Tom: Hey everybody.
Welcome to another episode of Impact Theory.
You are here my friends because you believe, like I do, that human potential is nearly
limitless but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something
with it.
Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that
are going to help you actually execute on your dreams.
Today's guest is one of the most successful and unconventional entrepreneurs I have ever
met.
With $700 and a beat up laptop he launched what has become arguably the largest and most
successful meditation and wellness media companies on the planet.
Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur he's lived in Malaysia, Michigan, New York, the Bay Area,
and at the time of this recording he's house shopping in Estonia, not kidding.
He and his family also uproot themselves for an entire month every year to spend time in
a new and exciting location to ensure maximum exposure to new ideas.
This very unique perspective, the diversity that it brings, is what has allowed him to
question everything and crawl out from under the horde of bullshit rules, what he calls
"brules", that he believes are holding us all back.
In the process he's had a ridiculous string of successes that sees him now leading a global
empire of 200 employees from 40 countries.
Along the way he's founded Omvana, the highest grossing health and fitness app on iTunes
in over 30 countries; Dormio, which was recently the second most downloaded health and fitness
app in the US; Dealmates.com; and most importantly his flagship company Mindvalley.
He's also a hyperactive philanthropist who's on the Innovation Board of the X PRIZE, was
named to the Transformation Leadership Council, and through his project renaissance he's aiming
to make his home of Kuala Lumpur one of the top 20 cities in the world to launch a startup.
Please help me in welcoming the CEO and founder of the radical new Mindvalley Academy, a revolutionary
educational platform with over 1.5 million students and subscribers, the creator of A-Fest,
and the best selling author of The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, Vishen Lakhiani.
Vishen: So honored to be on this show.
Can I just give a shout out to my family?
Tom: Please.
Vishen: Christina, Hayden, Eve hi.
Hayden, check out that t-shirt.
Do you recognize that symbol?
My son is a big Jedi fan.
Tom: He's the reason that I'm wearing it.
Vishen: Nice.
Got that Hayden?
Tom: You had said in an interview, actually it was a talk that you gave, you said, "We
have to question all these brules.
One of them is religion so my kids get to pick their own religion," and you said that
you kind of hoped that he'd choose Jedi and I was right there with you man.
Vishen: You were? Tom: Yeah.
I love that notion.
Tell us what are the brules?
What's the culturescape?
Give us some of that which is pretty important.
Vishen: Well I coined a word which I call the "culturescape."
The culturescape is that tangled web of shared subjective realities that all of us are immersed
in.
All of us are influenced by the culturescape of our local group.
I grew up as a kid in Kuala Lumpur and growing up there my family was Hindu so I was influenced
by the shared subjective reality of Hinduism, the idea of reincarnation.
I believed growing up that eating beef was somehow bad, I might go to Hell.
Well, Hindus don't believe in Hell but I might not achieve oneness with the universe or I
might be looked upon badly by God because I chose to eat beef.
That was my shared subjective reality.
As I grew up I went to a British school and then I came to America, I went to the University
of Michigan, and as I got exposed to these different elements of the culturescape, because
of this diversity I was part of, I start realizing that not all shared subjective reality is
true.
I realized that my belief that eating beef is bad was just that, it's a belief.
It's neither true nor false.
What I write about in my book is how to study the culturescape, the shared subjective realities
we are living in, and identify what rules help you and what rules are really brules,
or bullshit rules.
Brules that hold you back from truly living your most extraordinary life.
Let me give you an example of a bullshit rule.
Growing up in an Indian family there's a lot of pressure to be successful.
If you have Indian friends they'll probably say this as well, especially Indians who are
immigrants like me who live outside India, that your family pushes you to be a lawyer,
a doctor, or an engineer and if you're not any of that you're a family embarrassment.
Indian kids grow up to be lawyers, doctors, engineers or family failures.
In my case I loved art.
I wanted to study art.
I loved performing art, I loved getting on stage and acting, I loved photography, but
when I went to school I viewed the idea of me being an artist as disappointing my family,
as the opposite of success, so I signed up for computer engineering classes.
I studied hard, went through all of these boring as hell classes that I had no interest
in at the University of Michigan so that five years later I can get a job at Microsoft.
Now boom, I was it.
I was working for Bill Gates.
I was at Microsoft.
My family saved up over 100 grand for this college education and now I was a software
guy at Microsoft.
Eleven weeks into Microsoft I realized I was miserable and I quit cold turkey.
I basically got myself fired.
I had no motivation for work.
When I was supposed to be in the office, and I confess and I'm so apologetic to my boss,
I would just hole myself up and play Age of Empires because I was so bored with programing.
My boss caught me and he fired me and I wanted that to happen.
I realized that for five years I was pursuing something that I had no interest in because
the rules of the culturescape, of being a good Indian kid, said, "Be a software programmer,"
so I quit.
I quit, I went and joined a non-profit and that's really when my life began.
I dabbled in different things from traveling around the world to meditation to art.
It was through following these passions and it was through ignoring the bullshit rules
of the culturescape, identifying what really drove me, what made me passionate, that I
was able to build the life I have today.
That's really why I'm so adamant about teaching people through my work, through my books,
to question everything.
To question your religion, to question your societal rules, to question the idea of a
college degree.
I have a method for that which we can talk about later, it's called the Three Most Important
Questions.
That's how I feel all of us should be living life, by questioning everything.
I don't mean being skeptical of everything, there's a difference.
I mean healthy skepticism.
Ultimately questioning the rules of the culturescape so we can stay true to our own inner identity.
Tom: That's really interesting.
Full disclosure to anybody watching, Vishen and I know each other, we're both on the board
of the X PRIZE.
I didn't know that you had a performance bug in you.
I think anybody watching will get that you're very at ease talking, you're great on stage,
your presentations are amazing, and they have a lot of fucking views dude.
How do you let that stuff drive you?
Do the Three Most Important Questions do they address that?
Like tapping into ... Vishen: Well let's talk about that.
I think the idea of goal setting in the western world is rubbish because here's what happens:
when you ask people to set goals, even if you teach them methodologies like S-M-A-R-T,
SMART goal setting, you are basically encouraging people to set goals based on that same culturescape
with its restricting rules.
People, especially in the United States, set goals along the lines of this: we need to
get good grades so I can graduate high school, so I can get into a good college, need to
study hard to get a good GPA so maybe I can go to graduate school, so maybe I can do well
in my LSAT, that becomes the next goal, get into law school, the next goal, graduate from
law school, get into a partnership, become a lawyer.
That's how teenagers often think about their life.
This series of ticks that they have to go through but here's what happens.
Let's actually look at that.
Let's look at lawyers.
50% of lawyers in America are clinically depressed.
It's not just the US, I think Australia did a similar study.
Why are kids going into these professions where they end up in a job that they thought
was a good goal at one point only to find themselves absolutely miserable?
I say that with some confidence because I, at a certain point, was working in a legal
industry, I was selling technology to law firms.
I would speak to lawyers on the phone and diagnose what was going on in their law firms
and it was shocking how many of them actually hated their jobs and wanted to quit.
Why is it that teenagers go into these roles?
Now it's not just lawyers.
We set our goals to have two cars, and a house of a certain size, to be in a marriage.
It's because these goals aren't coming from inside us, they're coming from the culturescape.
The culturescape is basically a safety net mechanism.
For the longest time in human history we had to watch out for each other.
There were wars, there were disease.
Go back a thousand years there were wild animals that might kill you.
You had to follow certain rules of the culturescape to stay safe.
Among these were get a good education so you're not stuck in a factory job, so that you can
have a blue collar job.
It was get married, so if you're a woman you have a man to provide for you.
It was have five kids because if you go back 50 years ago infant mortality was so much
higher, you had five kids two were going to probably pass away.
The problem is people continue with these same rules in today's world when everything
has changed.
The thing is I don't believe in goal setting because when you teach traditional goal setting
people are locked into the rules of the culturescape.
Here's what I suggest.
I suggest we ask ourselves three questions, and I call these the Three Most Important
Questions.
The first question is this: it's what experiences do I want to have?
I'll tell you why that's important.
You see there's two types of goals, there are means goals and there are end goals.
People tend to chase means goals not realizing these are very different from end goals.
A means goal is do well in my LSAT, graduate from college, get that particular job, save
up for retirement, but if you ask these people why do you want that there's always a so.
"Well I want to qualify for college so I can do this."
Tom: Right.
Vishen: "I want to become a lawyer so I can do this."
Well the "so" leads you to the end goal.
Now what are end goals?
End goals are these things that really lead to the beauty of being human.
It's waking up next to someone you madly love, it's holding your first child in your arms,
it's having a puppy, it's seeing your business open for the first time, it's getting that
first customer, it's completing your first book, it's creating a work of art and having
people admire it and fall in love with it.
These are end goals.
What I advocate is, and the Three Most Important Questions, is forget the means goals.
Means goals are goals designed by the culturescape.
Instead go straight to the end goals.
The first question you ask yourself to identify your end goals is what experiences do I want
to have in life?
This is where you start writing down your experiences.
When I do this exercise I ask people to take out a piece of paper, draw three columns ... If
you're watching do that right now.
Take out a piece of paper, three columns, top of the first column you're going to write
down experiences.
Ask yourself what experiences do I want to have?
Who do I want to wake up with?
What type of house do I want to live in?
What countries do I want to visit?
Where do I want to travel to?
What adventures do I want to have?
Whether it's climbing Mount Kinabalu, or hiking the Andes.
What type of family life do I want?
What dog do I want?
The beautiful thing about experiences is often they don't require that much money.
It's crazy, we associate money with happiness but often the most beautiful experiences in
life require no money.
Almost any human being today can fall in love, can make a baby.
These are some of the most profound experiences I've had.
The first thing is you make a list of your experiences.
The second thing is you ask yourself this question: for me to be the man or woman who
has all of these experiences how do I have to grow?
Here we come to the second list.
I believe we are souls having a human experience here on planet earth but these souls are not
just here to explore all of these wonderful things about being human, I believe as souls,
as human beings, we crave growth.
Human beings are growth driven machines.
You make that second list and that second list is how do I want to grow?
How can I learn to be a better father?
A better spouse, a better lover?
What languages do you want to learn?
Do you want to learn a musical instrument?
Do you want to learn to write?
Do you want to learn to play a particular sport?
Or learn a particular skill?
What many people don't realize about the world is that growth is a goal in itself.
It's one of the key things that drive us forward as human beings but very few people write
down growth as goals.
It's because the education system which tries to teach us to grow through forced learning
makes many people dread learning.
Growth becomes that second list.
Now you have two lists, your experiences and your growth.
Now you ask yourself the third question and the third question is this: to be that man
or woman, how has all of these experiences, to be that man or woman who has grown in such
a way, how can I give back to the world?
There's a very important reason for that question.
The Dalai Lama said, "If you want to be happy, make other people happy."
I believe that when you do these three most important questions that third category is
what truly leads to fulfillment.
It's when you can take your growth, you can take your experiences, and contribute to fellow
souls, contribute to the human race.
You've learned entrepreneurship?
Great.
Mentor someone.
Mentor a kid who wants to get there.
You have the ability to sing?
Figure out how to use it to deliver beautiful music to inspire people.
Your list of contributions becomes your steps for you to give back to the world because
that takes you beyond pure happiness into fulfillment.
When you have this list, experiences, growth, and contribution, this becomes your goal list.
Everything else is just a means goal.
When I started creating this I found that it allowed me to rewire my brain to shortcut
and bypass so many bullshit rules to go straight to these final items.
To go straight to ways I could contribute, ways I could grow, ways I could have these
beautiful experiences.
Often these were unconventional parts.
When I started my company I didn't work with any investors or VCs, I decided to start my
own university, which is happening in Barcelona, but it all came because when you have done
the Three Most Important Questions you get to short circuit the brules of the culturescape
and figure out short paths towards true human fulfillment.
Tom: That's amazing and has a high degree of consistency.
Now what I want to know is growing up as your kid, do you think that your kids will still
struggle with this?
Is the culturescape the kind of thing that worms its way in and how do you walk them
through not ending up in that?
Vishen: That's a beautiful question and I love parenting.
One of the key things in my growth list is be as great a parent as I can be because I
think that's one of the biggest responsibilities that being human, the whole act of being human,
gives us.
To raise another baby you and not fuck that kid up.
Tom: Too much.
Vishen: Too much.
Right.
One of the key things ... I remember talking to a parental psychologist called Shelly [Rafko
00:16:02] and I asked her once, "Shelly, what is the greatest gift a parent could give a
child?"
And Shelly said this, she said, "The greatest thing you can do for your children is to be
acutely aware that they form their beliefs because of you so make sure that you are taking
absolute care to give them the right beliefs."
This is so, so, so important.
Kids are little meaning making machines.
It's how the human brain has evolved to work.
We create meaning about the world.
Now if you think about American parenting, let's say Billy, your kid, is sitting at a
table and he drops his fork and you go, "Billy, don't drop that fork."
Two minutes later Billy drops his spoon and now you're like, "Billy, I told you not to
drop that fork.
Now you drop a spoon?
Go stand in that corner."
You take Billy off the chair, you go put him in a corner, and if you're parents, I've done
that, I know you guys have done that as well.
Now I thought that was fine.
I'm not slapping the kid, I'm just making him stand in the corner so he learns to hold
his freaking cutlery.
Shelly said the problem with that is this: we're not paying attention to Billy's meaning
making machine.
It's that machine in the child's head that's creating meaning.
What if this is what is going on in Billy's head.
He accidentally dropped his fork and he was surprised that his mom questioned him.
He's a kid, he's still learning to use his hands, so he wanted to find out was his mom
really angry with him?
Is mom really angry?
What if I drop my spoon?
I just want to see what happens.
That's how kids understand the world, they experiment.
He drops his spoon, now mom sends him to a corner.
He doesn't get to finish his meal which he was enjoying.
"Now think about," Shelly says, "What's going on in Billy's head?"
The meaning making machine is turning.
He's going, "Mom doesn't trust me.
Mom is angry at me.
Mom sends me to a corner because she doesn't respect me.
Mom doesn't love me.
Does she love me?
Why am I in a corner?
Why can't I speak now?
My voice is not important."
These things become part of our identity and these things when they repeat is what creates
adults that can be so broken.
All of us grow up with these holes within ourselves.
We feel not loved enough, we feel not important enough, we feel that we don't matter.
All of us grow up.
I had these issues as a teenager and it's because our style of parenting doesn't take
care of the meaning making machine in a child's brain.
How do you do that?
Well you be acutely aware of a child's brain works.
With my son, let me give you an example of the opposite.
I was driving my car with my son two weeks ago and he asked me a question.
I can't remember what it was but it was something about science, he's a science junky.
As he asked me the question the phone rang and I checked it and it was my CFO and I knew
it was an important call so I took the call.
Two minutes into the call I realized I'd ignored my son.
Now what does that tell him?
It occurred to me that his meaning making machine might go off and go, "Oh, dad's work
is more important than me.
I'm not important.
Dad's CFO is more important."
I paused the call and I said, "Hayden, I am so, so, so sorry.
Your question is so important to me.
You're the most important person in my life.
I just need to finish this call because it's only going to be two minutes and I'm guessing
it's something urgent and then I'm going to give you full attention."
Those simple statements tweak his meaning making machine and gives him a sense of importance,
gives him a sense of understanding that he is truly important.
As parents you want to be careful of that.
Now if you do that your kid is growing up with healthy beliefs, beliefs which are empowering,
beliefs of confidence, beliefs that say I matter.
When children have that they are less immune to the brules of the culturescape.
They are less immune to a religious leader who might say, "You're a sinner because you
ate the wrong type of meat," or because you didn't follow some arbitrary bullshit rule
written 2,000 years ago.
They are able to use their own ... They get a positive meaning making machine and they
are better able to use that sense of power and confidence to navigate the world without
falling for other people's bullshit.
Tom: Yeah.
How do you deal with discipline and not wanting to trigger a negative meaning making machine
but knowing that at ... Or maybe hey you tell me, do you need to coral them?
Are there certain rules that they should follow?
What happens when Billy punches somebody in the face?
Vishen: That's happened to my kid.
I think there are two fundamental things we can have as human beings that define how we
function in the world.
The first belief is that human beings are fundamentally good.
The second belief is that human beings are fundamentally evil.
I have a major issue with religion.
I think religion has gone past its time of usefulness in human society and it's about
time that we start questioning religion.
We should cut the cord and stop indoctrinating our children in our religion, whether it's
Islam, or Christianity, or Hinduism, or any other type of religion.
One of the things is many religions are created by men and women and enforced by men and women
who believe human beings are fundamentally evil.
That's where you get dumb ideas such as sin, bad karma, and things like that.
I believe human beings are fundamentally good.
I rarely have discipline issues with my son.
Yes, there was a time many years ago, four or five years ago, when I know my kid punched
another kid because he lost his temper so I sat down with Hayden and we spoke about
it.
We spoke about the value of compassion and we spoke about Ken Wilber and his theories
of levels of awareness.
How one can move from ethnocentrism to worldcentrism to cosmocentrism, how all of us can be connected
in life.
I never disciplined him.
I educated him.
Tom: How old was he at this point?
Vishen: He was maybe five years old.
Tom: And do you think he got that?
Vishen: He did.
Tom: Ethnocentrism is pretty intense ... Vishen: You'd be surprised at how smart kids
really are.
Hayden is aware of philosophers like Ken Wilber and understands many of these concepts.
Here's why this is important.
Charles Darwin, we all know Charles Darwin, theory of evolution.
In 1872 Darwin wrote a really interesting book, I forgot the name but it had the word
"sexual" in the title.
I guess in 1872 you wanted to sell a book you would put the word, "Anatomy of Reproduction
and Sexual Something," in the title.
Tom: I think that works today too.
Vishen: It works today.
Probably.
I wish I could remember the name of the book but anyway you guys can Google it.
It was written in 1872 or 1873 and in that book Charles Darwin spoke about this incredible
idea called diffusion of sympathy.
When I read that paragraph I felt my hair stand on end because it was like listening
to the Dalai Lama, remembering that this was a guy who lived 150 years ago.
He said when human beings start understanding that they can be sympathetic to the community
around them very soon they start understanding that they have a natural advantage by being
sympathetic to the entire nation.
Then very soon they realize that they have a further advantage by being sympathetic to
people of other nations and one by one this diffusion of sympathy will extend until someday
the entire human race will be sympathetic to each other.
He predicted worldcentrism.
He predicted that more and more of us are going to go up to areas of worldcentrism.
Charles Darwin didn't just talk about how we evolved he talked about how we are going
to evolve.
The natural state of evolution of human beings, according to Charles Darwin, is that sympathies,
and sympathies is basically 1872 language for compassion, is going to extend and extend
and extend until the human race is one.
I guess today you can call that unity.
Back to why it's important for a kid to know this.
When you see ... I'm not trying to get political.
I'm trying to get logical.
Tom: Sure.
Vishen: When you see a man like Trump get on television and blame Mexicans and blame
Muslims, you can tell that his ideas are counter to the natural forward evolution of the human
race, which is diffusion of sympathy to people of all colors and all creeds.
In other words he's holding us back.
If you decide that the goal of a political leader is to help human beings evolve you
would not vote for Trump, assuming you understood Darwin, you understood Ken Wilber's philosophy.
My child, at seven, can watch Trump on television and go, "This guy is kind of bad."
I believe that is the most important thing we can teach our people because if people
learn that there would be no racism, there would be no wars, there would be no discrimination
against people of different colors or religions, there would be no discrimination against gays.
The thing is if you are a religious person and you learn that, they way you embrace your
religion changes.
Religion goes away from being a suffocating, poisonous brule to something that can open
you up to new experiences.
Tom: Do you consider yourself a philosopher or an entrepreneur more?
I imagine there's a bit of both.
Vishen: Interesting question.
I realize I just went on on philosophy for a really long time.
Tom: Which is amazing but I'm very curious to know where your self definition would fall.
Vishen: I used to think I was an entrepreneur, but again entrepreneur is a means goal.
Tom: Okay.
Vishen: I don't like that label, entrepreneur.
There are entrepreneurs who are freelancers on freelancer.com right now who will design
a logo for you.
They're an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneur simply means you're earning your own income.
There are entrepreneurs like you who have built billion dollar companies.
The gap is too wide to put everybody into one label.
I define myself not by the label entrepreneur but by what I stand for.
I believe it's not our labels that matter, it's your stand.
One guy I know, Patrick Gentempo, has a quote, "Your stand is your brand."
I believe what makes us truly unique as an individual is what we stand for.
I fundamentally stand for one thing and it's reflected in everything I do and that one
thing is unity.
It's my number one value.
I'm an activist for unity, more so than I am an entrepreneur.
If I lost my business- and you know that happens right?
Small chance but it happens- I wouldn't lose my identity.
If I stopped standing up for unity I wouldn't be Vishen.
Everything I do in Mindvalley is about taking Darwin's prediction of sympathetic diffusion
and getting it out to more people.
There's this big desire in me for unity.
I don't know where it comes from, maybe it was the raising and my experience as a child.
Often the biggest childhood pains we experience are simply the things that define our future
values but that's what makes me me.
I'm a fighter and an activist for human unity.
That's my number one definition of myself.
Tom: Wow man.
That's intense and I love that.
I love that you've thought enough about it to really know what your real end goal is.
That's phenomenal.
Vishen: Right.
Tom: The reason that I asked is I think a lot about what is the ultimate power of being
an entrepreneur?
What is the end game, to put it in your terms.
For me I definitely consider myself an entrepreneur but the reason that I consider myself an entrepreneur,
and the reason that I think that's so powerful, and the reason that I get so excited doing
things like the adventure trip that we did for the X PRIZE is you get to be around other
entrepreneurs and they sound like fucking philosophers.
Vishen: Right.
Tom: They sound like you sound and I know anybody watching this is thinking, "This guy
runs companies?"
You know what I mean?
They're thinking of you as a philosopher.
What I want them to see in that is that commerce becomes this very powerful vehicle for you
to build a platform to launch what you're trying to do with unity in a way that's sustainable,
in way that touches a lot of people.
Tell them about Awesomeness Fest, now known as A-Fest, and that you give away the profits
but you're only able to do that because you're such an effective entrepreneur.
Vishen: Well let me first back track a bit.
I want to give you guys a model that might help explain this.
In my book I have a quote, I think it's the single most quoted line in my book, and it
is, "Business people do it for the dollars, but entrepreneurs do it to push the human
race forward."
Tom: I love that.
Vishen: That's the difference.
People lump everyone together but no, there are business people who will start businesses
that basically are designed just for shareholder value, just to make a buck.
Entrepreneurs are people like you.
You started Quest Nutrition because you wanted to make a dent on obesity in America.
You wanted to help people live a healthy lifestyle.
Entrepreneurs I found, true entrepreneurs, do it because there's this deep calling in
them to push the human race forward.
As a result business people and entrepreneurs build very different types of companies and
if you understand this division you understand that there are two different types of companies
you can join.
If you are applying for a job or working for a company, this is so important, you can be
in a humanity minus company or you can be in a humanity plus company like Quest Nutrition
or Mindvalley.
Humanity plus companies are designed not just for profit.
They can be highly profitable, like Quest, like Zumba, but they are pushing the human
race forward.
Humanity minus companies create money but they don't really serve to push the human
race forward.
In many cases they keep the human race stuck in old practices.
If you think about oil and gas companies right now which are influencing the EPA to cut so
many environmental regulations.
If you think about companies that sell junk food.
These are humanity minus companies.
Big tobacco, junk food, companies that are willing to sacrifice quality and manipulate
people to eat stuff that actually make you sick because it leads to their bottom line,
humanity minus.
I wish millenials today could understand this so you guys stop sending your resumes to bullshit
companies that are messing up the planet.
No one's asking you to save the world.
All I'm saying is don't fuck it up for the next generation.
Tom: That's a fair ask.
What I want to know is do you think, going back to what you were saying about the food
companies, the humanity minus, do you think that we legislate our way out of that?
Do we stop food companies from doing things?
Or do we as consumers make demands that they be better?
Vishen: That's a very important question.
I am not for extreme legislation but the fact of the matter is legislation is necessary.
Because especially in a country like the US there is this danger that America become a
corporatocracy if it isn't already and certain legislation is necessary.
Let me give you an example.
In [Talin 00:31:21], which is this beautiful medieval town, my wife is from there, we're
buying a house there, I love Talin, I'm so happy that there's legislation that doesn't
allow Starbucks in Talin.
I used to live in New York and I remember in 1998 and 1999 walking through the streets
of New York and being able to visit and have dates in all of these beautiful little romantic
coffee shops and then Starbucks came and all of these coffee shops just died out.
It's just a Starbucks everywhere.
Some of these Starbucks don't even have places where you can sit, it's coffee on the go.
Right now I love Starbucks, I started Mindvalley in a Starbucks, but I can see how, without
legislation, certain historical places like Talin, one of my favorite cities, might lose
their native touch.
Talin has shops, stores which are over 500 years old.
These might die out if these companies come in so sometimes legislation is necessary.
Especially when it comes to food I think it's so vitally important.
According to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, one in three Americans are now officially
obese.
Tom: Right.
Vishen: Until we create a world where, and hopefully the millennial generation will figure
this out, we create a world where companies are all humanity plus ... The fact is a large
number of companies exist straight up as an algorithm for generating profit and these
algorithms ... I'm not saying these guys behind them are bad or wrong, I'm just saying the
algorithm of the company is to generate profit at all cost.
These might be counter to where we want to take the human species.
Tom: That's a fascinating argument that I won't derail us entirely and then keep going
down that rabbit hole but it is something that I think a lot about.
What was that study that you read about belief?
I think you refer to it as Bob, Billy, and Sally and their teacher ... It's the one where
the teacher gets told these three are special.
Vishen: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's called the expectancy effect.
There was this one study done in a school where they took a teacher and they played
a trick on her.
They told her that certain people in her class had tested and were proven to be exceptionally
gifted but the teacher, to be fair to everyone, was not allowed to tell these kids how they
had done in this presumed IQ test.
She just had to do her regular job and be quiet about it.
What they found is that after one year, even though they had randomly picked the kids whom
they told the teacher was gifted, those kids started scoring better in exams.
That's the expectancy effect.
People do good when you expect them to do good.
It's a really interesting study that shows that often what we expect to be true about
the world, whether it's because it changes our behavior or it influences the world in
some way, ends up being true.
They did that same study with managers.
They told managers certain employees just had the potential to be star employees.
Again these employees were picked at random and sure enough those employees ended up being
star employees.
Tom: That is so fascinating to me.
When you think about the power of mind.
Vishen: Right.
Tom: Because what's happening is ... Did you read Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers?
Vishen: Yes.
I did.
Tom: He talks about hockey players in Canada are all born between January and March because
they end up being bigger and because they have early wins, because they're just more
coordinated, they're bigger, they're stronger.
Then that gives them the confidence, they go on to do better, simply because they have
the confidence and believe that they must be better and so they actually separate themselves
from the pack.
That just the teacher, because these kids don't even know the study's happening, just
the teacher believing ... Even though they're trying not to let anything on, that they think
these kids are special, the kids actually end up doing better.
That is so surreal and makes me absolutely terrified to have children.
Because you realize ... I want it to be Plato, I think it's Plato that said, "The only impossible
job is raising children."
When you think about how many ... I literally as you were talking about brules I had this
vision of your kids and vines representing the brules winding their way over and your
job as a parent is one by one to fight those off because they come for you.
Vishen: They do.
Tom: It's not like they just get passed on by you.
To navigate the world we have to make assumptions about it and to have a consistent human experience
you have to make assumptions.
You have to have things you believe.
Things can get in man that are sneaky and it is so hard to shuck that all off and do
something exceptional.
All right, I don't want to run out of time.
I want to hear about your university because I think your university addresses a lot of
this stuff.
Vishen: Right.
Tom: What exactly is Mindvalley Academy and how's it different?
Why is it important?
Vishen: Perfect.
Mindvalley Academy is a company I started.
Mindvalley is an education company, Mindvalley Academy is this really successful online school
we started to teach people the things that school should have taught you but forgot.
I often hear from people who say education failed me.
The reason for that is because if you really look at what creates happy, successful life
it is not the stuff that schools are teaching us.
All of us today walk around with the equivalent of a freaking super computer in our pockets
right?
On this computer you can pretty much pull up most information yet what do schools teach?
They teach you geography, history, math, and all of that is accessible in our portable
brain but what they don't teach us is how to truly lead exceptional lives.
How do you be a great parent and not fuck up your kids?
How do you be a great lover so you don't end up one of those divorce statistics which afflict
50% of marriages?
How do you lead a life of adventure so you don't wake up at 40 wondering what the hell
am I doing?
How do you stay physically fit?
How do you extend your longevity?
How do you know what foods to eat and what to toss into the garbage can?
How do you treat people?
How do you get onstage and share an idea?
How do you write a business plan?
How do you become an entrepreneur?
How do you learn how to create residual streams of income, passive income?
School doesn't teach that to you.
In fact school doesn't teach you much of what one truly needs to be successful.
What we do is we go out there, we find the greatest teachers in the world.
The greatest guy for fitness, the greatest man or woman for healthy eating, the greatest
people for mindfulness and meditation, the greatest people for self esteem, the greatest
people for goal setting.
We take those great teachers and we combine them with a great curriculum.
Often they have their own curriculum but we teach them particular psychology and stuff
to create phenomenal courses.
We combine this with great technology.
Great teach, great curriculum, great technology.
Wrapped around all of it is art and design and beautiful film making and we produce the
world's best courses in these subject matters.
These courses are on an app.
We have two apps, the Mindvalley App, which is for traditional courses, and a new app
we're launching soon called Mindvalley Quest.
Basically students join a cohort, a group, 3,000 students at the same time going through
an incredible program.
One of our top programs is Wild Fit which is a weight loss program.
It's the most amazing thing for reshaping your body all based on using NLP to change
your approach to food.
You have 3,000 people go through it and here's the crazy thing, the completion rate is almost
500% better than traditional courses.
Tom: Wow.
Vishen: What happens is it's based on micro-learning so you take a 10 minute lesson everyday.
It's not eight hours of content.
People go through and then there's communities so people are supporting each other and at
the end of 30, 60, or 90 days people now have a healthy eating habit, or they've figured
out how to put on muscle and be physically fit, or they now have high endurance, or they
now can practice mindfulness, or they've now learned to tap into their intuition.
We are roping in many of the world's greatest teachers.
Neale Donald Walsch, Ken Wilber ... Putting them-
Tom: Wim Hof.
Vishen: Wim Hof.
Yeah Wim Hoff is teaching in our university, I'll come to that in a moment.
And putting them on Mindvalley Academy through our apps.
Now at the same time there are certain things where you learn best as a group and that's
what Mindvalley U is about.
We're actually creating our own university to compete with four year colleges which I
think are not relevant anymore.
Alan Watts, who's one of our teachers, his work is coming to Mindvalley Quest, phenomenal
philosopher.
Alan Watts said, "No literate, inquisitive young man needs to go to college unless they
are training to be a doctor or a teacher or anything that requires certification."
He wrote that in 1972.
It's even more true right now.
Think about college.
You take a group of 19, 20, and 21 year olds and put them in a bubble for four years and
when they come out of that bubble the world has changed.
Peter Diamandis said between 2016 and 2022 we will see more change in the world than
between 1900 and 2000.
What happens when you emerge from this bubble?
Your knowledge is often no longer useless.
Your degree doesn't matter.
15% of people at Google, according Laszlo Bock, the head of hiring, no longer have a
college degree.
Same at Mindvalley, 15% of our hires?
No college degree.
People are coming out with these bullshit degrees, they've spent four years on campus,
and they're hanging out with other 19 year olds.
What can you learn from a 19 year old?
We want to change college so the first thing is get rid of the four years.
Mindvalley U is one month a year.
You go for one month onto our campus and then you go back into the real world for 11 months.
You come back a month later, go back into the real world for 11 months.
It is one month a year stretched out for 48 years.
The second thing we just got rid of?
Graduation.
It's pointless.
Why would you ever want to graduate from learning?
You come back every year.
The third thing we do is it's not just for teenagers.
You have parents coming, husband, wife, 10 year olds, teens, five year olds, it's for
people of all ages.
You could be in a class with a 13 year old and 70 year olds.
Because of this everybody learns from each other.
An interesting statistic shows that 85% of jobs are found through personal connections,
not resumes.
The resumes help but it's that personal connection.
Everybody knows resumes are BS.
By putting entrepreneurs and teenagers all on the same campus together your kids make
incredible connections.
The next thing we hack is the campus itself.
Rather than have a confined campus our campus is in spectacular cities around the world
like Barcelona.
Next year it's going to be Berlin or Talin.
The campus moves every year so every year for one month you're living in a new city,
you're discovering a new culture, you're on this campus with this incredible community
of people of all around the ages, and now we bring in the magic ingredient, teachers.
Our subject matter and our teachers are the subjects that truly change your life.
Our teachers are legendary.
Colleges do not have the best teachers.
They have the best researchers.
They're incentivized to employ the best researchers but the best teachers, these are the people
you have on the show.
These are people on Ted Talks.
These are people writing best selling books.
We get these people into our campus.
It's such a rich community.
It all started because my family and I wanted to question a brule.
Christine and I were wondering how cool would it be if we could live one month a year in
a foreign city with our kids?
If we had community around this and we had opportunity to do what we love, which is learn,
and this new university idea was born.
We launched it, it's been ridiculous.
Hundreds of applications.
We're going through them right now.
We'll probably fill our first quota, our first beta test is 400 people, but I'm going to
scale this to 10,000 people and yes absolutely, we are taking on four year colleges.
Tom: Wow man.
That's incredible.
That's a big vision.
Vishen: Thank you.
Tom: All right.
You're doing a lot.
Where can these guys find you online?
Vishen: Go to MindvalleyAcademy.com.
MindvalleyAcademy.com is where you can learn all about Mindvalley Academy, our courses,
our teachers, and MindvalleyAcadamey/U is where you can learn about our university project.
Tom: Awesome man.
All right, last question.
What's the impact that you want to have on the world?
Vishen: I already shared what I feel is the number one thing I stand for and that is unity,
but the second thing I stand for is human transformation.
The impact I want to have on the world is to help take our human education systems from
what we learn as adults to what colleges teach and later we're going to go down to K-1 to
K-12 and early infant learning and upgrade these to teach the skills that truly create
happy, wonderful, kind, generous people who are able to live beautiful, fulfilled lives,
create humanity plus companies, and elevate the human race as a worldcentric species.
Now this means an overhaul of how our education system works.
It means teaching ideas like worldcentrism, getting into the K-1 to K-12 system, into
colleges, and teaching people to unleash that power within.
I know that line sounds corny but teaching people to unleash their abilities within,
to really craft and create the best lives they can.
That's the legacy I want to leave.
I want to reboot human education and create something that's more relevant for the generation,
that future, that this human race is moving into.
Tom: I love it man.
Vishen: Thanks.
Tom: Thank you so much for coming on dude.
It was awesome.
Vishen: Thanks.
Tom: Guys, listen when I say that yes, he has a massive vision, but the thing you need
to understand about him is he is an entrepreneur to his core.
While he does not define himself by that and I get it, it's all about unity, he actually
knows how to execute and that's why it's important to me that he has the skill set of an entrepreneur.
Because he's not an empty dreamer who's pulling all of this stuff out of the ether to sound
good.
He's building all of this stuff based on real world execution, knowing what it takes to
actually take on a four year university, knowing what it takes to look at a global problem
like people being too ethnocentric or being too egocentric and understanding how to build
sustainable engines that take care of that through being an entrepreneur, looking past
the dollar and looking to the opportunity and the way to build something to get people
excited and rallied around an idea.
Go online and look at their offices, look at the way that he's constructed it.
One thing I was not going to forget to ask him and I forgot is that he makes people swear
on a Wonder Woman statue when they start in the Hall of Awesomeness.
These are all real things tied to his company.
Go check it out.
He questions everything.
He is doing things in a new way and I know I have learned a lot from him, I hope that
you guys will as well.
It is a weekly show my friends so if you haven't already be sure to subscribe.
Until next time, be legendary my friends.
Take care.
Vishen: Thank you everyone.
Tom: Vishen, thank you brother.
Hey everybody, thanks so much for joining us for another episode of Impact Theory.
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