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Do you feel like you're nowhere near your goals? Do you want something so badly but think that it's impossible to achieve? Having goals in life gives us a sense of purpose. Whether they're for our career or relationships, goals push us to give our best. However, we sometimes set too many goals and find ourselves stuck. We can also feel discouraged from pursuing our dreams because we subject ourselves to other people’s standards. But while our plans may sometimes seem impossible, we have everything we need. If you can stay determined and learn how to prioritise, we can have our breakthrough. In this episode, Dr John Demartini joins us to talk about living your best life by structuring it. Learn how to prioritise and you can achieve anything. He shares the philosophy of the Breakthrough Experience, which has miraculously helped thousands of people reach their goals. John also discusses how to make decisions based on priorities, not emotions and instincts. If you want to learn how to prioritise and stick to your top priorities, then this episode is for you. Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/. Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle? Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching. Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com. Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books. Lisa’s Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. 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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn about the Breakthrough Experience and how it has changed thousands of lives. Discover how to prioritise and determine your top priorities. John shares his secret to retaining Information in the quickest way possible. Episode Highlights [05:00] About John Dr John is an educator, researcher and writer. He has spent over 48 years helping people maximise their potential. John wanted to know what allows people to do extraordinary things. That's why he distilled information from great minds throughout history. He made them into practical things that people today can use. John had speech and learning challenges as a kid. At a doctor’s recommendation, his parents took him out of school and put him into sports. After having a near-death experience at 17, Paul Bragg inspired John to overcome his learning problems. With the help of his mom, he eventually learned how to read. Listen to the full episode to learn more about John's inspiring story! [15:42] How Surfing Changed John’s Mindset Surfing has taught John that people are not going to excel without perseverance and commitment. John converted his determination for surfing into persistence in reading. [17:57] The Breakthrough Experience The Breakthrough Experience is a philosophy and program changing lives globally. This system teaches you how to prioritise and structures life by priority. It breaks through limitations and helps achieve life goals. John teaches people to use any experience, even challenges. These are catalysts for transformation and progress. John has helped people learn how to prioritise to get their breakthrough experience in different areas of life. These include businesses, careers, health, relationships, among others. Lisa relates the Breakthrough Experience philosophy to when her mom had a severe aneurysm. [24:14] John Shares a Miraculous Experience At 27 years old, John handled a family with a son in a three-year coma. The family went to different hospitals in Mexico and the United States. However, they found none to help their son. They then went to John, and he thought of a maneuver to help the child. However, the treatment also came with significant risk. Listen to the full episode to find out how John helped a child get out of a three-year coma. [33:34] Jesse Billauer’s Breakthrough Experience Jesse Billauer, a surfer, decided to go to the Breakthrough Experience after a surfing accident. At the time, he was depressed because he was physically unable to surf. After the Breakthrough Experience, he learned how to prioritise and what his top priority was. Jesse became determined not to let anything stop him from surfing. Jesse developed a way to surf as a quadriplegic person. He taught others how to do the same. [38:58] Herd Mentality in the Sciences New ideas are violently opposed and ridiculed. That's why people fear going against the norm. People who aim to survive follow the multitude. People who want to thrive create a new paradigm. Each person can excel at anything if they focus on that, not on others' opinions. [41:37] How to Prioritise John made a list of every single thing he does in a day over three months. He then placed multiple columns next to that list. The first column contains how much money each task produces per hour. The second column contains how much a job inspires him on a scale of 1-10. He also considered the cost and the time spent on each activity. After doing that, he prioritised the activities that made thousands of dollars. He also focused on ones that scored ten on the inspiration scale. John hired people for the low-priority tasks. This choice allowed him to be more productive in his top priorities. Within 18 months, his business increased tenfold. Listen to the full episode to learn how to prioritise and about investing in your top priority. [56:19] How John Stays Looking Young John is almost 67 years old. However, Lisa describes him as someone who looks like a teenager. John doesn't eat junk. He drinks a lot of water, has never had coffee in his life and hasn't had alcohol in over 48 years. Doing what you love every day also slows down the aging process. [58:03] Some Lessons from the Breakthrough Experience Nothing is missing in you. When you compare yourself to others, you'll try to live by their values or get them to live by yours. Both of these are futile. Sticking to your values and priorities is key to resilience and success. People are different from each other, but no one is better than the other. If you don't empower your own life, others will overpower you. Your mission is something that you're willing to get through any means necessary. [1:06:38] How to Get Your Amygdala Under Control The amygdala is associated with emotions and the "fight-or-flight" response. Because we have neuroplasticity, we can remodel our internal system. Perceiving challenges and feeling shame and guilt trigger an autoimmune reaction that attacks your body. Every time we choose to live by the highest priority, the amygdala calms down. The prefrontal cortex is reinforced. [1:12:03] The Mind-Body Connection Our psychological processes also affect our physiological processes. People are used to blaming external factors. They don't take accountability for the things they experience. John uses the example of when people get symptoms after eating unhealthy food. They don't face the fact that they brought it upon themselves. Our bodies do an excellent job of guiding us. That's why we should learn how to listen to them. [1:18:13] The Journey to Financial Independence There is nothing evil about having money. John believes that you can be a slave to money, or you can be a master of it. Nothing is stopping you from doing what you love to do. [1:21:28] How to Retain Information Teaching what you've learned is the key to retention. Teaching compels your mind to organise ideas and reinforce them. Teach the concepts as soon as you've discovered them. Don't wait until you're an expert on the subject. Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! You can choose between being an official or VIP patron for $7 and $15 NZD per month, respectively. Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-ageing and longevity with NMN Bio. Related Pushing the Limits Episodes 135: How To Make Better Decisions Consistently 183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Elena Seranova 189: Increasing Your Longevity with Elena Seranova Connect with John: Website | Facebook | Linkedin | YouTube | Instagram The Demartini Show Demartini Value Determination Process The Breakthrough Experience program Join John's The Mind-Body Connection course Learn more about Jesse Billauer and his story. High Surf: The World's Most Inspiring Surfers by Tim Baker The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management by Alec Mackenzie and Pat Nickerson Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness by David and Austin Perlmutter The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing by Bronnie Ware 7 Powerful Quotes ‘I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential.’ ‘I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things and then passing that on.” “I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey.’ ‘No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. And my teacher and my parents come to the school and said, ‘You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively’ because I wrote kind of backwards.’ ‘Well, I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. Yes, that's the move from water waves into electromagnetic waves.’ ‘And so the Breakthrough Experience is about accessing that state. And breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind and transforming whatever experiences you have into “on the way” not “in the way”.’ ‘She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling — like I had a power of a Mack truck. And me? I don't know how to describe it.’ About Dr John Dr John Demartini is an author, researcher, global educator and world-renowned human behaviour specialist. Making self-development programs and relationship solutions is part of his job. Among his most popular programs is the Breakthrough Experience. It is a personal development course that aims to help individuals achieve whatever goal they have. As a child, Dr John had learning challenges and could not read and write well until 18 years old. He has now distilled information from over 30,000 books across all academic disciplines and shares them online and on stage in over 100 countries. Interested in knowing more about Dr John and his work? You may visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and Instagram. Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can achieve their life goals by learning how to prioritise. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. He is a world renowned speaker, teacher, educator, researcher, medical doctor. He's written I don't know how many books, countless, countless books. He's an incredible, incredible man who teaches literally thousands and thousands of people every year in his breakthrough experience. The information that you're going to get in this podcast could change your life. So I've given you a fair warning. He's an amazing, incredible man that, and I've talked to a lot of incredible people but this one is really next level, he started out as a big wave surfer in Hawaii, way back in the day. Even knew Laird Hamilton and people like that. Had learning disabilities and could hardly read or write, and yet managed to overcome all these things to become one of the greatest scholars that there is. He's read over 30,000 books. He has distilled the knowledge from people right through the ages, through leaders and philosophers and stoics and scientists. He's an expert in so many different areas. He teaches people in business, he teaches people how to overcome massive challenges in their life. So I really hope that you enjoy this episode. It is going to get uncomfortable in places because we’ll talk about really being accountable, really understanding our own physiology, and just so much more. An absolutely amazing interview. So I hope you enjoy it. Before we head over to the show, just reminder, we have our patron membership for the podcast Pushing the Limits. If you want to join our VIP tribe, we would love you to come and do that. It's about the price of a cup of coffee a month or two. If you want to join on the premium level, we would love you to come and join us. Support the show. Help us get this work out there. We are passionate about what we do. We want to change lives, we want to improve your life, we want to improve the lives of others. And we need your help to do that to keep the show going. So please, head over to patron.lisatamati.com. Check out all the premium VIP member benefits here, and support the show. Be a part of this community, be a part of this tribe. Help support us and reach out to me or the team. If you have any questions around any of the topics or any of the guests that have come up. We would love to hear from you. Any feedback is always welcome. Please always give a rating and review to the show as well on iTunes or whatever platform that you listen to. That is really, really helpful as well. We do appreciate you doing that. And as a reminder, please also check out our epigenetics program. We have a system now that can personalise and optimise your entire life to your genetics. So check out our program, what it's all about. This is based on the work of hundreds of scientists, not our work. It has been developed over the last 20 years, from 15 different science disciplines all working in collaborating together on this one technology platform that will help you understand your genes and apply the information to your life. So check that out. Go to lisatamati.com and hit the Work With Us button and you'll see their Peak Epigenetics, check out that program. And while you're there, if you're a runner, check out our Running Hot Coaching program as well. Customised, personalised training plans made specifically for you, for your goals. You get a video analysis, you get a consultation with me and it's all in a very well-priced package. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com. Now over to the show with Dr John Demartini. Well, Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing The Limits. Today, I am super excited for my guest. My guest is an absolute superstar. Welcome to the show. Firstly and foremostly, thank you very much for taking the time out today. Dr John, I'm just really excited to have you. Whereabouts are you sitting in the world? Dr John: I am in Houston, Texas. I'm in a hotel room in Houston, Texas, even though it shows that I've got a library. Lisa: Yeah,I love that background. That is a fantastic background. Really great. Well, greetings to Texas and I hope that everything is going well over there for you. Today, I wanted to talk about you, your work, the breakthrough experience. Some of the learnings and the exciting mission that you've been on for now. For 47 years, I believe. Something crazy like that. So Dr John, can you just give us a little bit of a background on you and your life and what you do on a day to day basis? Big question. Dr John: I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now, over 48 years, on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential, their awareness potential, and achieve whatever it is that they're inspired to achieve. So that could be raising a beautiful family to building a massive business to becoming fortunate or celebrity, doesn't matter. It's whatever it is that inspires them. I've been studying human behaviour and anything and everything I can get my hands on for the last 48 years to assist people in mastering a lot. That's what I love doing. I do it every day. I can't think of any else I'd rather be doing. So I just do it. Lisa: It's a bit of a role model for me, Dr John, because I think what you have achieved in this time, the way you've distilled information, I mean, you've studied, last time I looked on one of your podcasts, that was over 30,000 books, probably more now. And you've distilled the information from great masters throughout history into practical things that humans today can actually benefit from. Is that a good assessment of what you basically have done? Dr John: I'm writing right now a 1200 page textbook on philosophers and great minds through the ages. I summarise it. I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things, and then passing that on. So yes. Right now, I'm actually, I just finished, I’m just finishing up Albert Einstein, which is one of my heroes. I had a dream when I was young. When I saw that E = mc² drawn on that board, I wanted to find out where that board was. I went to Princeton, and met with Freeman Dyson, who took over his position at Princeton in 1955. Spent part of the day with him and we're talking on cosmology. I wrote my formula on that same board, exactly the same place, because that was a dream that I had since I was probably 18, 19. Lisa: Wow, and you got to fulfill it and actually love it. Dr John: Yeah. Took me a bit of time. So what? But yeah, I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey and their thinking. That's every Nobel Prize winner I've gone through and every great philosopher and thinker and business leader and financially or spiritually, to try to find out and distill out what is the very essence that drives human beings? And what is it that allows them to do extraordinary things? So I wanted to do that with my life. Most of the people I get in front of want to feel like they want to make a massive difference. They want to make a difference in the world. They want to do something that’s deeply meaningful, inspiring. And so yeah, we're not 'put your head in the product glue and let the glue stick' and then pass it on. Lisa: Instead of having to reinvent the world, why not? So Dr John, can you give us a little bit of history though, because you're obviously an incredible scholar,have an incredible mind. But as a child, you struggled with learning and with reading and writing.Can you give us a little, how the heck did you go from being this kid that struggled with all of that to where you are today? One of the greatest minds out there. Dr John: Yeah, I definitely had some learning challenges. I had a speech challenge when I was a year and a half old to four, I had to wear buttons in my mouth and put strings in my mouth and practice using all kinds of muscles. Went to a speech pathologist. When I was in first grade. No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. My teacher, and my parents would come to the school and said, 'You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively,' because I wrote kind of backwards. 'I don't think he's going to mountain and go very far in life, put him into sport.' Because I like to run. And I did sports there for a while. But then I went from baseball to surfing. I hitchhiked out to California and down Mexico and then made it over to Hawaii so I could ride big waves and I was doing big wave and stuff when I was a teenager. So I didn't have academics. I dropped out of school. I was a street kid from 13 to 18. But then right before 18 I nearly died. That's when I met Paul Bragg, who inspired me one night in a presentation. That night I got so inspired that I thought, 'Maybe I could overcome my learning problems by applying what this man just taught me. And maybe someday I could learn to read and write and speak properly.' That was such an inspiration, such a moment of inspiration that it changed the course of my life. I had to go back. And with the help of my mum, I went and got a dictionary out, started to read a dictionary and memorise 30 words a day until my vocabulary. I had to spell the word, pronounce the word, use it with a meaningful sentence, and develop a vocabulary. Eventually doing that 30 we would, we wouldn't go to bed. I didn't go to bed until I had 30 new words, really inculcated. My vocabulary grew. And I started to learn how to do the reading. It was not an easy project. But, man, once I got a hold of it, I never stopped. Lisa: And once you started to read, you didn’t stop. Dr John: I've never stopped. I've been a voluminous reader now. You know, 48 years. Lisa: That’s just incredible. Dr John: I can’t complain. Lisa: So was it a dyslexia or learning disability? I just asked because my mum was a teacher of children with dyslexia and things like that. Was there specific ways that you were able to overcome the disability so to speak? Dr John: Yeah, I just, sheer persistence and determination to want to read and learn. I remember, I took my first, I took a GED test, a general education high school equivalency test. And I guessed, literally guessed, I close my eyes. I said this little affirmation that Paul Bragg gave me that, 'I'm a genius, and I apply my wisdom.' And some miraculous thing made me pass that test. I didn't know how to read half the stuff that was on it. I just went with my intuition and guessed. And I tried to go to college, after taking that test and had the test. I failed. And I remember driving home crying because I had this idea that I was going to learn how to teach and become intelligent. Then when I got a 27, everybody else got 75 and above. I got a 27 and I thought, 'Well, there's no way it's going to work.' But then I sat there and I cried and my mum came home from shopping, and she saw me crying on the living room floor. She said, ‘Son, what happened? What's wrong?’ I said, ‘Mum, I failed the test. I guess I don't have what it takes.’ And I repeated what the first grade teacher said, 'I guess I'll never read or write or communicate effectively, or amount too much. I guess I'll go back to Hawaii and make surfboards and surf. Because I was pretty good at that.' And she said to me something that was a real mind bender. She put her hand on me and she said, ‘Son, whether you become a great teacher, philosopher and travel the world like your dream, whether return to Hawaii and ride giant waves like you've done, return to the streets and panhandle like you've done. I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to love you no matter what you do.’ Lisa: Wow, what a mum. Dr John: That was an amazing moment. When she said that, my hand went into a fist of determination. And I said to myself, ‘I'm gonna match this thing called reading and studying and learning. I'm gonna match this thing called teaching and philosophy. And I'm going to do whatever it takes, I'm going to travel whatever distance, I'm gonna pay whatever price, to give my source of love across this planet.’ I got up and I hugged her. And I said to myself, ‘I'm not gonna let any human being on the face of the earth stop me, not even myself.’ I got out of my room. And that's when I decided with her help to do the dictionary. That was an amazing turning point. Lisa: And I can feel it, the emotion and what a wonderful mum you had. I mean, what a perfect thing to say when someone's down. Dr John: It was the most. If she hadn't said that, I might’ve come back to surfing. I might be a surfer today. Lisa: Which would have been a good thing as well, probably because surfing is great. Dr John: It didn’t make money in those days. I'm in the mid 60s and 70s, early 70s. But,, now, the guys I served with, Laird Hamilton and- Lisa: Wow. He's a hero is amazing. Dr John: Both Ben Aipa, Gerry Lopez, and these guys, those are the guys I served with. And so those guys went on to be incredible. Lisa: I wasn't aware of that. Dr John: I lived at the same beach park in Haleiwa, where Ehukai Beach Park is, near Pipeline, between Rocky Point and Pipeline. Laird Hamilton was dropped off by his mother there and lived there on the beach. I lived up on where the park bench was. We lived right there and I saw him on the beach each morning. He was seven, I was 16. He was going on seven, I was almost 17. We live there at the same place and Bill Hamilton saw him out there and grabbed him and took him in and trained them on surfing and found his mum and then married the mum. That's how I became. I hung out with those characters. Lisa: Legends. You became a legend in this direction and they have become a legend in a different direction. Dr John: Well, there's a book out called The High Surf by Tim Baker. That’s from Australia. He wrote a book on people that rode big waves. And he said, 'I'd like to put you in there.' I said, 'Well, I didn't go on to be the superstar in that area like these other guys.' He said, 'But I want you in there because you became a legend. Lisa: Became a superstar. Dr John: Yeah Lisa: Do you think that there's, you know, I come from a surfing family. My brother's a big wave surfer in New Zealand. I've tried and failed miserably, stuck to running. I was better at it. But do you think there's a correlation between the mindset that you developed as a surfer? Because going in those big waves is scary. It's daunting. It's frightening. It's challenging. It's teaching you a lot. Is there a lot that you took from that for this journey that you've been on? Dr John: Yeah, I didn't surf anything more than 40-foot waves. So I think that was about as good as about as big as you get back in the 70s. At 70s is when I was- Lisa: Oh, just a mere 40, it’s okay. Dr John: Well, 40-foot waves was the biggest thing out in outer reef pipeline was the big thing. They hadn't had tow-in surfing yet. That was just, that wasn't begun yet. So there was that idea, we had to catch those waves. That was not easy because they're too big to catch. you got to have big long boards, and you got to really paddle to get into those waves, and it's usually too late. But I think some of those, I used to surf 11 hours a day sometimes. When you're really, really committed to doing something, that's... Einstein said perseverance is the key to making things happen and if you just stay with something. So, if you're not inspired to do something, enough to put in the hours and put in the effort, and you don't have somebody that you can bounce ideas off of, kind of mentoring you, you probably are not going to excel as much. But I did that. And then I just converted that over into breeding 18 to 20 hours a day, feeding once I learned to read, so I just and I still voluminously read I mean, I read every single day. Lisa: That is incredible. And so you've taken that big wave mindset a little bit over into something else. So obviously, everything you, do you do to the nth degree, we can probably agree on that one. Dr John: I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. I move from water waves into electromagnetic waves. Lisa: Wow. Now, you run something called The Breakthrough Experience, which you've been doing now for 40 something years. This is a philosophy and a system and a program that really changes lives and has changed lives all over the planet. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've distilled from all this information that you have in your incredible mind? And what you teach in this course, and how this can actually help people? Today, right now listening to this? Dr John: Well, the breakthrough experiences, sort of my attempt to do with what that gentleman did to me when I was 17. I've done it 1121 times into that course. I keep records, and I'm a metric freak. Every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most important. Lisa: Podcast life. Dr John: Welcome to it. I thought that was off, but I didn't quite get it off. But whatever is highest on the person's values, priorities, whatever is truly deeply meaningful to them, the thing that is spontaneously inspiring for them to that they can't wait to get up the morning and do.If they identify that and structure their life by priority, delegating the lower priority things and getting on with doing that, they will build momentum, incremental momentum and start to excel and build what we could say is a legacy in the world. And so, the breakthrough experience is about accessing that state, and breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind, transforming whatever experiences you have into 'on the way' not 'in the way.' So no matter what goes on in your life, you can use it to catalyse a transformation and movement towards what it is that you're committed to. And if you're not clear about it, we'll show you how to do it because many people subordinate to people around them. Cloud the clarity of what's really really inspiring from within them, and they let the herd instinct stop them from being heard. I think that The Breakthrough Experiences is my attempt to do whatever I can, with all the tools that I've been blessed to gather to assist people in creating a life that is extraordinary, inspiring and amazing for them. And if I don't do whatever it takes in the program, I don't know when it's going to be. I've seen six year olds in there write books afterwards. I've seen nine year olds go on to get a deal with Disney for $2.2 million dollars. I've seen people in business break through plateaus. I’ve people have major issues with relationships break, too. I don't know what's gonna be. I've seen celebrities go to new levels. I've seen people that have health issues that heal. I mean, every imaginable thing, I’ve breaking through. I've seen it in that course. And it's the same principles applied now into different areas of life. In any other area of our life, if we don't empower, the world's going to overpower something. And I'm showing I want to show people how to not let anything on the outside world interfere with what's inside. Lisa: And you talk about, it's on the way, the challenges that we have to look at the challenges that we have and ask how is this going to actually help me get wherever I am. And this is something that I've managed to do a couple of times in my life really well, other times not so good. But where I've taken a really massive challenge, I had my own listeners, I had a mum who had a massive aneurysm five years ago, and we were told she would never have any quality of life again, massive brain damage. We know that's not happening on my watch. I'm going to, there is somebody in something in the world that can help with her. And this became my mantra that I was going to get back or die trying. That was that total dedication that I brought to her because of love. When you love someone, you're able to mobilise for the last resources that you have. And that nearly bloody killed me as far as the whole effort that went on to it, and the cost and the emotional costs, and the physical and the health and all the rest of it. It took me three years to get it back to health, full health. She's now got a full driver's license back and a full independent life back and as my wonderful mum again. And that was coming from a state of being in a vegetative state, not much over a vegetative state at least. Hardly any higher function, no speech, no move, be able to move anything. Dr John: That’s a book there. That's a book or a movie. Lisa: It's the book. Dr John: That's a book and a movie for sure. Lisa: Exactly. And this is very powerful. Because I saw this and when you're in the darkness, everybody is telling you there is no hope, there is no chance. And these are medical professionals who have been to medical school, who have a hell of a lot more authority than you. You just go, ‘No, I am not accepting it because that alternative means death, basically, decline and death in being in an institution. And that is not what I'm going to answer. I'm going to find somebody who can help me’ and I did. I found hundreds of people, actually, and this is what tipped me into doing what I'm doing now, is finding world leading experts to give me the next piece of the puzzle for her and for the people now that are following me so that I can help empower people, not to be limited by the people who tell us we can't do something. It's because that means basically they don't have the answer. Not that there is no answer, is my understanding. And they were right. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. But I did it and my mum is alive and she's well, and that book. I really want to empower people with a story. I see that same like they're obviously your passion. What you went through with your learning problems when you were young and your mum standing beside you has actually propelled you into this lifelong journey that I find absolutely fascinating because that passion, and I can see that passion in you, is still very much alive 48 years later because you're doing what your priority is. Dr John: I'm definitely doing what I love doing. It's interesting that your story reminded me of something that happened to me when I was 27. If you don't mind, I'd like to share this. So I graduated from my professional school. I had a bit of a reputation there of being kind of the taking the cream of the crop clients, patients that were turned down everywhere else. I just tackled it, see what we can do with it. And I got a family from Mexico, with a son that fell three stories off an apartment complex onto the ground on his head. He went into a coma, been in a coma for three and a half years. And the mother, they assumed he was dead a few times, but there was still a breath. There were still something. It wasn't a strong breath. You couldn't see it but you could put a mirror in front of you and get a little bit of breath out there. So he wasn't dead. And he had decerebrate rigidity. So his whole body was so rigid that when I saw him, you could lift up his feet and his whole body would rock. It was so stiff. His hands are like this. A classical decerebrate rigidity. And he had gone to, throughout different hospitals in Mexico, where he was from, and nobody checked them. They came to America, they went to the Medical Center in Houston, which is the largest Medical Center America. And they got rejected. No one would accept it. There's nothing we can do. They went out to the professional school that I'd gone to. And they said, ‘We can't do anything.’ But we know this interesting character. West Houston, if there's anybody that would try something this guy might try, who knows? And they sent him to my office. I remember when they came in, they carried him wrapped up in a white sheet, and laid him on the armrest of the chairs on my office. I looked out there and I saw this Mexican man and woman and seven or eight other kids in a family. I'm in this. At first, I didn't know what this was, this thing wrapped up in this sheet. They came down my hallway and I saw him going down the hallway. And like, ‘What on earth is this?’ Then they unveiled him in my exam room. And there was this 58 pound tube in his nose, coma case that was so stiff. It was ridiculous. I mean, he had gauze on his chin and his hand was rubbing on it and to protect the chin from having an ulcer. It had an odor to him in the head. It was just nothing. Just stare. He just sat there. But the mother and father said, ‘No, he's still alive. Please help.’ So I didn't really have much to do an exam with. So I got him, we took him in and did a film of his spine and his skull from the history. We found his foramen magnum, his skull was jammed down on a spinal cord and his spinal cord is up in his foramen magnum. This opening in the bottom of the skull. And I thought that night, when I was developing those films, and I looked at that I thought, 'I wonder what happened if I lifted that skull? If I've got that off? It could? Could something happen?' And I was scared because you just don't do that. He could die just instantly. I sent them over to this health food store to get him some liquid vitamins and minerals and amino acids to try to get nutrients in him because they're feeding him beans and rice with liquid. It was just crazy. So the next day came in. We had four doctors on a preceptorship visiting my office, one doctor that was working for me, one assistant, the seven or eight kids plus him and the mother and father in this little room. It was packed. And I said to him that I saw that on the film something that might have make him, help. I don't know, I can't guarantee it. But if we, if I did a particular manoeuvre, it might open up the brain function. And the little woman held on to her husband and she said, 'If he dies, he dies. If he lives, we rejoice. But please help us. We have nowhere else to go.' Lisa: Yeah. Wow. Dr John: She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling, like I had a power of a Mack truck in me. I don't know how to describe it. And I had this manoeuvre that we could do this, what they call the Chrane Condyle Lift, that can actually lift the skull up the spine. And I said to myself, if I'm not willing to have him die in my hands, I can't raise the dead with my hands as a little quote that I learned from an ancient healing philosopher. And I thought, 'Okay, we're, I'm going to take the risk, and just see what happens.' Because, I mean, I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna do it. Because I mean, they've got no place to go and I only took a rip. As I lifted that skull with this powerful movement. He came out of his coma. He came right out of the coma. He screamed, and this whining noise you couldn't. It was not coherent. It was just this whining sound. The whole family went on their knees, they were Catholic. They just went to their knees and prayed. I was blown away. I saw the four doctors one of them ran down the hallway and vomited, couldn't handle it. The other just stared. And here's this boy squirming on the table. I walked out to let the family be with the child for a minute and just sat with one of my doctors. We sat there and just cried. Because we knew that the spinal cord expressed life in the body. But we didn't know what would happen if we took the spinal cord, it just scanned off. Theoretically, it could kill you. But there was some still life in the spinal cord. Anyway, this boy went on to gain 20 pounds up to 78 pounds. We took him off the tube, we got him to move, we had everybody in the family take a joint in his body and move his joints to remobilise him. Sometimes I think we probably tore some ligaments doing it. But we got mobility. And this boy came out of it. And I have a picture here with me of the boy actually graduating from high school. Lisa: You’re kidding me? Why is this not an? What is not? Why have I never heard the story? Dr John: I don’t get to share it too often. I didn't many years ago. I haven't practised in a long time. But all I know is that that was a moment that you just, it's probably like you had with your mum when you saw incremental progress. Lisa: Yeah. Just grind. Dr John: And I think that that's a metaphor. That's a metaphor. It doesn't matter where you've come from, doesn't matter what you're going through, doesn't matter what you've been through. What matters is you have something that you're striving for. And are you willing to do some incremental movement towards that? What else just said is, he's got a diagnosis. Diagnosis means through knowledge, supposedly, but it could also mean die to an agnosis. You don't know. Even the doctors don't know. But the reality is, he came out of the coma. And I had over the next few months, I had some amazing cases of a boy that was blind and couldn't walk, and all of a sudden see and walked again. I had a boy that was paralysed quadriplegic, was able to walk. I mean, I had some amazing stuff happen. When you're willing to do what other people aren't willing to do, you're willing to experience when other people don't get to experience. Lisa: Yep, it is just so powerful. And I'm just absolutely blown away from that story. Because, I mean, I know with my mum who was only in a coma for three weeks, and had stroke and so on, and in the specificity and the things that I've had to deal with. The whole vestibular system being completely offline, she has like a rag doll, having to read, programming her from being a baby, basically, to being an adult, within that three year period with a body that is now like 79 years old. And the doctors going like, your brain can't change that much. And in just going, I'm going to keep going. I'm only listening to people who tell me I can do something, I'm not listening to anybody who tells me I can't do something. And this is something that I've really integrated into my entire life like as an athlete, doing stupidly long ultramarathon distances. I was always told you can't do this, and you can't do that. It's impossible. And I was like, 'We'll see.' I'm going to throw everything in it. And that was my passion at the time have now retired from doing the stupid distances because I've got other missions on in life. But whatever it is, is always the big mission. And then everybody comes up against people who tell you, you can't do it. This is one of the biggest limiting things that I see. Dr John: That's what Einstein said, greatness is automatically pounded by mediocre minds. Lisa: Wow. Dr John: I had a boy, a boy attend my breakthrough experience, who had a surfing accident and became arms and legs not working, He could move his neck. He got a little bit of function slowly into the hand that was about it, just a tiny bit. And I remember a man wheeling him in and having them kind of strapped to a wheelchair. I knew the father and I knew his brother. There were doctors who were colleagues of mine. And they brought him, they flew him literally from Los Angeles over to Texas to come to the breakthrough experience. I remember him looking straight down really depressed, suicidal, because he was a surfer and he was on his way to being a great surfer. If he couldn't surf, he didn't want to live kind of. I remember getting on my knees and looking up at him at this chair, and I said, 'It all determines inside you what you decide. I don't know what the limit you have in your body. I don't know what you can repair. I don't know what you can do. I don't want to say you can't. But all I know is that if you're going to, you're going to have to put everything into it. You're gonna have to have no turning back kind of attitude. There's got to be a relentless pursuit of your master plan to serve.' His name is Jesse Billauer. He made a decision at the Breakthrough Experience that nothing was going to stop him from surfing again, nothing. He is really, in the room was absolutely applauding him. The before and after in that weekend was so astonishing that it was tear jerking. Well, about 17 years ago, 16 half years ago, I had the opportunity to get, I was living on the Gold Coast of Australia. I had many homes in New York and different places. But I had one in the Gold Coast of Australia in Aria, lived in the penthouse of Aria. And all of a sudden, I found in my entrance of my penthouse, which you only can get into with my key somebody from downstairs, put it in there like mail, a DVD video of a surfing movie, called Stepping Into Liquid. And when I pulled that up and put that in there, there was Jesse Billauer, surfing. He found a way of using his head muscles, and designing a special vehicle, a transport system, a surfboard. He had to have somebody take them out into the water and push him. But once he got on a wave his head movements were able to ride and he was riding like 12 foot waves, which is 20 foot face waves. He was doing that. And he was an inspiration. He became friends with Superman who had quadriplegia and they became friends and he created a foundation to do something but he taught people how to go surfing as a quadriplegic. So when the wise big enough to house take care of themselves, you've proven that in your book. What little I've done in my life compared to some of these kind of stories is just astonishing what I see sometimes people do. I mean, mind blowing stuff that people, that determination to overcome that are absolute inspirations. Inspiration is a byproduct of pursuing something that's deeply inspiring and deeply meaningful, through a challenge that people believe is not possible. That's inspiration. Lisa: That's how we grow as a human race. We have these amazing people that do incredible things. And these stories, I mean, these are stories that aren't even out there in the world, in a huge way. There are hundreds of these stories and thousands of these stories and miraculous stories. These are the things that we should be talking about. Because why are we not studying the outliers? Why are we not? When I look at my book, or my story, which I share publicly and not a single doctor that had anything to do with my mum ever asked me, 'Well, how did you do it?' Nobody is interested in why she has not taken the normal path as long gone. Nobody has asked me what did you do? People do. My audience want to know why. The people that follow me, etc. But nobody that was involved in that case. And I see that over and over again. Dr John: It's forcing him to face their own, you might say, belief systems about what they've been taught. There's an educated awareness by the herd and then there's an innate yearning by the master. The master transcends the herd, if you will. You can be a sheep or a shepherd. The shepherd is the one that goes out and does things that the sheep are not willing to do. But then once they do it, they'll rally around it. They are there watching you to be the hero instead of becoming the hero. Lisa: Wow. And why is it in the medical fraternity that there seems to be a very big herd mentality, like no one is scared to step outside of their norms, and they get slammed. I see this in academia and in science as well, where people who have brilliant ideas and hypotheses and studies and so on, they just get slammed because it's outside of the current paradigm. Dr John: William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, said 'To be great…' And Emerson followed in suit, 'To be greatest, to be misunderstood.’ William James basically said that the majority of people fear rejection from the multitudes because that was survival. People that are into survival follow the multitude. People that are in thrival create a new paradigm. At first they're going to be ridiculed. They're going to be violently opposed to Schopenhauer and Gandhi said, but eventually becomes self-evident. And you're either following a culture or building one. The people that do that build a new culture. They build a new culture of idea. Emerson said in his essays on circles, 'We rise up and we create a new circle of possibility. And then that becomes the new norm until somebody comes up and breaks through that concentric sphere with another circle.' It's like the four minute mile. I had a gentleman on my program the other day who is striving to be the fastest runner in the world. He's got bronze and silver medals, but he hadn't got the fastest running. And he's not stopping. He's working sometimes eight to 13 hours a day on this project. I believe that the way he's so determined to do it, and how he works on it, and he doesn't need a coach telling him what to do. He just does it. He's inspired to do it. He'll be the fastest runner, he won't stop till he's the fastest runner in the world. And that’s determination, that to be great at that one thing, find that one thing that you really target like a magnifying glass, on that you become the greatest at that thing. Mine was human development, human behaviour. I want to have the broadest and greatest width of information about that. That's my one thing. But each individual has something that they can excel in, if they just define it, and give themselves permission at it, and say, thank you but no thank you to the opinions. The opinions are the cheapest commodities on Earth that would circulate the most as a use value. There’s ton of those. But those opinions aren’t what matter. It's not you comparing yourself to other people, it's you comparing your daily actions to what's deeply meaningful to you, and the highest priority actions daily, that’s what it is. Lisa: How do you, this is a problem that I face, get to a certain level of success and achievement, and then you start getting lots of offers and opportunities and so on, and you start to lose the focus. You get distracted from the things that are happening in this day and age where the internet and everything that ends up like I get the shiny object syndrome. And say, 'Oh, this is an extremely interesting area of study, and I should go down that path. And then I go down that path, and then I go down that path.' It is adding to the whole picture of a general education. as someone who studied as much as you have, you've obviously encompassed all of these areas. But I think what I'm asking is, how do you find out what your highest priority is? And how do you get a team around you, so that you're not limited? I think there's a lot of business people that are listening to this, me included in this, who has struggling to get past a certain ceiling because the area of genius is one thing that they love and excelling at, and you'd like to spend all of your time doing that. But you're stuck in the groundhog day of admin and technology in the stuff that you hate. And not busting through because financially, you can't delegate to people. You also got to find people that are a good fit for you who can do the jobs, and then also have the finances to be able to break through to that near next level. Can you talk to that about? Dr John: Yes, absolutely. When I was 27 years old, I was just starting my practice. I was doing a little of everything, anything and everything, just to get the thing cranking. I had one assistant that I hired. But I realised I was doing way too many trivial things. And that'll burn you out after a while if you're doing stuff that's not really what your specialty is. I went to the bookstore and I got a book by Alec McKinsey called The Time Trap. I read this book. As I read it, I underlined it and extracted notes like I do. I decided to put together a little sheet for it. I'll share that because it was a goldmine. I made a list of every single thing that I do in a day, over a three month period, because each day I had sometimes different things to do. But I wrote down everything I might be doing in those three months in a day. I just wrote them all down. And I don't mean broad generalities like marketing or this type of thing or radiographs or whatever. I mean, the actual actions. The actual moment by moment actions I do in those categories. I made a list of those and it was a big list. And I looked at it. Then right next that list, every single thing I did from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, everything — home, personal, professional. I wanted to know what my day looked. I want to be an honest, objective view of what am I actually doing with my day. Because if I want to create my life the way I want, I've got to take a look at what I'm actually doing because if I'm not doing things that give me the results, no wonder I'm not getting there. I made that list, and right next to it, in column number two of six columns is how much does it produce per hour. Which is a measure of actually meeting somebody's need as a service and people willing to pay. How much is that produced per hour? And that was humbling because there are whole lot of stuff that I will do without pay. I was minoring in majors and majoring in minors. I was doing all kinds of stuff that was just cost, no return. I stopped and I looked at that, and that was humbling, and frustrating, and a bunch of stuff went through my mind. I mean, I just, but I had to be honest to myself, what does it actually produce? I extrapolate. If I spent two hours on it, what is it per hour? Cut it in half. If I spent 30 minutes, I’d double the number to get an idea what it is per hour. There's a lot of stuff that was not making anything and there was a few things that were making a lot. The third column I wrote down, how much meaning does it have? How much is it that makes me inspired to get up and do it? I can't wait to do what people can't wait to get. Those are the things I want to target. So I looked at it on a one to ten scale, how much meaning it was. I made a list on a one to ten scale of every one of those items, how inspired am I to do that? And there's a lot of stuff on there that was not inspiring, that I didn't want to do. I thought, 'Hell. I went to ten years of college for this?' I made this list and I put this one to ten thing. And then I prioritised the tens down to the ones. I prioritise productivity down from the ones that made thousands of dollars an hour to nothing an hour. I just prioritise them. And then I looked. There were some that were overlapped, where the thing that was most meaningful and inspiring match where it’s most productive. I prioritise that based on the two together. And that was really eye opening. Then I went to the next one because I realised that if I don't delegate, I'm trapped. Then I put what does it cost? Every cost. Not just salary, but training costs, no hiring costs, parking costs, insurance costs, everything. What is the cost of somebody excelling at doing what it is I'm doing at a greater job than me? What would it cost? On every one of those items? The best I could do? I had to just guess on something, but I definitely did the best I could. And then I prioritise that based on spread, how much it produced versus how much it cost. Then I put another column. How much time am I actually spending on average? The final column, I wrote down, what are my final priorities with all these variables? I did a very thorough prioritisation system there. I sliced those into ten layers. I put a job description, I put a job description on that bottom layer, and hired somebody to do that but bottom layer. It took me three people to get the right person because I had to learn about hiring. I didn't know how about, hiring. I finally got the first person there, and that was free. That allowed me to go up a notch. And then I hired the next layer. What I did is it allowed me to go and put more time into the thing to produce the most, which was actually sharing a message of what I was doing publicly, with speaking. Public speaking was my door opener. I just kept knocking out layers.In the next 18 months, my business tenfold in increase in income and business. I had 12 staff members and five doctors working for me in a 5000 square foot office from under 1000 square foot original office in 18 months. Because I said goodbye to anything that weighed me down. Anytime you do something that's lower on your values, and anytime something hone your value value yourself and the world values you when you value. It's waiting for you just to get authentic and live by the highest values, which is your ideological identity. The thing you really revolve around you. Mine was teaching, so I call myself a teacher, right? So whatever that highest value is, if you prioritise your day and fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it doesn't fill up with low party distractions that don't, because it's now you're allowing yourself to be authentic. And it doesn't cost to properly delegate if you get the right people, and you go on and do what produces more per hour, it doesn't cost it makes sense. Lisa: That's the hard part, isn't it? As is growing. Dr John: You do your responsibilities. Go do the thing that knocks down the doors and goes and does the deals and then go and let them do all the crazy work. Like when I was 27, that's the last time I ever wrote a check or did payroll or looked at bills. I never looked at that again. Because that's a $20 an hour job and I could make way more speaking and doing my doctrine. So I thought, 'I'm not doing anything that's going to devalue me ever again in my life.' I've never gone back. 38 years, I've never gone back. Lisa: So systematise. This is a thing here, where I have a bit of a problem, a bit of a chaos, right? Dr John: I'm an ignoramus when it comes to anything other than research, write, travel, and teach. I'm useless. I'm not. I do jokes and say when I'm having I want to make love with my girlfriend. I tell her. I put my arms around I said, 'If I was to organise and have Hugh Jackman or Brad Pitt take care of lovemaking for you on my behalf and things like that, would you still love me?' One time if she said, 'No, I will still love you more.' I'm joking. That’s a joke. But the point is that if you're not delegating lower priority things, you're trapped. Lisa: And this is the dilemma, I think, of small businesses is giving that mix right and not taking on people before you can go to that next level. Dr John: But you go. You go to the next level by taking them on if it's done properly. Lisa: If it's done properly, because I've- Dr John: You want to make sure. That's why I have a value determination process on my website to determine the values of people I hire because if they're not inspired to do what I need to delegate, that's not the right person.You gotta have the right people on the bus, this column says. I have to be clear about what I can produce if I go and do these other things. And me speaking it, and doing the doctoring on the highest priority patients was way more productive financially than me doing those other things. So once I got on to that, I put somebody in place just to book speeches, and just to make sure that I was scheduled and filled my day with schedules with patients, it was a updated day and night. I've never gone back to that. I only research, write, travel, teach. That's it. Lisa: That's my dream. I'm gonna get there. Dr John: I don't do it. What's interesting is I became financially independent doing that because of that. I learned that if I don't value myself, and I don't pay myself, other people aren't going to pay me. If they're waiting for you to value you add when you value you, the world values you. You pay yourself first, other people pay you first. It's a reflection, economically, there. And that's what allowed me to do it. Because financial independence isn't for debauchery and for the fun life, in my opinion. It's for making sure that you get to do what you love because you love it not because you have to do it. Lisa: And having an impact on the world. But if you're stuck doing the admin and the technical, logical stuff, and the crap that goes along with the business. You're not impacting the world like you want to be impacting. Dr John: Weel, the individual that does the administration is impacting the world through the ripple effect by giving you the freedom to do it. Lisa: Exactly. Dr John: If that's what they love doing. That’s not what I love doing. But there are people that love administration, they love that stuff and love behind the scenes, I love doing that. Finding those people. That's the key. Lisa: Finding those people. I's given me a bit of encouragement because I've been in that sort of groundhog days I had to get through the ceiling and get to the next level of reach. Dr John: I finally realised that the cost of hiring somebody is insignificant compared to the freedom that it provides if you do your priority. Lisa: If you get your stuff right, and know what you… Dr John: Because the energy, your energy goes up the second you're doing what you love doing. And that draws business to you. Lisa: Absolutely. I mean, like doing what we're doing. Now, this is my happy place. Dr John: We’re both in our element. This is why we're probably going to slow down. The point is, when you're doing something you love to do, when you're on fire, with kind of an enthusiasm, people come around to watch you burn. They want to see you on fire. Lisa: I mean, they do, they do. And I've seen that in times in my life where I've been preparing for a big race or something, and I need sponsors. I just go out there. At the start, I didn't know how to do a sponsored proposal, I didn't know how to do any of that fancy stuff. I just went out there and told the story. And by sharing the story, people were like, 'I want to get on board with this. That's exciting.' People would come on in and and when you don't know, one of the things that I've found in life is the less you know, sometimes the more audacious you are. When you actually h
Tiny Farms CEO and co-founder Andrew Brentano thinks cricket protein will ensure future food security. Tiny Farms is an AgTech and Precision Farming company that produces food grade cricket protein for use in pet food and animal feed applications offering a sustainable, safe, reliable protein source for pets, livestock animals, and people.Transcript:Lisa:This is Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host Lisa Kiefer. Today, I'm speaking with Andrew Brentano, the Co-Founder and CEO of tiny farms. Welcome to the program, Andrew.Andrew:Oh, thank you.Lisa:You are the perfect guest for a show about innovation. Co-Founder of Tiny Farms. First of all, tell us what Tiny Farms does, and what is the problem you're trying to solve.Andrew:We are basically, precision ag company. What we're doing, is we're trying to grow a whole lot of crickets. The big problem we're addressing is that we basically cannot produce enough animal protein to keep up with the demand. We've got growing population, growing per capita consumption and also a really huge growing pet food market, which is consuming a huge amount of meat. Traditional meat consumption, your livestock, your pigs, your chickens and your cows, is a hugely resource-intensive endeavor.You're concentrating huge amounts of feed, 25 30% of all the crop lands on earth are just growing feed for animals. Then we're also grazing about 25% of the earth's surface for cattle. There's really not any room to expand. We really have to find these higher efficiency ways to supply that animal protein that people need.Lisa:You have found, what I think is a pretty unique niche in this market of cricket farming, protein farming. I know the argument about cattle using energy and all of that, but what you're saying is that dogs, chickens, all of these other animals. If we can feed those animals your product, we can make equivalent savings, maybe?Andrew:Yeah. We can offset these huge resource environmental footprints. If we take the pet food example, in the US, we're feeding about 30 billion pounds or more of meat just to dogs and cats every year. That market is growing like 6% year over year. If we can, instead produce crickets, which use just a tiny fraction of the food and the water and the space required, we can essentially get more from less. We can meet this demand without just completely overextending our current resources.Lisa:Okay. When did you start this company?Andrew:We started in late 2012. We initially got the idea ... of course it took a while for markets to actually developed. We were a little bit ahead of the curve. We've been-Lisa:Do you mind if I ask how you came to this? Were you doing market analysis studies or looking at big data? How did you figure out that this was a niche?Andrew :In that moment, what we were doing was really just thinking about big existential problems. We were trying to decide what should we be spending our time and energy on and had really started drilling into food production. Everyone's got to eat. It's the largest and most resource-intensive endeavor that humans do on this planet and also one of the most immediately going to be effected by climate change, population growth, et cetera. What we realized when we were diving in was that meat production was this huge concentration of where all the resources were going, It was the most inefficient place and also the highest demand. Everyone wants to eat meat. We thought, wow, this is-Lisa:Yes. Especially with incomes going up.Andrew:Exactly.Lisa:First thing they want to do is have the steak that you and I have.Andrew :Exactly.Lisa:Right?Andrew:This westernization of diets around the globe, all these trends were pointing to essentially meat crunch in really the relatively near future. People need this protein, but how do we produce protein more efficiently but that still has a high-quality nutritional profile? We're looking at agriculture. We were looking at algae and fungus. Then we came across a body of research about insects and their nutritional values and their production efficiencies, historical uses around the world, and it just made so much sense.Lisa:Who's using crickets? I assume some of these countries have been using crickets for thousands of years, is that correct?Andrew:Yeah. Particularly in Oaxaca, in Mexico and some other Central American cultures. There are long traditions of eating crickets and grasshoppers, both interchangeably. A number of African cultures also like different types of crickets that are native, crickets and katydids. Then in Thailand, more recently, I think there's been a long tradition of eating different insects. Very recently, there's been quite a growth in, particularly the cricket market there. The Thai government has even, for the last 10, 20 years been sponsoring and promoting this. There's now tens of thousands of small backyard cricket farms supporting those largely street markets.Lisa:How did you start? Were you right out of college, or what was your motivation here?Andrew:I guess, I was about two and a half years out of college. I went to University of British Columbia, studied absolutely unrelated to agriculture, a program called cognitive systems. It was AI information systems, linguistics. What that did instill was this mindset of systems thinking. I'd worked an AI startup. My Co-Founder Jenna, who's now is my wife, had been working for an artist. She went to Rhode Island School of Design. She was managing an artist business in LA. We'd been living in LA for a couple of years and decided this wasn't fulfilling. This wasn't really where we wanted to be or what we wanted to be doing.That was where we took a summer, went and started doing freelance web development just to pay the bills and took this time to decide what are we going to do with our lives that's can be meaningful. That's what led us into this. It was important that, you we found something that we could do that would apply our creativity and actually be meaningful. HLisa:You know how we're all about organic and sustainable. How does that fit into the cricket industry? What do they eat? How do you follow the path to make sure they're sustainable and that they're organic?Andrew:Yeah. The great thing about crickets is they'll eat anything, pretty much. I mean, they're basically omnivorous. Anything you could feed a pig, or a chicken, or a cow, or basically any other kind of animal, they can eat. They really have a very high, what's called feed conversion ratio, which is basically the amount of food they have to eat to grow a certain weight as a ratio. With crickets, it's about 1.7:2 pounds of food to get 1 pound of cricket. To give comparison, chickens are more like 3:1. Pigs are between 4 and 6:1. Cows can range from 8:20:1, depending on what the diets are. Even if you fed them the exact same thing you fed a commercial chicken, you're using much less of that feed.You've got this corresponding, way much smaller land and water footprint. Then because they are so efficient converting that feed and they'll eat anything, we can then take food by-product streams and agricultural by-product streams and incorporate that into the feed formula. That can range anything from stale bread, which commercial bakeries, large scale ones are producing millions of pounds of stale bread or excess bread. They essentially overproduce by about two what they actually sell. Then we can also go to agricultural processing. There are huge streams of by-products, like dried distiller grains that come out of ethanol production, spent brewer's grain, juice pulp from the citrus industry.Lisa:The wine industry.Andrew:The wine industry. Exactly. Almond holes are huge one in the United States, or in California alone, we're producing 150 million tons of almond holes every year.Lisa:They're kind of like goats in the insect world.Andrew:Yeah.Lisa:They'll clean everything up.Andrew:Right. All we have to do is balance the different inputs, so we get the nutritional profile that grows the cricket efficiently We understand that pretty well. We can basically say, okay, we'll take 20% of this, 30% of that, 50% of that, blended altogether, and then we can just grow our crickets.Lisa:You been able to notice differences in tastes of your crickets by what you're feeding them?Andrew:One of the reasons crickets are so good, is they have a pretty mild and generally pleasant taste regardless what you feed them. You definitely can tell different things. You'll get either a nuttier cricket. Sometimes it'll be because the cricket is a little fatty or a little leaner.Lisa:What would you feed it to make it fatty?Andrew:You could feed it, for one, more fat or a higher carb diet. You can make it leaner by having more of a protein and fiber formulation. We've fed them carrots in the past and they turn just a tiny hue, more orange. They actually pick up a tiny bit of that sweeter carrot taste.Lisa:Do you ever feed them chocolate?Andrew :We've never fed them chocolate. It's a bit expensive.Lisa:How do your vegetarian or vegan customers feel about this product? Do they have any concerns?Andrew:There's two camps. There's one camp where folks are vegetarian and vegan primarily because of sustainability issues, humane treatment of animals, ethical issues. Those are exactly the issues that we're targeting and trying to address with cricket production. Those folks are generally very, very receptive to incorporating insect protein into their own diets. What's really exciting for these people is when we say, yeah, did you know there's dog and cat food you can get with insect protein? You've got vegetarians and vegans, but they still have a pet cat that they have to feed meat too.It creates a real dissonance for them. It's an amazing solution for those folks. Then there's folks that maybe have a religious or spiritual aversion to actually eating living animals. For those folks, that's fine. That's a different set of issues. Insects are living things, and if they decide that's not what they want to eat, it's not the product for them. We generally think that we have a great solution for the folks that really see the fundamental environmental and ethical issues around meat production.Lisa:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, we're speaking with Andrew Brentano, the Co-Founder and CEO of Tiny Farms. Tiny Farms is building the infrastructure for a new category of our food system, cricket protein, one that will play a big part in ensuring future food security. Talking about your products, and you just covered one, which is feeding pets. What other products do you have, and who are your customers?Andrew:Our core business is the design and development of a high-efficiency cricket production facility. That's really the big problem. We want to get crickets out into the market, but how do you do that? How do you produce enough crickets cheap enough that it can actually become this bulk commodity that could reasonably offset traditional meats. In a way, our core product is actually this method for producing them and then also how do you process them into palatable ingredient.Lisa:I read that your method was unique in that it avoids the monoculture of most agriculture.Andrew:Yeah. One of the fundamental problems that we see in traditional livestock production, farming in general, is that you have these huge centralized productions, whether it's, say 10 thousand acres of soy beans or if it's a mile-long chicken house with 4 million chickens in it. When you think about ecosystems and biology, that's a really unhealthy ecosystem. Also, it's incredibly risky because if something comes in there that's a blight, or past, or a disease [ 00:10:48], it just can, wipe out everything very quickly.The approach that we take is a more distributed model where we'll set up smaller production units, and then we'll put them around in a cluster, in a region. That way, you never have this just huge, enormous centralized population issues of just having a lot of animals in place, breathing and pooping and eating and all of that mess and the potential for pollution. Also, that you significantly reduce this biological risk.Lisa:Crickets get disease and die out like other ...Andrew:We've been lucky. We've never had a blight. We have a very tightly controlled environment, keep the biosecurity levels pretty high. There have been, in actually a different species of cricket than when we grow, there is a disease. It only affects crickets. There's no risk to any people or animals but that have gone around and wiped out some of the cricket farms that have existed in the US. One of the cool things about insects, again, too, is that biologically they're so different from people that you don't have the same zoonotic transfer of diseases the way that you've got your swine flu or your bird flu, which can jump to humans. It's this huge health risk.Every animal has diseases and parasites that can affect them. The cricket is so different. Its life cycle's so different. They don't carry that kind of disease that could jump to a human. It's much safer. Even with a mosquito or a tick, they're transmitting a disease, because they're actually holding some like human blood, Mammalian blood in them. It's not that that animal itself actually gets a disease that can transfer to a human.Lisa:You have a cricket powder, but that's primarily for feeding animals. Does it also go into human-Andrew:We produce this cricket protein powder. It's completely food grade. It's completely perfect to use in human food products or pet food products. We focus on the pet food market, because we see a really, really big opportunity to offset a lot more of the consumption in that space. There are a ton of human food products out on the market, and a bunch of being produced right here in the Bay Area. Chips and snack foods and energy bars and baking flour mixes and stuff that-Lisa:With cricket powder.Andrew:With cricket flour. Yeah. Exactly. In that market, it's awesome. It's a really great way to start introducing to people this idea that they can eat crickets. Long-term, the best possible thing is we stop eating animals as much and we eat much more insect protein. Put it in something that people want to eat anyways, crunchy, healthy snacks.To really have the big impact we want to have, we have to figure out how we can start really replacing the meat that we're using as quickly as possible and as big of volume as possible. That's where we're really focusing on the pet angle. There's actually another company here in Berkeley called Jiminy's. They've released a line of dog treats. The only animal protein in that dog treat is cricket protein. Dogs love this stuff.Lisa:You don't have any retail human products yourself as a company.Andrew:We do supply another brand that is currently distributed at the Oakland Days Coliseum and it's called Oaktown Crickets. In the cricket production, get more into how that works. You harvest most of the crickets at a certain stage in their life when they've got the optimal protein content to make into the protein powder. Then you maintain a chunk of your population to go through adulthood and breed your next generation. Those breeders, we call them, they've got a higher fat content because they're, particular the females, are full of eggs. They're really, really tasty.In Thailand, those are the prized ones that people want. They'll fry them up and sell them in the market. For the protein powder application, they're not very useful. What we do is, those get sold for culinary use. We had local chefs use them in different specials, and then they're being fried and seasoned and packaged in little snack packs and distributed at the Colosseum. [crosstalk] Extra tasty.Lisa:One of your main goals is to address the challenges that are facing agriculture, what we just talked about. Are there any other challenges that you've experienced as you enter this marketplace?Andrew:One of the big fundamental things about how the agricultural system is set up is it's very linear. You extract resources, you dig up phosphorous, you create nitrates and nitrites for fertilizers. You pour them on the fields, you grow these plants, you harvest them out, you process them. You throw away the byproducts. Then you feed the animals, and the animals create a huge amount of poop. You don't know what to do with that. It just sits there. Then the animals get eaten. It's this very just linear extractive system of production.That's part of why we're having so many issues with soil degradation and waterway pollution. We're also just running out of phosphorus, which is its whole own problem. What we really see is an opportunity for insects is to help start close some of these loops and create more of a circular system. If you've got your wheat industry and it creates all of this chaff when you process the wheat into flour ... well if you can efficiently convert that, instead of just say composting it or throwing it out there or using it more inefficiently to feed dairy cow, you can turn that into a really high-quality protein, putting that through the base of the cricket as a bio converter.We've spent the same amount of nutrients and water to produce all parts of that plant. If you only eat a little bit of it, that's not very helpful. Then the cool thing about the crickets is, the waste they produce is completely dry and stable. They're not releasing-Lisa:The cricket poop.Andrew:The cricket poop.Lisa:What is it called?Andrew:It's called frass. That's the technical term for insect poops. It's basically the consistency of sand. If you go by Harris ranch or the big feed lots, and they're just-Lisa:Hold your nose.Andrew:Exactly. Producing huge amounts of nitrous oxide and methane and ammonia. These are greenhouse gas emissions that are many, many times more potent than CO2. Instead, you've got this very, stable, safe product that can be applied directly as soil. It's actually produced dry. You can cost effectively transport it. You-Lisa:And amend your soil with it.Andrew:Exactly. Yeah. You can take it back to the source of production, or you can put out into gardens, community gardens, home gardens, anywhere. The frass, which is our by-product, we've just recently gone through the approval process with the California Department of Agriculture to sell that as a retail fertilizer. We now have one pound and five pound bags of that.Lisa:Where could I find that?Andrew:We've just listed on Amazon, and we're starting to starting in the Berkeley area. We're getting it out to some of the local gardens stores. We're hoping that we'll have a chance to really take on a life of its own. Besides that, we're also able to sell that wholesale to bigger garden and farming operations in the area.Lisa:How did you find the funding to start all these operations?Andrew:Definitely, financing is the least fun and hardest part of starting a business. We were able to bootstrap the first several years. We were just actually building websites on the side while the initial pieces came together. Then when we realized that we really understood what the business model was going to be and what the growth plan was, we were able to go out and convince a handful of angel investors to come in and put enough money that we were able to launch our first R&D farm down in San Leandro.That was really just a process of getting out there, both going to pitch events, networking, going to basically the places where the kind of people are who care about sustainability and the food system, who understood the issues. Actually, a number of our investors found us, which was great. We had enough of a presence on social media and had been featured at a few events that they said, "Hey, I really believe in what you're doing." They understood why, and they knew it was going to be a long road to get there.They were very supportive. Then, from there, once you've got initial traction, then as you need more funding, you go out, find ways of getting in front of the right people and being able to tell that story and show how the payoff is going to happen down the road.Lisa:Everybody's pretty aware. It's a huge problem.Andrew:It's amazing how the awareness and focus changed from 2012 to now, because when we started and we're going out there saying, hey, insect protein is this amazing solution. People just raised eyebrows. Now, we go out there and people say, "Yeah, we know, but how are you going to implement it?" Which is much better conversation, because we actually get right into the meat of what we're doing and how we're solving the problem. We don't have to worry about spending half an hour just convincing someone that they should even take us seriously.Lisa:Who are your major competitors?Andrew:The industry is so new, The demand for the product keeps growing at a rate that, essentially, we're not able to directly compete, because we're all just trying to keep up with the scaling of demand. There's a farm down in Austin, Texas, which has gotten some great funding and done some cool stuff, building their operation. There's a big operation up in Ontario, Canada that's been one of the major suppliers in North America.Lisa:Internationally?Andrew:They're a good number of companies in Thailand and Southeast Asia, starting to be a little more presence in Mexico. When we think about it, for us to saturate this market, they're going to have to be thousands of cricket farms, right? We have this concept of a benign competition. When they have a win, that's good for us, because we're growing this opportunity together. It's much less cut throat than you find in more matured and saturated markets.Lisa:There's room to grow in it. Yeah. For sure.Andrew:Huge, huge opportunity.Lisa:Have you had any negative response?Andrew:Certainly. Particularly early on, you got a lot of ew, yuck. What are you doing? What's great about people, is that we really quickly get used to ideas. The same folks we would talk to six years ago and say, "Hey, we think you should try eating crickets." They'd say basically, "No way in hell would I do that." My test is based. I'm sitting on an airplane and the person next to me says, "Hey, what do you do?" How does that conversation go? Six years ago, went one way. Now, Lyft drivers or just folks out of the coffee shop I say, "Hey, we do cricket protein." Almost immediately, people now start telling me why it's a good idea. I mean, it's amazing how the public perception has shifted. I think it's really just a consequence of exposure.Lisa:If you can find a tasty way to get protein and not have to pay what you pay for meat ...Andrew:The market's so young. It's still a pretty premium product. The price point is similar to that of an equivalent meat product. So like the cricket protein powder is basically a dried ... It's 60% protein, 20% fat. It's this really nutrient dense product. It costs similarly as if you bought meat and dehydrated it. What that would cost, 15 to $20 a pound, which seems like a lot. Then you think you're reducing that down. You can get your fresh crickets. The costs of production is similar to your higher-end meat now. What's great is that's with really barely any R&D that's been done over the last few years.Lisa:Barely anybody in the marketplace.Andrew:Barely anyone in the marketplace. You think about what the price of chicken and beef is right now. That's the result of 50 years and trillions of dollars. Our industry, with five years and a few million dollars of development, is already getting competitive with meat. In the next few years, it's just going to soar below that, which is great. Up until very recently, there'd never been really any indication of actual opposition to the idea. It was just niche enough. No one was really worried about it. We did interestingly have the first high-profile shot across the bow.What happened was, late in July when the Senate was starting to go through their appropriations bill process, Senator Jeff Flake actually introduced a amendment that would specifically ban federal funding for research projects around insects for food use. This really caught us all off guard, what seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere.It was very strange and essentially someone had brought to the senator's attention that a handful of small innovation grants had gone out from the USDA to companies that were developing food products with insect protein. It's not the kind of thing that someone like Jeff Flake would just pick up. Someone out there suddenly cared enough to bring that to his attention. We don't really know exactly what went on there.Lisa:You don't know what went on.Andrew:Not yet. Yeah. We have an industry group. There's over 90 companies in the United States, Almost every state, there are companies working with insect protein, whether it's for pet food or animal feed or for human food, both on the production side and the product side. This is actually an amazing opportunity for American economic growth, American leadership. It's very surprising that something would come along like this that you would want to block federal research funding. Specifically, it's the small business innovation research grants that were being referenced. We've received some of the same grants as well.Lisa:Was that this year?Andrew:This was just a few months ago. Now, very luckily, that amendment was not accepted into the final version of the appropriations bill. We realize like, oh, there are people that care enough to start throwing up some roadblocks. That's actually a good sign for us that we're being taken seriously in that way.Lisa:That's a positive way to look at it.Andrew:For us, anytime that we have a conversation with someone and I convinced someone that they should take this seriously or they should go to A's game and buy a pack of crickets or they should go to the pet store and get some Jiminy's treats that they can feed their dog. That's a huge win for me.Lisa:Yeah.Andrew:Every time I'd ride in a Lyft or sit on an airplane, that's an opportunity. Yeah. I mean, there's already been this level of engagement, which is great.Lisa:I wanted to ask you about other projects. One of them I'm intrigued with is the Open Bug Farm.Andrew:In a earlier stage of our business development, we actually developed an open source mealworm farming kit, basically for people at home who are interested in this. The could either buy the kit from us or the designs were online. It was all off-the-shelf components, so they can make it themselves.Lisa:Like having chickens in your backyard.Andrew:That was the same kind of idea.Lisa:Instead, it's crickets.Andrew :Exactly how we were modeling it. In fact, a lot of the people who were interested in that, wanted to grow the mealworms to feed their chickens. That project didn't end up being really good business model for us. We didn't keep selling the kits, but we kept the designs for it out there. What was really great was around that project, we just launched a forum and a huge number of people came to that forum and asked questions and provided expertise. We were able to share some of our expertise on the topic.Now, there's this huge information resource that just has tons and tons of discussion about raising different kinds of insects at different scales, from commercial to home scale. We're really happy that exists out there. We get a lot of inquiries from people that say, "Hey, I just want to start growing some crickets for myself or some meal worms" or whatever it is. We don't have time to help every one of those people individually. We're able to say, "Hey, go over to the forum here, because there's just this huge drove information."Lisa:What do you see in the future?Andrew:Looking at the future, there's just so much room for growth. For us, the key thing is just get more commercial cricket farms built over the next years. Get the production ramped up, instead of just being able to have niche premium pet treats on the market. There can be full-diet pet foods and then maybe even your mainstream pet foods. If the Walmart brand of dog food could have even 5% cricket protein instead of meat, we'd be saving millions and millions of pounds of meat, hundreds of millions of gallons of water. It's all just about being able to grow the production volume to be able to meet those demands.For us, the path to doing that is not just building cricket farms ourselves but to be able to take the facility that we've designed and package that into a turnkey product that we could then license out to a production partner. Because we got a lot of inbound inquiry from folks that say, "Hey, I would love to start a cricket farm, but I don't really know how." There's great opportunity to leverage that and provide a ready-made solution where you can say, "Well, here's the setup and here's the training. We can provide the technical support." Then you can grow these crickets, and then we can help you process that into the protein powder that we can get out to the market."That's really the longer term growth strategy, is being able to engage with all these partners. Over the last several years, we've had hundreds and hundreds of people contact us, say, "I'm a dairy farmer, but I want to get into crickets." A lot of folks with agricultural backgrounds, maybe they grew up on a farm, but their parent's farm isn't quite big enough to support them coming back to work on the farm. They say, "Hey, maybe I could throw up an outbuilding and we could have a cricket farm there."There's a huge amount of opportunity for people that essentially have cricket production as their own business and be able to feed into the supply chain where we can have this huge impact offsetting meat. Fundamentally, what we are after is really converting, like I mentioned, this linear extractive food production system into a circular sustainable food production system. Right now, we're just so overextended on our demands, on the very limited resources that we have available in terms of water and soil and arable lands and even just nutrients available to grow crops.We're going to stop being able to produce food. When we talk to folks in the chicken industry or the beef industry, they're actually all very interested in the potential for the insect protein in the feed for their animals. Because all these animals are not just eating plant-based proteins. Almost all the animal feeds out there also have some amount of fishmeal in them, which supplements key amino acids and fats that you don't find produced in plants. Fishmeal production is a really shocking industry. We basically send out ships that scoop up indiscriminately, all the small fish. Particularly, they'll go scoop up whole schools of anchovetas and anchovies. Then they just grind that up into a powder and send it off into the animal feed formulations.Essentially, all that farmed salmon is basically eating wild fish that's been caught and ground up and pelletized and then fed back to that salmon. Something like 90% of fisheries are on the verge of collapse or have already collapsed. There's a huge amount of interest in introducing insect proteins into animal feeds. The FDA and AAFCO, which is the organization that controls what can go into animal feeds, have already approved soldier fly proteins, which is another insect that's being widely grown for use in salmon feeds. Now, the FDA has also just indicated that they think that should also be allowed in poultry feed. Poultry feed is one of the biggest consumers of fishmeal in the land-based agriculture.Lisa:Do you have a website that people can go to?Andrew:Our company is Tiny Farms. The website is just www.tiny-farms.com. Yeah. You can check out our basic offering. You can contact us through the contact form.Lisa:Are you selling tiny farm hats, like you have on? [crosstalk]Andrew:We've printed short-runs of shirts and had these hats made just for the team. There's enough interest that I think we'll get those listed up there soon. We just have to start thinking about the food system, in terms of a self-sustaining system and not like feel good sustainability. This has to be a system that can continue to produce food forever.Lisa:There are a lot of us living here, and we'll need every tool we can use if we want to keep enjoying it.Andrew:Yeah. Exactly.Lisa:Thank you, Andrew, for being on program.Andrew:Thank you. This was fun.Lisa:You've been listening to Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks. 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Hey everyone and welcome to the GOAL MAGIC podcast, where it’s our mission to get you unstuck. Today I got to interview Lisa Lord. If you may not recall or hadn’t heard heard, I interviewed Lisa a few months ago about her transition from corporate into professional coaching. Lisa and I chat about millennials and where her fascination with them came from, as well as how she is rocking the corporate world by changing the conversation about Millennials. I was really surprised to hear what Lisa uncovered about Millennials and their self-expectations. Since there was so much to talk about, we split this episode into two parts. Here's the first part! Top Takeaways from my interview with Lisa: Instead of learning how to “manage” Millennials, corporate needs to learn to better tap into their talents as a more efficient way to use their resources Millennials are able to focus on doing something they’re passionate about because, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, so many of our needs are met AND there are a plethora of options to make money...which means Millennials can have the option to decide where they spend their professional energy and can craft a life on their own terms Millennials have a lot of self expectations, driven from their use of technology, from things being “on-demand” and from their parents telling them “they can do anything” (which ended up being self-defeating because there are *so* many choices!) Millennials are going to change our society and especially corporate in so many positive ways - it’s corporate’s responsibility to harness that energy and talent Connect with Lisa: lisalordconsulting.com Email: lisa AT lisalordconsulting.com Here's to Getting Unstuck, Cynthia This week our show is brought to you by Elite Strength Therapy from Ashley Burnley. Ashley specializes in functional strength training, pelvic floor & core rehab, and post-partum recovery. Ashley works with every client with great care, specializing and individualizing each workout for every single person who she works with. She takes a holistic approach to her personal training focusing on all aspects of wellness from physical activity to sleep to nutrition and especially incorporating the mind-body connection in all her work. I have personally worked with Ashley to address my back pain and back issues that I had been having for years and couldn’t have asked for a better coach and support. Ashley is a rockstar trainer but also now a dear friend whose kindness and care for the people she works with is beyond measure. I can’t say enough wonderful things about her! If you want to work with Ashley, you can contact her at elitestrengththerapy@gmail.com and if you mention “Goal Magic” to her, you will receive $20 your first session! Intro Music: We are One by Vexento We Are One by Vexento https://www.youtube.com/user/Vexento https://soundcloud.com/vexento Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/Ssvu2yncgWU Outro music: Nostalgia by Tobu tobumusic.com/license https://soundcloud.com/7obu/nostalgia
Our guest today was once an unwanted child and got thrown into foster homes, but she has since beaten life’s difficulties. She’s fought to find her way and has always seen the world in a different way. She’s here to share her very remarkable feat–both in life and in her business–and how mastering her craft have helped others map their own success. About Lisa McCarthy Lisa McCarthy is the Founder and President of Make My Idea Real and inventor of the Affirmations Mirror, a programmable talking mirror that reminds women how intelligent, capable, and powerful they are. Ms. McCarthy’s uses her expertise to help leaders drive initiatives for transforming ideas from concepts into reality, by identifying and designing a plan of action to achieve even greater success. With over 20 years of innovation, management, marketing and sales, to deliver strategic results. She has worked across a broad-spectrum of industries including: start-ups, inventors, authors, speakers, investors, service companies, automotive, real estate, network marketing companies, manufacturers and non-profits. Lisa’s Top 5 StrengthsFinder Themes: Ideation Arranger Strategic Responsibility Futuristic Key Takeaways If I can believe in myself, then that’s who matters. To continue serving people with your Superpowers, you have a responsibility to tell people what your Superpowers are. What you do is not about how great you are. It’s about what you can facilitate for your clients. You can’t always listen to other people about what you know is inside you to do. Time-Stamped Show Highlights [01:29] Getting to know Lisa Instead of rolling over and quitting, I just get back up. [03:00] Lisa’s remarkable feat through life’s negative experiences as a child The impact I can make will be carried forward. [03:54] The journey of Make my Idea Real and Affirmation Mirror. [07:44] Lisa on possible rejections and how she looks at it. [10:37] People getting inspired just by being in Lisa’s space What a gift that is to know that your entire life is not wasted. Your experiences bring something amazing to other people. [13:42] Tackling the two biggest challenges that Lisa has in her biz. Keeping consistency in the flow of people that you can assist is a big challenge [15:57] Lisa shares Possibility Talks, her podcast that’s still in the works. [31:07] What does Lisa’s process look like? They’re gonna accomplish everything that they wanna do by starting with the who, what, when, where, why, and how. [34:26] – Podcast recommendation of the week! Selected Links for This Episode Make My Idea Real Website Affirmations Mirror Website Connect with Lisa on Twitter Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn Make My Idea Real Facebook Page Affirmations Mirror Facebook Page Podcast of the Week: Something You Should Know by Mike Carruthers Frickin’ Awesome Resources Frickin’ Awesome Entrepreneurs Facebook Community From Frustrated to Frickin’ Awesome by Alissa Daire Nelson Daire Success Coaching website StrengthsFinder 2.0 test StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
Carrie Silver "health coach and functional nutritionist, working with women and balancing hormones" It's not just women of women of your age, it's women of all ages. During all ages of our lives we are going through fluctuations. Each woman is going through the same fluctuations as their best friend! "I'm we're all running together, then why doesn't the whole world get it's period?" In the first phase of the month we are feeling happy, and toward the period (end of the month) we have less energy. "we just can't throw as many parties!" - carrie on when we have less energy in our cycle. "I'm putting this in my body and I know my body's not going to be happy" - Lisa on eating traditional glutinous pancakes for her fasting glucose test. "Hormones are building blocks and we need nutrients to make them work properly." - Carrie "Change is scary for people, for everyone, for me!" - Carrie Carrie was always the healthy type, but always felt like crap. Had a lot of anxiety and depression and no libido. Extremely painful periods. Very active and realized when she was super low blood sugar that she needed to figure it out. She had an inkling and went to see a functional medicine doctor that told her about hormones. Up until then she thought something was wrong with her. "Let's fix you" This whole weight lifted, and it's not about what was wrong with her, but her body. "If your body's mechanisms aren't working right you're going to be depressed" -Lisa "Sometimes it gets hard to figure out what to eat." - Lisa We definitly have to cut out some things that are causing inflammation, and when we look at the connection between the brain and the body. "Sometimes its not what you have to cut out, but what you're putting in." - Carrie We are taught our whole life to go on this deprivation diet. Telling some women to take it out, that's going to cause even more stress. Stress is a huge factor that people don't even take in. - Carrie Carrie loves going to the women's health section in the bookstore, and she happened across the orgasmic diet. She had never liked chocolate, and this book encouraged her to incorporate more chocolate. "incorporating new foods is where to start"- Carrie" "We are not talking about a Hershey bar here" - Lisa "there are a lot of nutritious foods that are frickin' yummy" "I get aroused from sweet potatoes" - Carrie Sweet potato is good before your period, and its great for building seratonin, which helps with anxiety and mood. "We're living in such an awesome age" - Carrie "I use hemp milk, I just want the world to know" - Lisa I haven't had a period in four months, menopause is signaled by a year of no period. I feel like I'm in a constant state of PMS. Greens at every meal, what kinds of fats are you having? Can we talk about the gut? I love talking about the gut. "There are so many tests out there now to find out what's going on in the gut" - Carrie Healing food, restoring the intestinal lining. Leaky gut- when particles making it beyond the intestinal wall. Functional medicine doctors - they look at the root cause of the problem. Little bit of testing and natural medicine, blend of eastern and western medicine. Once you solve the root cause, then you're solving symptoms. Not feeling well happens over time and you don't realize you're not your best self. "One day you're like, This is my life and I don't feel very vibrant" - Lisa "I 100% believe everyone should the life they fricken want to live." - Carrie Women say, oh this is just the way it is. About sex, about food, other passions. When we are looking at anything, there are always multiple cause possibilities" - Carrie Glennon Doyle Melton's Love Warrior "How are you supposed to have a good experience in the bedroom if you're stressed out?" - Carrie "Orgasms have a lot of potential health benefits" - Carrie Produces oxytocin, which is anti cortisol (stress hormone, one of the women's health epidemics) "Getting pleasure is such a huge part of the healing process for women." - Carrie Book rec: Dr. Christiane Northrup Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom "There are a lot of things in my life that I never really dealt with like I thought I had." -Lisa I wonder if that's contributing. Did I spend too much time covering up that I don't know how not to be that person. People think PMS is normal. Severe painful, periods, every month. "Do you think that's normal? I learned to deal with it" - Carrie "1/4 of YOUR LIFE that you feel pretty shitty" - Carrie "25 years of feeling shitty- not okay!" - Lisa "My mother used to say, 'People do their best work when they're not feeling well'" - Lisa "It's not just effecting us health wise, how is it causing us in our relationships, in work, being a mother when we are feeling like fucking crap?" - Carrie You don't have to live like that. Think of how much better life could be when you don't have to live like that. Are you putting nutritious foods in your body? are you taking probiotics? What is your stress level like? "Overhauling your life might not be a good situation"- Carrie "What is MY normal?" - Lisa Instead of taking things away, what's one good thing you can add? Foods that help women during PMS: Bone broth: good for the gut. There's a bone broth bar in Portland! Sweet Potatoes and eggs and greens for breakfast - Carrie Avocado is great for healing the gut too! What are you incorporating into your diet? People underestimate the power of short walks. Do you meditate? Yes. It's my own me time. Having to do it, vs. choosing to do it. Visualization time. It becomes fun. Be Silly Now - for helping people be in the now, for laughing at themselves. Finding things to add to your life that make you happier. Not about piling it on. Finding ways to be present. Give yourself permission to feel good. I deserve to feel good!
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