speaker-1: Vision, before Mind Valley you were burnt out. What was happening to your health that you could no longer ignore?

speaker-0: The classic things that happen when you really don't enjoy your job, when you're overworked, when you're worried about money. I was working for a company that really pushed its employees but gave them very little. Horrible company culture. In the office I worked in there was racism, there was sexual harassment and People who did bad things got promoted, not actually fired. And so I lived in this horrendous culture. I had difficulty sleeping, breakouts, acne, pimples, all of the classic symptoms where you don't love your nine to five. And the worst part was this. Waking up every day and rather than looking forward to a new day, dreading that you have to step out of bed.

speaker-1: Vision, thank you so much for joining me on the Business of Longevity Podcast. we're here in Copenhagen to explore a little bit of your own health journey and where you've put your own money now and how you see the business of this longevity space developing. So this experience that you've just got into now, how has that had an impact on where you are today? What kind of changes have you made since then?

speaker-0: Well, one of the biggest things that I really started doing that shifted my life was the daily practice of meditation. And I worked with two protocols. Okay, so let me introduce a concept here to the listeners. You go to a gym and you work out your muscles. And then there are such such a thing called sets and repetition. How many sets do you do? How many repetitions you can do, right? So let's look at reps. And let's look at exercise. We do that for our physical body, because we see our physical body. But if you actually think about human beings, human beings are unique as animals. We exist in two different worlds. There's the physical world, the part where you and I are here in physical reality. But there's also a mental world. Now the historian Yuval Hariri, in his hit book Sapiens, calls it the cognitive reality. The world of cognitive reality. It's a world of ideas, of beliefs. When we think about concepts like love, God, forgiveness, these are not things you can see, but they are real to us. Love is real to us. But can you see love? You can witness two people being in love and holding hands, but can you see love? So the first thing we gotta understand is that we are unique creatures. We exist in physical reality and cognitive reality, but we don't take any effort to mold and shape cognitive reality. That's why running, endurance training, exercise, playing tennis, that's shaping physical reality and muscles. But there's such a thing called mind wrecks. The number which are patterns that you run in your head that actually help you shape cognitive reality. They make your mind calmer, they make you feel loved, they put you in states of happiness, they make you feel more connected to life, to other human beings. And when you nail that, Your physical reality actually shifts. So I'll give you an example, okay? There was a study done in 2012. The scientists looked at 1,200 men and women over 66. And they wanted to see what were the attitudes that these people had that actually impacted their lifespan. So in this case, they looked particularly at one of the nastiest cognitive reality models that we have, and that is regret. Fear, hate. They asked these people to analyze how they forgive and they divided forgiveness into five different buckets. Now, one of these buckets was bitterness. You know, I'm bitter. I'm bitter that that person did that to me. How could they do that? My childhood was wrecked, my love was wrecked. Now another bucket was I'm ready to forgive them, but they have to make amends. They have to reach out and correct. Now they looked at all of these different things, the five buckets. Can you guess which people when they and then they ruled out everything? They ruled out belief in God, they ruled out religion, they ruled out everything else, and they found one thing, one mental model that actually caused the people to die sooner. Can you guess what that mental model was?

speaker-1: Negativity in in the mind.

speaker-0: It wasn't it actually wasn't. It wasn't the bitterness group. It was the group, and remember this was a thousand two hundred plus people, right? It was the group that practiced conditional forgiveness. Okay. So conditional forgiveness is not bitterness. Bitterness is that person sucks, but you know, I'm done. I'm just just not gonna like deal with them anymore. Conditional forgiveness is why did they do that? Why did he or she cheat on me? I will forgive them. I'm a good person, I will forgive them, but only if They apologize. I will forgive them for the money they took from me, but only if they return that money. Conditional forgiveness, a mental construct, actually caused you to die sooner.

speaker-1: Cause you demanded something for someone else which is a ultimately out of your control.

speaker-0: Right, right. Now, how do you fix that? So there was another study that showed this. If you practice forgiveness, not conditional forgiveness, but you say, Listen, that is a bad person. Yeah. But I'm gonna forgive them anyway. I'm not gonna carry the grudge. What starts to happen is your physiology actually changes. Now this is nothing more than a mental state. You're not going to the gym, you're not working out, you're not eating forgiveness pills, you're not buying a forgiveness biosensor that zaps your brain. It's simple, simply a mental rep, okay, which is a forgiveness protocol. And we'll talk about the protocol. But what happens is this in a study done, they found that your endurance goes up. People who practice forgiveness versus not practicing forgiveness, when they were asked to march up and down a hill, they perceived the hill, after forgiveness, they perceived the hill as less steep. This is crazy. Your vertical jump goes up. You can jump higher after you practice forgiveness. Now, in a study at in Vancouver at the Biocybernaut Center by Dr. Jim Hart, they found that forgiveness actually shapes your brain waves to give you the brainwave states that better resemble monks who spend years in meditation. They were analyzing to try to figure out what mental process gives you the brainwave states of Zen Roshi monks who spend decades in meditation training. And this is high alpha amplitude, left-right brain coherence. They were studying people, they were putting electrodes on people, they were asking people to do creative visualization, to do meditation. Then they found this one lady, and her brain waves were just getting better and better and better, right? Like like a pro-athlete of brainwave training, and they asked her, What are you doing? And she goes, I'm just trying to forgive that asshole. Her husband had cheated on her. When she forgave him, boom, brainwave's data. So what they are finding is that forgiveness is a superpower. Forgiveness. Helps you live longer. Forgiveness improves your endurance. Forgiveness is just one of many forms of mental repetitions that we can do of now sign study exercises that shift you. Another one is gratitude. Gratitude is the mental frame with the highest correlation to overall feelings of well-being based on multiple studies, meditation. Meditation, there are many different types. It tends to be a buzz-all word, but just calming your mind. Since 2010, an exponential increase in studies. Everything from reducing anxiety, sleeping better, back pain, all of these are mental raps. The reason we don't hear enough about them is because, I mean, look around you. Everyone here is selling food, supplements, devices, electronic gizmos. You can't make money teaching someone a mental rap. I can teach forgiveness in 30 minutes. You carry that for life. You never have to pay a subscription fee. And that's why we don't hear about these things as often. But these mental models are now overwhelmingly, scientifically proven to shift your longevity more than anything else.

speaker-1: So this is very fascinating to to hear and you experienced this this burnout phase and then you stepped into

speaker-0: So this is what I started doing. I started classifying and optimizing my day with mental models. So I start this way a Zen Roshi compassion practice takes one minute. Gratitude takes two minutes. Forgiveness three minutes. I forgive everything. Forgiveness doesn't mean pardoning. I've had people who have cheated me. I've had employees who have stolen. I've still reported them to the police, but I forgive them. So when I if I had to see them or face them in court, I'm perfectly calm. The f now the first three mental reps that I do. Now this is part of the meditation protocol I pioneered called the six-phase meditation. I've made it free on the internet. The first three, which is compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, are about present emotional state. The second three are about goals. And that is where you see your life three years out and you pick one thing that you want to manifest, whether it's kids or it's a beautiful home or it's business success. Phase five is You see your day-to-day unfolding beautifully. And phase six is just a blessing. If you believe in God, ask for a blessing. That's it. It's that simple. The six-phase meditation is now used by so many professional athletes, so many superstars who have actually gone public after I put it free, saying that it reshaped their life. Reggie Jackson of the LA Clippers does this. His brother introduced it to him. He said it helped him with his basketball. Tony Gonzalez, one of the top 100 NFL players in the world, he invited me to come and train him on this. I've trained some of the top Hollywood stars. Miguel, the RB star, in an interview at Billboard magazine, spoke about how he does this with his team before getting on stage for major concerts. So this protocol,

speaker-1: Fantastic.

speaker-0: and the reason why, you know, actors and sportsmen do it is because they immediately feel it. They immediately see their game improved. But it's nothing more. Than a free mental protocol. And this is what I want the world to understand that the best longevity hat is a pattern you run, a structured form of thinking, scientifically validated, that you run in your head in the morning.

speaker-1: That's fascinating. And so this is all about the business side of it as well. So so you learn all of these techniques and then from that you kind of build a brand around yourself. I did. And you create mind valley. So how has getting an understanding of this, being able to build your business

speaker-0: Exactly. So what I launched is I launched an app called Mind Valley Meditations, and you can get it from mindvalley.com forward slash meditations, 99 a year. And the app has 1,200 tracks that cover multiple mental protocols. You talk to the app, you let it know how you're feeling. There are different ways we describe it, and AI analyzes what you're saying and it suggests it's the best protocol. Now there are many different mental protocols. Meditation is one, it gets a lot of credit. But there's also creative visualization. It's when you visualize something. So when you're visualizing your future, when you're visualizing the perfect day, that's creative visualization. And then there are healing protocols like forgiveness. They're healing protocols where you visualize your body healing. Then there's breath work. Breath work is one of the most amazing ways to go into altered state. There's music technology that actually relax your mind. So here's a really important thing. A lot of these protocols work better when you're not fully awake. They work better when you reduce your brainwave state to the relaxed state that scientists call alpha or theta. Then finally, there's hypnosis. Hypnosis gets you to a relaxed state, then speaks to your subconscious to rewire your thinking. You can hypnotize someone and immediately reduce their baseline stress level. Get them to slow down unhealthy eating or sugar consumption. Get them to increase their confidence all in twenty six minutes. And this, again, hypnosis has been scientifically proven.

speaker-1: So this is really interesting because I speak to a lot of founders and I think we've managed to spend a bit of time together the last few days and I'm full on all the time, right? And I feel that. And I'm constantly doing my saunas, my breath work, my lab tests. Lab tests are key for me. I make sure I do my supplements. I have a dog, so like we spoke about him earlier. And and he makes sure I go for my walks and so on. But I still feel it. Right? I still feel it. And then I speak to other founders that might not even be in the longevity space or even are in the longevity space. And they I'm worried about them. I'm actually worried about their health because they're grinding so hard, but they don't know how to switch off. Right. So that's something that's really fascinating. If we can try and make the because founders have something special. It's inherent in them. Right. they They own a mission, they have the entrepreneurship, they see a potential, but then they burn themselves out. Yeah. And it seems like what you learnt in that process can benefit a lot of health founders as well, because sometimes they're selling something that they're not doing themselves. But getting them into the state once a day would actually be able to change their own mindset and maybe make them perform even better. Yeah. Because ultimately that's what we want to do, founders, even yourself, you talk about this so much, but you want to build all the time. I I love speaking to you because you are constantly thinking, where can we build? We just spoke about you coming here next year with the booth and what how but you're in this kind of relaxed state at the same time. Yeah. And you feel that volume. So what would you recommend now for these founders that are especially in health space?

speaker-0: So let's talk about burnout. Okay, let's again. Burnout isn't coming from something you do. Stress isn't coming from something you do. It's coming from how your mind perceives it. So evolutionally speaking, stress is a response when our lives are in danger. In today's world, we're safe, right? We're we're we're safe. Like we have a house over our head. There are no wild animals about to jump on you when we go out there later today in Copenhagen to grab our coffee. But our brain will perceive stress as we're chasing a goal for a company. And venture funding is about to run out. Or we're trying to hit this deadline, but our ad campaign is in the negative. And we can't hit our revenue target and we don't know how to optimize our ads. And all of a sudden our brain goes, You're gonna die! You're gonna die. Yeah. Stress comes up. Now you can train the brain for this. Now the protocol that I establish is called the six-phase meditation. I wrote a book about it, I made it free. You can Google it. I've made this free for everyone who wants to use it. It's the six steps I outline. The first three steps, all proven scientifically, to actually cause a reduction in baseline stress. That means same situation, less stress. You're training your brain. Yeah. Okay, now you can also train your brain with biochemistry. You can take, you know, supplements like L-theanine to calm you down. So biochemistry has a place as well, but You can cause your brain to have less of a stress response if you start your day with going into a relaxed frame of mind. So there are different brain waves, okay? We are mostly at beta. When we wake up in the morning, we're at alpha. So you can measure this with an EEG machine. When you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, use the restroom, then sit down in bed. And when you sit down in bed, what you want to do is you want to start with a compassion practice. So a compassion practices, this comes from Zen Roshi Buddhism. See the face of someone that you love and feel that love in your heart. Who's the person you love most? Okay.

speaker-1: Cool, that's a very dangerous question.

speaker-0: Did you have to think of a person or an animal, it could even be a pet.

speaker-1: Yeah, well let's use Charlie my dog as a meeting.

speaker-0: Close your eyes for a settlement. See Charlie. Feel yourself cuddling with Charlie. Feel that love for Charlie in your heart. Now here's what scientists in Los Gados at the HartMed Institute found. Just doing that improves your HRV. You can measure this with your room. It improves your HRV. But here's the funny thing. Take that love for Charlie and imagine beaming it to everyone in your neighborhood, then your city, then your country, then the world. You calm down your system and you train yourself to observe other people. With kindness. You're actually tuning down your this this thing in your brain called fundamental attribution error where we unnaturally judge other people. And so you start walking into the world feeling more safe, more secure, more connected. You become the type of guy who will be in a cafe and see a line behind you and buy coffee for the person behind you. You become the type of person who tips a little bit more. That's compassion. But now We want to elevate. So now we've expanded your connection to life. Now we want to expand your bliss. What's the happiest thing that happened to you yesterday that you can think about?

speaker-1: That's a very good question.

speaker-0: Two one happy thing. So let me try. Yesterday I discovered a cafe in Copenhagen. And they had fresh croissants. I've been looking for fresh croissants for days and I saw them. They were making it fresh, they were getting it out of the oven. And that was my happy moment. Just reflecting on that actually causes a surge of good chemistry in your body that will increase your happiness and take you forward and make you more resistant to stress. So that's gratitude. Okay, now we've stacked compassion and gratitude. We're gonna continue stacking a third thing, forgiveness, which we spoke about earlier. There's a particular forgiveness protocol called Reset that my friend Dave Asprey studied and helped popularize at his institute 40 Years of Zen. Now by stacking these three together, and by the way, here's the science: compassion studies, gratitude studies, forgiveness studies all pretty much show the same thing. Heart health improves. Feelings of well-being improve. Baseline stress goes down. Ability to tolerate stressful situations goes up. Moods change. You sleep better and deeper. HRV improves. Back pain reduces. Incidence of PTSD go down. Feelings of love and connectedness go up. How long did it take? Four minutes. If this was a pill, man, if this was a pill and we could like figure out, we would sell this for millions. But it's not a pill. It's something that our ancestors knew that modern man has conveniently forgot. What do we do when we wake up? We scroll Instagram and we check for email. Or worse, we make ourselves a cup of coffee, which instantly puts you gets you wired. Okay, so that's the first three. Now the next four, five and six is creating visualization, seeing your goals accomplished, seeing your perfect day, and then a prayer to God if you're an atheist, just speaking to yourself. I know you got this. We're good. You're enough. Whatever it is. A prayer to your own self. Those three things set you up with a higher level of expectancy. You start seeing your goal as accomplished. And this actually neurologically changes how you feel. You go through a tough time, you go, I'm gonna overcome this. I've seen success. I've seen where this company is going. This, nothing more than a speed bump that I'm gonna roll over. So when we do these practices in a coherent way, we actually give ourselves the biggest longevity boost.

speaker-1: So this is so fascinating because I l I think that a founder or an entrepreneur sitting in this can draw parallels to a lot of what you're saying and also draw parallels to what they don't do. Right. So I'm a I'm a good example of that. I don't sit down and do that, but I definitely want to be thinking about that much more. How can you I wanna take this a little bit further and and and talk a little bit about the companies that are out there. So if we use functional future, which is my my my brand here in Denmark, which does organic food based supplements, collagens, bone broths, organ matrix, ginger shots, as an example to kind of make I wanna have a positive impact. Right. Right and

speaker-0: And by the I love your bone broth. Thank you very much. I mix it with with with hot water and I take it as broth, or I sometimes add it to my protein shakes. It's it's really wonderful.

speaker-1: I love that. Thank you. So if we were taking that as a case a little bit and say, well, how can my mindset as a founder, which is intense? I think a lot of my my staff, my my friends around me can feel that I'm intense. But how can I my work on my own mindset to have an impact on them so that they are feeling the same mission and passion and intensity that I have? It's

speaker-0: Okay, so here's a very fascinating thing, okay? So so firstly, I am insanely intense. When somebody comes to work with me, we give them a forty I give them a forty eight hour challenge that I know I can accomplish in two two hours. I give it to them to accomplish in four in two days. If they can't, it doesn't work out, right? I'm insanely intense. My background is computer science. I'm a coder. I'm currently starting seven different AI companies simultaneously with a team of seventy programmers. That's my intensity level. But this is how I sharpen the blade. So my intensity isn't actually hurting the company. And it has to do with appreciation. So there was a study done by by Sean Aker, the Harvard researcher. And he looks at happiness. Happiness is actually a superpower for productivity. By the way, the six phases I mentioned, they actually increase your happiness. And studies show that when you are optimistic, As a salesperson, you're 55% more likely to close a sale. If you are primed to be happy as a doctor, you're 19% better with diagnoses. There's a study by Shizad Shamin outlined in this book, PQ, that shows that the happiness level of a team is the single biggest predictor of the team hitting its goals. Okay, so happiness, happiness, happiness, right? How do you engineer happiness? So Sean did this with a company in the US. They were doing $650 million in revenue. The CEO Gary Baker, Sean said was a numbers guy. And what Sean did is this. He said, Gary, I want you to ensure that all your managers, when they start their day, they take out their phone and they set a timer for two minutes, just two minutes. Okay. And then in that two minutes, they write an email of appreciation to someone else who did a really good job the previous day. That's it. Don't make it shorter than two minutes because one line, you know, is kind of nothing. Don't make it more than two minutes because then it's too big an investment. And they do that for 30 days. And tell me what happens. Gary Baker is like, I don't believe this is gonna work. They did it. The managers loved it so much, other team members started doing it. By the end of 18 months, the company revenue had gone from 650 million to 950 million. Number of applicants applying to join the company went up 270%. Google flew down to see what they were doing to their culture. Gary Baker took his entire sales team off the floor and had them get into huddles and do appreciation exercises. What we do in my company is we built our own little internal app and we're gonna release it to the public. It's called get1Up.com. And every day I appreciate one member of my team. And they appreciate one member. So as you appreciate people, you get people collect a little badge, they collect a note of appreciation. And as you give appreciation, you get a virtual garden and trees start sprouting. The more you appreciate, the more your garden grows. But when we create that, intensity works. Intensity ain't a bad thing. You want intensity. Intensity is like, we got a big goal. I'm super excited. We're gonna crush this. But intensity must come with two things. Number one, frame. Your frame must be happy. Your frame must be tuned to be stress resistant. Your frame must be optimistic, positive. And the second thing is you can push people but you must also recognize people. That's appreciation. If you bring both these things into your business, you're golden.

speaker-1: That's beautiful. So that's definitely what I'm taking with me from this. So as we close off the business of longevity, I like to ask three kind of sharp questions with trying to get sharp answers on it as well. What's the your number one recommendation for someone building a business in the longevity space?

speaker-0: Okay. So if you're building a business in the longevity space right now, it is crazy competitive because there are so many other companies out there, right? The most important thing, and I believe this is gonna sweep every company here, the most important thing is evidence. Start collecting case studies. Because here's what's happening. AI, more and more people are gonna be searching on AI models like Chat GPT. ChatGPT, for example, right now is launching advertising on ChatGPT, right? But the approach that a lot of these AI models is taking is we know that every marketer, every marketer exaggerates. Show the evidence, show scientific studies, and show user stories. Customer support is important, trust pilot is important. I'm very proud that my company has a 4.3 score on trust pilot higher than any of our competitors. Customer support is important. What customers are saying about you, focus on that. Your marketing is important. Start. Collecting case studies. Ask your customers, how did this make you feel? Why do you take this? Do you serve this product to your friends? Would you tell people about it? And ask for permission to share these on your website. That's one of the most important things. So if you do that, I believe this is going to be the future of marketing. The LLMs are going to send you more traffic. You're going to surface more. Now the second thing is community. People want people. Right. And in a world where a lot more people are working from home, AI is replacing a lot of like interactions that we have with other human beings. Can you create community around your product? So with our product, we create, we do a two-week festival where a community comes together to one city. Next year it's happening in Porto. And thousand plus members of our community come together and they co-create the festival with us. And they stay together for two weeks in Porto. And it's amazing. Community. Community is so essential right now. Now, you may be selling a bone broth, you may be selling vitamins. How do you create community? Well, sponsor events, sponsor meetups. Like if you're selling, if you're selling a tool, for example, a supplement for say focus, maybe create some free Zoom classes where your community can come together and bring in scientists who specialize in the state of focus. Sponsor it, but bring people together so your customers can meet fellow customers.

speaker-1: Amazing. So what's that one personal health habit that you never miss that doesn't include what we've spoken so much about today, which is that mental aspect. So what's a physical health?

speaker-0: So physical health, I'm big on high-intensity interval training. I love the gym. Actually, I injured my hand from, for lack of a better word, over gymming. So I can't use the gym for like two weeks because they had to operate on my thumb. Right. and it sucks. I miss lifting weights. So I love being in the gym. I love lifting weights. I love working with a physical trainer who pushes me so badly that I want to just punch him. Yeah. You know? But of course I wouldn't because I meditate. But

speaker-1: So you're never mad, but you in the moment you're kinda and then you forgive and

speaker-0: Right. So I love that.

speaker-1: Amazing. Where can people find you and your work to learn much more about Vishnu and Mind?

speaker-0: Go to mindvalley.com. Mindvalley has events. We have a meditation app. We're a pretty big ecosystem. But I would say go to mindvalley.com forward slash meditation and check out our meditation app. It's very unique because it's not about calming your mind. It's about mental raps. It's about the techniques I mentioned, whether it's breath work or hypnotherapy or forgiveness or gratitude or creative visualization that sharpen you to make you better at whatever you're looking to tackle.

speaker-1: Amazing. Vision, thank you so much for joining me on the business of longevity. It's been a huge pleasure, mate. Thanks.