.
1:08:53 Speaker 01 And it has to do with compassion.
1:08:57 Speaker 01 In exactly the way you talked about it as well. So when you say, turning with truth is, well, I'm telling you, it's got all these aspects. And it goes back to our conversation about meaning. So that a life without truth is not a meaningful life.
1:09:15 Tom Bilyeu? That is, that's very interesting. As you were talking, I was like, oh, please God, let him write a book about truth. I would, hearing you say all that, I would definitely sign up for that book. I want to talk about the idea of a Bodhisattva. So this is one of the things that I found super interesting about Buddhism. And again, hey, a guy that understands it at 30,000 feet does not know the specifics, but that idea of, hey, there's two things you can do with enlightenment. You can, hey, you're enlightened and now you sort of stand apart from everybody else. Or you get enlightened and decide to be a Bodhisattva, to reengage, to go back in, to help other people. And
1:09:59 Tom Bilyeu? do you think, this is maybe a dangerous question, but do you think any
1:10:07 Tom Bilyeu? buddy would, like knowing what you know about the human mind, would anybody ever that attained enlightenment actually just go, peace, I'm out? It seems like the very nature of that moment would sort of propel you back to other people.
1:10:25 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, the last thing I could, I want to present myself as as any kind of an expert on.
1:10:33 Tom Bilyeu? I thought that might be your response.
1:10:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know. But yeah, I mean, there have been.
1:10:42 Speaker 01 In the Christian tradition, there were saints that went to the desert and they just stayed there.
1:10:48 Speaker 01 And then certainly on the other, all the Hindu traditions, there are all these people in the Buddhist tradition as well. I think there are people who, you know, sit in caves and they just contemplate the reality. That's what they do.
1:11:03 Speaker 01 Which doesn't mean that what they do has no impact on others. But they're not going out, but they're not out there trying to recruit others or to teach others. They're just doing what they're doing.
1:11:14 Speaker 01 I have backstory and difficulty imagining myself being one of those people.
1:11:24 Speaker 01 Which I'm not sure is either is is an advantage for me. I mean, I might be more advanced if I could handle the idea of being on my own. And and not doing anything. And just being. And just valuing being, period. I imagine that for a person like me might be a step forward. But I.
1:11:48 Speaker 01 But yeah, there I think from my limited understanding, they have people, there have been people who've done that and they're part of the human spectrum, aren't they?
1:11:58 Tom Bilyeu? Very well said.
1:12:01 Tom Bilyeu? Gabriel, what at this point, you're seventy seven?
1:12:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:06 Tom Bilyeu? You're so productive. What is it that keeps you going? When most people are like counting the days until they can retire at sixty four or whatever. What what keeps you going?
1:12:19 Speaker 01 Botox, steroid injection.
1:12:30 Speaker 01 Well, look, I mean, you talked about meaning. There's so much meaning in my life. I am so fortunate, you know, that, that... And I've never stopped developing, not that I've arrived there, but I've never stopped developing. Like, I've never stopped being curious. I believe I have, I've finally come to accept that, yeah, I do have a contribution to make and, and, and, and, and that that has value in the world and it is value for me. So at this point, it's just,
1:13:11 Speaker 01 there's not keeps me going, it's, it's, it's like, it's just who I am at this point. You know, is, is, is, I'm curious about what I'm doing. I'm excited about much of what I do. I'm excited about having conversations like this. I'm excited about the book I'm writing, the teaching that I do. I'm excited about spending time with my wife of 51 years now. I'm excited about that I can still go swimming and bicycling and do the yoga and, and just, you know, my life is just a very blessed one at this point. Not that I feel like that every moment, but since you ask, it's not like I'm... You know what it is? When people talk about work, what is work?
1:13:54 Speaker 01 I, I think, if I remember right, from physics, one way to look at work is energy expended against resistance. And the more energies you expend against more resistance, the harder you have to work, the more fatiguing it is. But I'm fortunate enough and I'm free enough in my life right now that I don't have to face resistance, internal resistance. I want to do what I'm doing and there's just so much more and, and, and I'm sure that my vision of reality is still very limited and maybe there's more to find out. In fact, I'm sure there's more to find out. So it's just...
1:14:40 Speaker 01 It's just an expansion into old age, I think, if we're fortunate enough. We'll see how that goes and you know, one never knows what tonight will bring, let alone the day after tomorrow might bring, but so far,
1:14:55 Speaker 01 it's an expansion, not physically, because as we get older, physically, I don't swim as fast as I used to, but,
1:15:05 Speaker 01 but there's an expansion that's available to us mentally and spiritually, relationally, in terms of understanding. And that's, I don't know what that sounds like, but that's what keeps me going.
1:15:21 Tom Bilyeu? How do we expand spiritually? And that's probably a word that would warrant definition, but I'm curious how you think about that.
1:15:32 Speaker 01 Well,
1:15:35 Speaker 01 so,
1:15:38 Speaker 01 spirituality is really beyond who we are
1:15:43 Speaker 01 as bodies and as minds. So it's an awareness that
1:15:56 Speaker 01 lies underneath all that and can hold all that, but isn't identical with it.
1:16:03 Speaker 01 And this is where it's hard for me to say, am I saying anything I truly know? Or am I just repeating what spiritual teachers that I've respected and have learned from have mouthed and I'm just repeating what they told me? But it's both, I think. I do have a sense that there's more to us and that more is, I think what we call spirituality. And it's all kinds of shapes and forms and I'm not concerned about that.
1:16:32 Speaker 01 But I do know that
1:16:38 Speaker 01 I am not who I used to think I was. And then nobody is who they think they are.
1:16:45 Speaker 01 They're beyond that. And that's the common teachings, I think, of all spiritual traditions. Which I'm very inadequate, and this is not false modesty, I'm just telling you. I'm inadequate at translating because I haven't.
1:17:07 Speaker 01 Had that deep experience that other people have had.
1:17:13 Tom Bilyeu? It's very interesting, and I believe you that you're not just being falsely humble, but as somebody who works so much with, there's two, two parts of your background that probably lean into what I would consider spiritual, but I think we may define that slightly differently. But one is the palliative care, which I'm extraordinarily fascinated by people that do that. And then your, I don't know if you would call yourself a guide of hallucinogenic transformation. I'm not sure exactly what your involvement is with that, but I know that you've, you've explored it enough
1:17:57 Tom Bilyeu? to, to sort of have at least a sideways glance at what's going on there. Talk to me first about palliative care. I know that you sort of ended up there by accident, but what makes that fascinating to me is you've got, subtracting out the pain, you've got somebody who's there themselves, but all of a sudden their future is a known quantity and it's very short. And the profound change that that makes in the human mind, I find interesting. What did you learn about life, about yourself in your time in palliative care?
1:18:39 Speaker 01 Well, the, the people, the nurses and physicians and the, the social workers and the others who work in palliative care tend to be a very special breed in that they're not afraid of death.
1:19:01 Speaker 01 So learning not to be afraid of human death and giving up your sense of omnipotence.
1:19:10 Speaker 01 Are really liberating. By a sense of omnipotence, I mean physicians are trained to save lives. I'm telling you, Tom, I knew physicians that would barely visit their patients in palliative care because they couldn't stand
1:19:28 Speaker 01 what they considered to be their own failure, which of course it wasn't. But their self-image as healers or cures
1:19:41 Speaker 01 just couldn't withstand the white heath of death.
1:19:48 Speaker 01 And so that's very liberating when you just you get to talk to somebody and you get to minister to them and you're not pretending to be able to do anything more than you can do.
1:20:01 Speaker 01 But you can really listen to people and get to know people in their final days and their final hours, final weeks.
1:20:10 Speaker 01 It's an absolute privilege.
1:20:13 Tom Bilyeu? What about it is a privilege? Is there an insight?
1:20:17 Speaker 01 Getting to know, getting to know people without pretension.
1:20:21 Speaker 01 You're not pretending to do anything you can't do and they're past pretending.
1:20:27 Speaker 01 If they want to die right, they're past pretending.
1:20:30 Tom Bilyeu? That's interesting. What do you mean die right?
1:20:33 Speaker 01 Well, there's ways of dying. You can, you can resist it. You can resent it. You can be angry about it.
1:20:43 Speaker 01 Or you can
1:20:47 Speaker 01 actually accept it and allow
1:20:56 Speaker 01 so much of what may be repressed in life to finally arise for yourself.
1:21:01 Speaker 01 Because before then you were too busy and you were too intent on your role and your personality and getting this done or getting that done.
1:21:11 Speaker 01 You know, in one of my books, when the body says no, I talk about this guy who who had a company selling shark cartilage
1:21:24 Speaker 01 as a treatment for cancer. That was total shock. But he believed in it.
1:21:32 Speaker 01 And then he developed cancer himself.
1:21:36 Speaker 01 And he was admitted to the palliative care unit and I was looking after him. And he was still eating, he had terminal cancer all over his body, a week or two left. He was still eating shark cartilage, which smelled awful. You could, when you stepped off the elevator to the palliative care facility, you could smell the shark cartilage.
1:21:57 Speaker 01 And I finally said to him, what does it smell? I don't like the smell. What does it taste like? He said, it tastes awful, I hate it. I said, why are you eating it? And he said, do you think it'll help your cancer? He said, no, I no longer believe that. But my business partner would be so disappointed if I stopped eating it.
1:22:19 Speaker 01 And so, one of the last things I was able to do for him is to actually convince him and to help him see that, look, you don't have to pretend anything anymore.
1:22:30 Speaker 01 It's not your job whether or not your business partner is disappointed.
1:22:35 Speaker 01 He had to literally walk into the last week of his life before he could let go of his role as being responsible for other people.
1:22:48 Speaker 01 So that coming towards death experience can be a powerful teacher for people.
1:22:55 Speaker 01 And I've seen real love and real beauty and real inspiration from a lot of these people. So it's beautiful work. And I know that everybody who works in palliative care will tell you the same thing. It's a real privilege.
1:23:08 Tom Bilyeu? Can you share some of the beauty?
1:23:11 Speaker 01 Well, I think I just did.
1:23:14 Speaker 01 Just people being, allowing themselves to be touched, to be helped,
1:23:20 Speaker 01 to be honest with themselves,
1:23:25 Speaker 01 to share stuff that they maybe never told anybody else before in their lives because they were too afraid to.
1:23:33 Speaker 01 To accept real lessons in acceptance.
1:23:38 Speaker 01 You talked earlier about how you might use of a month to resent and so on, you know. So these people are very often past that point. But that's a privilege to witness.
1:23:51 Speaker 01 Knowing how resentful I can get when life doesn't go my way, you know.
1:23:57 Tom Bilyeu? Are there things that, would it be a valuable exercise for people to run the thought experiment of, you know, look, I might not make it to tonight, like you said, let alone tomorrow. Do you think that there is insight to be had from that? Or is there another way for us to access?
1:24:21 Tom Bilyeu? Getting beyond, like if you're defining beauty as, hey, you don't have to pretend anymore. You don't have to play a role. You can really be who you are. And maybe this dips into big T truth.
1:24:34 Tom Bilyeu? How do we access that now without needing to be truly facing a terminal illness?
1:24:41 Speaker 01 Well, again, I don't know, but I have, it's very easy for me to speak.
1:24:47 Speaker 01 From a present position as a healthy,
1:24:51 Speaker 01 active 77 year old, and I know what I like, I know what it gets like when I get a stop toe and how.
1:24:58 Speaker 01 Our life is unfair, you know, why did I do my doing? I can't get on my elliptical machine, you know. So again, I'm in no position to give you sage advice, but I can tell you two things. One is I've talked to a young fellow in his 30s. He's written a book called Blessed with a Brain Tumor.
1:25:14 Speaker 01 His name is Will Pye, and this guy's a brain tumor. And I said, well, what's the blessing here? I interviewed him. He said, well, for one thing, when I'm interacting with somebody now, I value each moment. Because I never know that this might be the last time I ever speak to them.
1:25:37 Speaker 01 And the Buddha, again, I'm talking like some of the Buddhists, which I'm not, but he had his monks do a meditation where they had to imagine themselves dead in the graveyard and they had to imagine themselves
1:25:54 Speaker 01 being eaten by worms till the flesh melts off their bones. It's rotting flesh.
1:26:02 Speaker 01 And then they had to imagine themselves as bones just lying there, disarticulated bones. And finally, even the bones being ground into dust, you know, and he had them contemplate this as a way of bringing them to present day reality, present moment reality. No.
1:26:22 Speaker 01 I can't say that I've attained any of that. I mean, I'm just telling you, there are practices. There are practices. There's a book on my shelf by Stephen Jenkinson, who's another fascinating guy. It's called Die Wise. And he said, you know, it's basically about you want to die well, start preparing it for it now.
1:26:43 Tom Bilyeu? What's the wisdom, if you remember from the book?
1:26:47 Speaker 01 The wisdom is that I haven't read the book yet. My, my son just gave it to me. It's a birthday gift a few weeks ago, so I'll read it, but I haven't read it yet.
1:26:56 Tom Bilyeu? That's really interesting. Yeah, I, for me, it has been a very useful thought experiment to remind myself that for a long time I focused entirely on, I want to live forever. And I was really trying to do all the things that I thought would extend my life to say 120 years, believing that in that period of time, you know, the science would get better and we sort of hit health escape velocity where every year that I lived, there was, you know, a year and a day added to our ability to cure illness. And that really served me for a long time. And it allowed me to make long range plans that other people not, might not be willing to make.
1:27:40 Tom Bilyeu? And really made me feel excited and connected. And then there was something about Probably about a year ago that I started to have this feeling that I would be better served and more motivated by flipping it and to start now thinking about how transient my life is and that almost certainly, since none of us know what's going to happen, almost certainly I am going to die. And I don't get a heaviness from that. Quite the contrary, there's something about it that I find very motivating, that I do see the beauty that people so often talk about, that you know, you have this life for such
1:28:21 Tom Bilyeu? a limited time, and to waste it playing a role, to waste it doing things that don't fill you with joy, to waste it chasing somebody else's dream, like, it just doesn't make sense. And that, that has been fun. And I, I enjoyed both sides of the coin. I got something very beautiful out of each. And it, I didn't even like consciously make the shift. I just found myself more and more sort of getting a bigger gust of wind, of, of elevating wind, if you will, from the side of thinking, man, this really is like, how lucky, how transient, how beautiful, in its sort of ephemeral nature, how wonderful it is. And I think part of
1:29:02 Tom Bilyeu? that, part of what was releasing in that for me is, I am very much driven to matter, but never at the cost of joy, right? So it was like, I really want to matter. I want to do things that like are going to be felt, but I don't think about legacy. I don't think about living beyond myself or doing things that need to outlive me. I just think about like, hey, what can I do right now that will bring me more fulfillment, that will give me more joy. And, yeah, it was very, it was very fascinating to see that transition happen, where I went from, the only thing that gave me that push was thinking of myself living forever, and then all of a sudden realizing, no, it's actually now more advantageous to think of sort of imminent death, which, trust me, I'm not in any way, shape or form eager
1:29:47 Tom Bilyeu? for. But, just interesting that that change happened. I don't know if that's just sort of a natural thing about, you know, getting into my mid 40s and everybody is going to have that sort of same realization, but.
1:29:59 Speaker 01 No, everybody will not have the same realization. I think everybody might feel the knife.
1:30:09 Speaker 01 Breaking of that question, but not everybody will resolve it the same way. And some people resolve it by getting botox injections. And life enhancing ageless supplements and
1:30:28 Speaker 01 if they're wealthy enough, they'll and they'll invest in cryo technology so that they can be frozen and then who knows miraculously resurrected. Which I think is personally is total scientific nonsense, but
1:30:47 Speaker 01 not everybody's and some people will just ignore it and they'll try to escape from it by trying to keep their lives busy and follow all kinds of compulsions. So I think the question.
1:31:02 Speaker 01 The pain of that question is inside everybody, but I don't think everybody resolves resolves it the same way. And
1:31:13 Speaker 01 and I, you know, you're much younger than I and you say you have resolved it and maybe you have. Or maybe it's just something that you're still quite comfortable telling yourself at your young age. And who knows how you'll feel about it by the time you get my age.
1:31:29 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, I don't, I don't actually wouldn't characterize it that I've resolved it. I am making only one statement that right now at the age that I'm at, it's more useful. It's more motivating to realize that I'm going to die. When I was saying I'm not rushing towards that, I, if I actually thought it would work, I would cryogenically freeze myself like I would much prefer to live forever.
1:31:55 Tom Bilyeu? Oh, yes. Yeah, that's not even like a question for me and that may be mental illness. I'm perfectly willing to accept that. But in terms of what is motivating to me, that for sure, like one of my great pains. And this is what it actually bothers me so much. I can't allow myself to think about it. That I can't pursue all the things that I'm passionate about because there just isn't enough time.
1:32:20 Speaker 01 I know that one.
1:32:22 Tom Bilyeu? And that's like, that's one of those far more than stubbing my toe would make me think life is unfair. That one does, and it really messes with my head. And so I, I just have to put it out of my mind.
1:32:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it only messes with your head because you have a certain belief. I mean, there's a, there's a belief underneath. I totally get it. I mean, I think, I think a lot of us have experienced that. I certainly have. Somebody once said, every choice excludes, every time you make a choice, you're excluding something else. You know, and that's true. The, the question is, what part of me or you doesn't want to accept that? Why do we have a problem with it? And there's some underlying belief there that creates pain around it. It doesn't need to be painful. It's gonna be just this reality. You know, but so if it hurts, or if it bothers us, there's some belief there. I haven't thought about it, but now that you mention it,
1:33:15 Speaker 01 there's some belief there that creates the, the pain. It's just like, why do I have to be everything and do everything? Why? I am a limited human being.
1:33:28 Tom Bilyeu? I'll take a swag at it and let me know what you think. So, um, part of what I do, um, is so my company actually tells stories. So movies, TV shows, comic books, that whole thing. And when we're developing a project, we need to figure out what the style of that project, let's say it's a comic book. We have to figure out the style. So you go and you start, you know, looking at materials and seeing it and you realize that there's a hundred different ways you could go, two hundred different ways, more. And you'll respond so intensely to seven of them. And it is very hard to know that I won't get to spend
1:34:11 Tom Bilyeu? a year in that style, right? That I have to narrow it down to, to just one. And it's interesting, like, what I always tell entrepreneurs is, what really trips people up is you're standing in a room with a thousand doors and your job is to close nine hundred ninety-nine of them, right? To decide comes from what the Latin to cut. It's like, to your point about exclusion, that there's, going back to the physics of being human, I don't know why, and maybe it's a modern society thing, but humans have a hard time. Closing those doors, they have a much harder time of closing the other doors than they have walking through one. Cause if I say, hey, you can walk through that one, you can come right back.
1:34:53 Tom Bilyeu? Then they'll walk through it. But if I say, you have to pick one that you were gonna walk through forever, that they would just stand there paralyzed.
1:35:00 Speaker 01 But isn't, don't we have the same dilemma when it comes to relationships as well?
1:35:05 Tom Bilyeu? You know, it's interesting. When I was saying that, my wife popped into my mind and I don't. With relationships, I have not struggled with that. Um, I, it was a part of the calculus of whether or not to marry my wife, that I'll never sleep with another woman again. Um, but it wasn't a hard part of the calculus. So I don't know if that's just, uh,
1:35:23 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:35:24 Tom Bilyeu? My temperament or what?
1:35:26 Speaker 01 Sure enough, and that's great. And what about before you met your wife?
1:35:33 Tom Bilyeu? Cameron, this is interesting and uh, any insight you have here will be greatly welcomed. I understood very early on the utility of um, commitment. So I was very bad with women when I was young, extraordinarily bad. And my mom though, gave me a piece of advice, which was mind blowing to me. And she said, for a woman, trust is required for an orgasm. And I thought, what? Like, that seems so strange to me as a guy. I was like, let me tell you that trust does not enter into my mind when it comes to whether or not I can have an orgasm. And, but I thought, oh, that's really interesting. And so then sort of looking at women, how they're prized for their
1:36:16 Tom Bilyeu? beauty and committing to somebody, which always struck me as a good idea, that the value in a shared life, like if you ever watch this interview over again, look at my face when you say you've been married for 51 years, I was smiling ear to ear. Um, because that's something that really matters to me is sharing a life with my wife for as long as humanly possible. And all the things that I have to give up pale in comparison to what it means to share a life with somebody like that. Um, so putting the, okay, women need trust. That's interesting. Their prize for their beauty, which means that it's going to go away over time. As their partner wanting to give them that love and security and, and, and to be seen and desired, which I think is um, something that people long for in a romantic relationship.
1:37:02 Tom Bilyeu? I need my wife to know that I will always find other women attractive, because it's just hardwired in me. But I so covet commitment and being in a bonded relationship with you, that I want you to know, no matter what, you're gonna turn into a bag of wrinkles. God willing, we get to that stage, you're old, I'm old, we're not physically attractive in the typical cues of beauty and fertility, but I'm still gonna be into you, because we've shared a life. So anyway, that notion hit me very early, and so I've always, I haven't struggled with commitment, I guess. That was a lot of words around that.
1:37:42 Speaker 01 And I have been a commitment phobe, you know?
1:37:45 Tom Bilyeu? Really? What was the push?
1:37:48 Speaker 01 Well, which has to do with my own childhood history, you know? Is that to commit something is to invite pain and rejection, you know, which goes back to being one year old and being given to a stranger by my mother to save my life. And I didn't see her for six weeks, five or six weeks. So to be, to open your heart and to be committed means to be hurt. You know, I'm not making excuses, I'm saying that's how it worked for me. I've learned commitment, so your mother gave you beautiful advice, but I've had to learn that over time. The good news I can tell you, Tom, is the beauty does not go away.
1:38:29 Speaker 01 That, that, that should your marriage come to fifty-one years, as mine has, you'll be looking into your wife's eyes and you'll be looking, you'll be seeing the same beauty that you saw the first day you met her.
1:38:45 Speaker 01 It's gonna be amazing. So it's not like that. It's not like all those wrinkles and stuff.
1:38:52 Speaker 01 They don't take away the beauty, that's not where the beauty comes from. You know, so that, that again is, our society is travesty when it comes to defining beauty.
1:39:07 Speaker 01 So, I'm telling you, I've got good news for you.
1:39:13 Tom Bilyeu? No, I love that.
1:39:15 Tom Bilyeu? I know you're very clear about the things you consider yourself an expert in and what you don't. And I'm more than happy to hear just your thoughts out loud. But I'm curious, in 51 years of marriage, other than that that beauty remains, what are things that you've learned? It seems like your marriage is better now than it was before, based on things I've heard you say before.
1:39:37 Tom Bilyeu? What, what advice you have for people that are, you know, much earlier in a relationship than you?
1:39:46 Speaker 01 It's that the marriage is a wonderful opportunity to learn about yourself and about life, if you're willing to be curious. And, and that it's not 50/50. It's 100%, it's 100%. So you're each 100% responsible for how you show up.
1:40:14 Speaker 01 And every difficulty we've ever had has been a powerful learning experience. And this is where the commitment to truth comes in, because that's one thing we've shared. Is that it's not easy to give up your point of view and your grievance and your stance. But there's a deep payoff and when you do that. So that
1:40:43 Speaker 01 the marriage is just the most wonderful school there is
1:40:48 Speaker 01 for development.
1:40:51 Speaker 01 If you're willing to look at it like that, then if, if you, and if when you need the help, if you're willing to get the help to look at it that way.
1:41:00 Tom Bilyeu? And so how do you open yourself up to that? Is it soliciting feedback from your partner about what they see and how you are and helping you understand the truth about yourself? Or is it something totally different?
1:41:12 Speaker 01 Well, there's a lot, there's certainly that, that's a very important part of it. It's also, which goes back a lot to my work, is that any deep pain that you're experiencing is you confusing the present moment for the past.
1:41:29 Speaker 01 So that in a marriage, you're gonna get triggered. But when you think of a trigger, it's a very small little thing. And what's much more important is the ammunition and explosive that the trigger sets off. And guess what? Who's carrying the ammunition explosive? You are. So you can focus on the trigger. She said this, or he said that, or they didn't say that, they didn't do that. Or you can focus, oh, what's exploding inside me? And how long I have been carrying this? So it takes that curiosity and that willingness to look at yourself.
1:42:00 Tom Bilyeu? Speaking of trauma and how we're carrying around that explosive charge, are there universals to healing from trauma?
1:42:11 Speaker 01 What do you mean universals?
1:42:12 Tom Bilyeu? Things that apply to everybody. So I'm guessing a big part of it's going to be self-awareness. You need to become self-aware. But when I think about adults trying to heal from childhood trauma, that strikes me as a very difficult road. And I'm just wondering, you know, I, I hope that it's a hopeful road. Certainly from what I've encountered with your work, there's definitely a lot of hope. And I'm just curious, you know, for somebody watching this who's, who is just in the grips of, you know, childhood traumas, both sort of known and unconscious. What can they do to begin to heal?
1:42:55 Speaker 01 So there's many healing paths, but
1:43:03 Speaker 01 my own approach can be summed up in two words. And it's also the title of a course that I teach for therapists and so on. And these versions of it for the lay public as well. I'm not recommending my particular work. I'm talking about the name compassionate inquiry. So if you can be curious, the inquiry part is the curiosity part. I reacted that way. Oh.
1:43:31 Speaker 01 Why did I react that way? Not why did I react that way? That's not compassionate.
1:43:38 Speaker 01 I reacted that way. I felt this pain.
1:43:43 Speaker 01 I felt overwhelmed. I felt hatred. I felt rage. I felt despair. Huh. What is that about? So you have to have that curiosity. And you have to have the compassion
1:44:00 Speaker 01 to look at yourself not through that voice that tells you that you're worthless, but to say, if I reacted that way, there must be a good reason for it.
1:44:12 Speaker 01 Something in me.
1:44:16 Speaker 01 There's something happened to me that made me react that way at some point. So to be, so rather than putting oneself down or thinking that if I have problems, it means I'm deficient, have the curiosity to look into it and the compassion to not to judge yourself for it. And that both can be learned, both the curiosity and the compassion can be learned. And any good therapist, any, any person you work with, whether they call it compassionate inquiry, whether they call it something else, whatever they work with, those two attitudes will be embedded in their approach
1:44:52 Speaker 01 if they're going to be helpful to you. So compassionate curiosity, I think is the key.
1:45:00 Tom Bilyeu? And then are there tools? So let's say that somebody's doing the passionate inquiry. They really begin to understand what happened to them. In fact, maybe this is a better question. So let's say that you had had the upbringing that you had all the things you went through in Hungary in your infancy, but no one ever told you about it. What does somebody who they clearly are suffering from some sort of trauma, but they, they don't know what it is? How can they process through that?
1:45:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's not very difficult because it shows up in the present.
1:45:43 Speaker 01 And I can easily, I do that with people all the time. So.
1:45:46 Tom Bilyeu? So they don't need the why, they just need to know that they are reacting that way.
1:45:52 Speaker 01 Well, i- it's not difficult to get them to see. Um, that what they think is a reaction to the present is actually a reaction to the past. This is without any recall because there's all kinds of memory and the body carries memory even if it doesn't carry recall. And a lot of things that people that have happened to people happened before they had conscious recall.
1:46:18 Speaker 01 So, uh.
1:46:22 Speaker 01 In my work, I don't find it difficult to drill down to what is it that people are carrying in the present, you know, and. It's just a simple exercise that I do with people. So that what I'm saying, but but to make it long story short, the past shows up in the present all the time. And that goes back to Johnny Cash, your all goes down in your mind. You think you're reacting to something now? Uh, no, you're not, you know, the, uh, there's a wonderful, um.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 Um, Italian writer who survived the Holocaust called Primo Levy, who's just the most profound. Writer on the Holocaust of of them all, and he went through Auschwitz, he survived. Ended up committing suicide decades later. Um, but he said, uh, I'm just, um. Looking for the precise code here on my cellphone. If I can find it, I will. Uh, give it to you if you can bear with me, pre.
1:47:23 Tom Bilyeu? I mean, the the setup here, I'm more than happy to wait.
1:47:27 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:47:27 Tom Bilyeu? I'm holding my breath.
1:47:29 Speaker 01 Levy.
1:47:37 Speaker 01 Okay, here it is. So he says,
1:47:42 Speaker 01 anguish is known to everyone, even children. And everyone knows that it is even blank and undifferentiated. Rarely does it carry a clearly written label that also contains its motivation. In other words, people are beyond the suffering, but we don't always know what it's about. He says, and any label that it does carry can be mendacious. In other words, we can tell ourselves that we're suffering because of this, but it's not necessarily true. He says, one can believe, this is the heart of it. One can believe or declare oneself to be anguished for one reason and be so for something totally different. One can think that one is suffering at facing the future
1:48:26 Speaker 01 and instead be suffering because of one's past. One can think that one is suffering for others out of pity, out of compassion, and instead be suffering for one's own reasons. And so on and so on. And I just don't find it that difficult to speak to somebody and show them
1:48:49 Speaker 01 their present suffering is actually a memory of past suffering. So recall is helpful. And you know, there's ways to get at it sometimes. If it's totally inaccessible, people do hypnosis sometimes. People do EMDR, sometimes people do...
1:49:05 Tom Bilyeu? What's EMDR? I've heard you mention that before, but I don't know what it is.
1:49:09 Speaker 01 I've movement, desensitization, reprogramming. It's a way of working with conscious and unconscious memories. There's psychedelic work that sometimes I've seen people under the influence of psychedelics recall things that are not available to conscious memory usually. But none of that is crucial. What is crucial is to make the distinction that what I'm experiencing now is a resonance of the past.
1:49:38 Speaker 01 And I don't have to keep having that same resonance. If I can reinterpret the meaning that I gave to that past experience. Now, without demonstrating it live, I can't say more about it, except again to say that we don't have to worry about recalling because the past shows up in a form of physiological and emotional memory every day in your life, and particularly when you're upset.
1:50:07 Speaker 01 So that it's not that difficult to get at it.
1:50:12 Speaker 01 And usually what happens, you see, is not so much that people don't remember suffering. No, it's not so much that people don't remember what happened, it's that they don't associate with suffering, because already when they were experiencing it, they had to repress their emotions.
1:50:28 Speaker 01 So when you say, a lot of people have told me, I had a happy childhood.
1:50:33 Speaker 01 I still had mental illness and addiction later on, but I had a happy childhood. It takes me three minutes of just a few questions. Turns out that that childhood wasn't so happy at all. And it's not that they didn't remember events, it's that they didn't associate it with the pain, because they already suppressed the pain. That's how they survived it.
1:50:55 Speaker 01 So that's not difficult work.
1:50:58 Tom Bilyeu? It's work that you do extraordinarily well, and I encourage everybody to follow you. Where would be the easiest place to get ahold of you? Is it books first? Is it social media?
1:51:12 Speaker 01 Well, I don't personally post or read social media.
1:51:17 Speaker 01 Life is too short.
1:51:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's my four books out there. There's a website, drgabumati.com. I have all kinds of events happening, a lot of, like, for example, in March, I'm doing an event with a California-based organization called Spirituality and Non-Duality. And I think it's called the Wisdom of Trauma. It'll be a four-day online workshop, very intense. Last time, there was about a thousand people who took it. Probably will be down here again in a few weeks. That's a four-day immersion into my work. It's not for the faint-hearted, because it'll take you deep, and it'll be difficult at times, but I think it'll be liberating as well. So there's all kinds of stuff that I do online. It's all at the website, at my website, there's my books. And if you want to spend money on books, you don't have to.
1:52:06 Speaker 01 For one reason or another, people have posted all kinds of stuff of mine on YouTube. So lots of my talks on YouTube, none of that costs anything, any money to access, nor do you have to sign up for anything. So there's YouTube, there's my website, there are my books.
1:52:23 Tom Bilyeu? Perfect.
1:52:25 Speaker 01 There's lots, lots of stuff out there.
1:52:27 Tom Bilyeu? A lot of amazing stuff. I've seen a, a whole lot of it and I can just say it's absolutely incredible. Gabor, thank you so much for taking the time, man. I have wanted to sit down with you for a very long time, so I'm very grateful that you made the time. Guys, trust me when I say that this is somebody who has a lot more to offer than can be fit in two hours, so by all means, check out the books, look at the other stuff that you can find, you'll be richly rewarded. And speaking of being richly rewarded, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary.
1:53:10 Tom Bilyeu? Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make.
1:53:55 Tom Bilyeu? Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.
Previous The Real Reason You’re Lazy, Unmotivated & Unhappy | Dr. Rangan Chatterjee (Fan Fav) Next 4 More Months Until It Begins... Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
