STEVEN BARTLETT:

Dr. Joe, 95% of who we are by the age of 35 is programmed. When I read that in your work, it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks because I just turned 30. And if what you’re saying there is true, without realising it, there’s a puppet master that sits above me, that’s calling the shots in a way that I don’t think I’ve realised. Is that true?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think if we define a habit as a redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors and emotions that’s acquired through repetition. A habit is when you’ve done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your conscious mind. Then it’s programmed subconsciously. So then when the body knows how to do it better than the conscious mind, then for the most part, the greatest habit we have to break is the habit of being ourselves, right? So there’s a principle in neuroscience that says that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you keep thinking the same way, if you keep making the same choices, if you keep doing the same things, if you keep reproducing the same experiences and feeling the same emotions, your biology begins to become hardwired in a sense, it becomes programmed. So in order to change something, to arrive at a new vision of your future, if you wanted to arrive at a new goal or new vision of your future, you’d have to change something about yourself in order to get there. And you’d have to change the way you think, the way you act and the way you feel. When you begin to become conscious, of those unconscious thoughts, so conscious that you don’t let them slip by your awareness unnoticed or unchecked by you. If you catch yourself speaking in a limited way or you become conscious that you’re behaving in a certain way, in a habit, and you can notice or pay attention to how you’re feeling, then you’re no longer the program. How your consciousness observing the program, you’re only unconscious when you’re in the program. And so to change then is to become so conscious that you don’t go unconscious again. And in a sense, that is consciousness that is really the puppet master that really decides who we want to be. I think the biggest problem is that people lose their free will to a set of programs. And so their body is basically programmed into a predictable future based on what they’ve done in the past. So to change then, to change that habituation takes an enormous amount of energy, an enormous amount of awareness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why is this operating system, this program, useful? Because I look at everything the way that I do, and from doing this podcast and speaking to experts, I’ve stopped thinking that my body is against me. And I’ve started to realize that there’s a reason for these things. There’s a reason for the habits and patterns. So why is this useful? Because it seems to be working against me in so many ways.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, first of all, when we look closely at certain habits, whether you can ride a bicycle, whether you can speak a language, whether you can snowboard, when you first learn any of those things, it takes an enormous amount of conscious awareness to get your body to do what your mind is intending. But if you keep doing it over and over again, then the body begins to economize it in some way. And so we have a lot of things that we can do automatically or unconsciously or subconsciously that allows us to multitask, to drive your car, to talk on the phone, to do several different things at the same time. So a habit isn’t a bad thing. They can work for you or they can work against you. The problem is if you’re, as an example, complaining. and blaming and making excuses and feeling sorry for yourself and judging other people and you practice that and you get really good at whatever you practice. You practice that enough times that you’re unconscious to the fact that you’re doing it. The moment you become conscious that you want to change that, you’re going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to feel unfamiliar. It’s going to feel some degree of uncertainty. You’re leaving kind of familiar known territory and you’re stepping into the unknown. And so many people, when they want to change a habit, they have to be willing to be uncomfortable to do it. But habits can work for us. There’s a lot of great habits that you and I both have that I would never want to change. or would want to evolve in some way, but then there’s a lot of habits that don’t serve us. And so a person really wants to set a vision of the future, whatever that is, and they just have to agree that in order to arrive at that vision, they have to change in order to get there.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Someone said to me that there’s a certain type of behaviour pattern that we can’t change. They said when we get trauma under the age of 10, things that happen at a very early age, some of those things cannot be changed. And then there’s things that happen later in life that can be rewired and changed. Is that true? Are there some traumas, behaviour patterns that just appear to be too stubborn and too resistant to change?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

If you asked me that question just a few years ago, I probably would have a different answer than I do today. Because if you look at a lot of the work that we’re studying in terms of human change and human transformation, we’ve seen people with really difficult pasts, really brutal pasts that were abused and traumatized at a very early age. And then repeated traumas that took place in people’s lives. And they had night terrors and they couldn’t be in relationships. They had social anxiety. They had a lot of health conditions. We’ve seen them completely change, completely change to be happy people again, to free themselves from the past. I would never put a limitation on change because I just don’t think you can really predict that. I think many people that are learning how to change and they understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how it gets easier, I think for the most part people can change all kinds of things and when they do change Our research shows that their brain changes, their heart rate changes, their gene expression changes. There’s thousands of metabolites that are being released into their bloodstream that weren’t there prior. There’s a host of different changes that take place biologically that kind of support the person’s transformation.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is there a specific transformation that sticks in your mind? as being the most as the clearest evidence that you should never write off someone’s ability to transform. Wow.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I’m so pleased to tell you that my beliefs have been challenged just in the last two years in witnessing so many different changes in people’s health that I never knew was even possible. You know, everything from stage four cancers that were in a very progressed state that metastasized to organs and tissues and bones in the body, a complete reversal. in that health condition. Not once, not twice, not three times. We’ve seen it many times. We’ve seen people that were blind, that have been deaf, that have ALS, that have lupus, that have MS, that have Parkinson’s disease, that have spinal cord injuries, that have strokes, PTSD. myasthenia gravis, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy. We had a woman that had her thyroid removed, surgically removed, and I know this is difficult even for me to accept, and grew a new thyroid back. You know, we have the medical evidence for that. So I don’t know any longer what the limit is. I think there’s something really cool happening in the world when people believe in themselves. And when you believe in yourself, you have to believe in possibility when you believe in possibility you have to believe in yourself. So when somebody Has the opportunity and I think a story is There’s no there’s everybody loves a story. There’s nothing better than a story and when someone stands on the stage in front of 2,000 people and and talks about their journey to heal themselves from a chronic health condition. And it’s not always pretty. They lose things. They lose family. They sometimes lose their careers or get sick before they get better. And you see this person’s persistence and you see that they were not doing the work, their inward work to heal. They were doing the work to change. And if they understood, if they truly changed that, their biology should change. And they were uncompromising every day in showing up for themselves and staying conscious of their unconscious self and then reprogramming themselves in some way. And they tell that story, it’s the four minute mile. It’s somebody breaking through a level of consciousness or unconsciousness and the collective that’s observing the example of truth. they’re actually relating with that person in a way that causes them to examine possibility differently. And when you become conscious of a new possibility, a change in consciousness is a change in awareness, right? So now it’s in the collective. And lo and behold, it’s not uncommon. We just had this happen in our week-long event in Denver just a little over a week ago, two weeks ago. We had six people stand up out of a wheelchair by the end of the event. Now, I wasn’t expecting that. But one person that had MS in the middle of the week had a very profound experience, very profound experience. And a professional athlete, NFL football player, and stood up. And he stood up for the audience. When he stood up, he said, I thought I was going to a yoga retreat. I thought my brother was taking me to a yoga retreat. I had no idea what we were doing here. And then he said, I just, I just never loved myself. And it was his act of change that somehow changed his health condition. He somehow up-regulated genes in different ways, suppressed the genes for MS, and somehow he was more mobile, he was walking by the end of the event, and he was the magic number one. And when everybody saw that and the audience was excited, we started seeing other people have a similar experience. Now that possibility is becoming more of a reality for people. So I will always, I never limit what could actually happen, but I can tell you that what an amazing time right now to witness people really doing the uncommon.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you recited that story, I could see the emotion in your face as you say it. And I can only imagine with the information that you have and the beliefs you have about healing, change, transformation, the sense of urgency you must carry and the sense of like responsibility almost, I guess you must carry, knowing what’s possible.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, well, I do feel responsible for always keeping the information based in science and as pure as possible. I feel it’s really important to do the research that we’re doing. I mean, we’ve studied so much from a scientific standpoint, the process of change and the process of transformation and what meditation actually can do for a person in terms of their biology and and some of the changes that we’re seeing just in seven days. My responsibility really is to give people my greatest understanding of the truth and numerous opportunities to experience it, nothing more. There is a way to inspire people into possibility. And so we combine different models of science, whether it’s quantum physics or neuroscience or neuroendocrinology psychoneuroimmunology, the mind-body connection, epigenetics, electromagnetism, all of these sciences allow people to understand themselves better. And if knowledge is power, knowledge about yourself is self-empowerment. You can empower people to do something with it. So, the more you understand what you’re doing in the process of change, the more you understand why you’re doing it. As I said, the how gets easier. So, we now know that if you give people sound scientific information, and that is the contemporary language of mysticism. And they can learn that information. They’re basically making new circuits in their brain. That’s what learning is. Learning is forging new synaptic connections. But if you don’t review what you learn, if you don’t repeat it, it’s so much easier to forget it than to remember it. So you’ve got to repeat it over and over again. So we allow people in our workshops to then begin to turn and teach it back to somebody. They have to really explain it. If they can’t explain it, it’s not wired in their brain and they’re going to… something’s going to be left to conjecture, to superstition, to dogma, to spirituality. And that’s not the result we want. We want them to use science as that model. And if they can explain that model and remind themselves what they’ve learned, reproduce the same level of mind, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. So they begin to install the neurological hardware in their brain. By teaching others. Yeah, exactly. So that they are prepared for an experience. So then, if that information is installed in their brain, that philosophy, that theory, that knowledge and information, and now they can remember it and they have that model of understanding. And they understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. If we can set up the conditions in the environment and give them the proper instruction. If they can get their behaviors to match their intentions. If they can get their actions equal to their thoughts. If they can get their mind and body working together. They’re going to have a new experience. Now, experience enriches circuitry in the brain. That’s what experience does. The moment those neurons begin to string into place, though, another part of the brain makes a chemical. And that chemical is called a feeling or an emotion. And the moment you feel unlimited, the moment you feel grateful, the moment you feel empowered, the moment you feel whole, now you’re teaching your body chemically. to understand what your mind has intellectually understood. The information is just not in the brain now, the information now is literally in the body. And now you’re embodying the truth of that knowledge, of that philosophy, of that theory. So then you’re teaching your body and instructing your body chemically to understand what your mind has intellectually understood. Okay, so then that information that’s coming as a new experience is changing your biology in some way and we’ve actually shown this. So then if you’ve done it once, then it means you should be able to do it again. And the idea is to be able to repeat an experience. And if you can repeat it over and over again, both neurologically and chemically, neurochemically, you can condition your mind and body to begin to work as one. And when you can do it so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your conscious mind, it’s innate in you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I want to map out this process so that I make sure I understand it. starts with the neurology, which I heard is a thought which you then ingrain in your mind by teaching it to someone else. Is that accurate?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, first thing you have to do is you got to give people information. Yeah. And science is probably the closest to the truth in terms of information. And so when your brain is exposed to information and you’re present and you’re paying attention, that neurons begin to connect. That’s what learning is. Learning is forging new synaptic connections. The Nobel Prize research, Kandel in the year 2000, the researcher said that if you learned one bit of information and you paid attention to that information for about an hour, He would double the number of connections in your brain as a result of your interaction with that information. But if you don’t review it, if you don’t repeat it, if you don’t have to think about it, the circuits prune apart, right? So if learning is making new synaptic connections, then remembering is maintaining and sustaining them. It’s so much easier to forget this information than to remember it. So you learn it. Once I got a person’s head nodding, then they turn to the person next to them and say, let me try this out. Let me try this out and see if I can repeat it. And so between the two of them, they exchange that information and they start to build a model of understanding. Ah, I understand. I got that. Okay. Then we advance the information a little bit more and they’re adding new stitches into the three-dimensional tapestry of their gray matter. And they have to remind themselves what they’ve learned, reproduce that same level of mind. Mind is the brain in action. As you install those neurological circuits in your brain then, now you’re prepared. It’s the forerunner to the experience, you’re prepared for the experience. So give the proper instruction, get your body involved, get involved in the process. the experience then causes circuits to become more enriched. That’s what experience does. And then it makes a chemical and that chemical is called a feeling or an emotion. And the stronger the emotion you feel from the experience, the more you remember it. And what is that experience? Abundance, health, wholeness, a mystical experience, success, a new relationship, a new career, a new life, whatever the person’s, whatever that vision, that person wants to arrive at in the future. And to actually go from the thought of that vision to the actual experience of it. And the distance between that thought and that experience is called time. So if we can teach people to shorten the distance between the thought of what they want and the experience of having it, then they start believing more that they’re the creator of their life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What would you say to somebody that doesn’t think thoughts matter that much? I would say 95% of the world plus, or maybe more, 99% of the world plus sees thoughts as something that we are, you know, it’s my head talking. It’s me talking in my head. And as long as I don’t act on those thoughts, they’re inconsequential.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I would say then that’s the truth. Is it the truth? I don’t know. But for me, my thoughts do matter. I think every thought that you have makes a chemical. And you can have thoughts that make you feel good and thoughts that make you feel bad. And I think that if 90% of the thoughts that we think are the same thoughts as the day before, the same thoughts lead to the same choices. The same choices lead to the same behaviors. The same behaviors will create the same experiences. And the same experiences produce the very same emotions. And those same emotions influence a person’s very same thoughts in their biology, Their neurocircuitry, their neurochemistry, their hormones, and even their gene expression stays the same because they’re staying the same. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I do think that if you think differently and you learn new information and you have new thoughts, if you can make new choices and demonstrate new behaviors and create new experiences and arrive at new goals and feel new emotions, I would say that’s evolution. And I think that people really, really secretly believe in themselves on some level. And I think being defined by a vision of the future or really always, always dreaming of another great experience, I think is a great reason to wake up in the morning.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve had lots of conversations with very smart people on this podcast from multiple disciplines, you know, psychiatrists, psychologists, athletes, health practitioners, and they’ve given me such great advice. on which is irrefutable scientific advice on so many areas of my life and for some reason there’s still areas of my life that I still can’t act upon that advice and I think probably for most of my listeners who’ve heard great advice on this podcast and they think yes that’s who I want to be I have an intention to stop eating sugar at 1 a.m at night or I have an intention to become organized or to be this kind of friend or partner They have the information, right? What there’s something stood in the way of me doing something about that information on a regular basis.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah Well, I can give you a few answers for that. Unfortunately It normally takes crisis trauma disease Diagnosis betrayal loss a person has to reach that lowest denominator Where nothing’s making that feeling go away Has to. Well, not they don’t have to, but this is human. This is the human condition. This is the moment where they don’t feel like returning the texts. They don’t feel like going to dinner and seeing the same people. They don’t feel like watching the same television show any longer. The sports car, the wardrobe, none of that is making this feeling go away. This is a moment of reckoning for the soul. And this is really when you could actually see yourself through the eyes of someone else because you don’t feel like yourself anymore. And that’s the moment where people begin to change. They can see how they’ve been thinking, they can notice how they’ve been acting, they could pay attention or become aware of how they’ve been feeling for the last 20 years. And that idea in neuroscience is called metacognition. That’s the moment you’re no longer the program. Now, what we believe and what we’ve seen and what I think is a much better approach is being defined by a vision of the future. And if you understood that you could actually elevate your state without anyone or anything every single day, and hold whatever that intention of your future is. And it takes a coherent brain to do that. And feel the emotion of your future before it happens. That is, you know, you can’t wait for your wealth to feel success. You can’t, or abundance. You can’t wait for your new relationship to feel love. You can’t wait for the mystical experience to feel awe or your healing to feel whole or grateful. That’s kind of The old model of reality of cause and effect, waiting for something out there to change or take away this emptiness, this lack that I feel in here. If you teach people then they could elevate their state and we teach that model through meditation. And they can combine that clear intention with an elevated emotion and teach them how to make that heart of theirs more coherent. If they do that properly then, they’ll live their life feeling like their future has already happened. Now, from that elevated state, instead of that self-limited state, they can become as conscious of that unconscious self as they could if they were at that limited state. And being defined by that vision of the future, getting up every day inspired by it, and not letting any person, any circumstance, anything in our life remove us from that vision, that would be a day well-lived. So then, most people then, they have that vision of the future. but they give up on that vision because in order for them to arrive at that vision, they have to do something. They have to think differently. They have to act differently. They have to feel differently. And it’s so much easier to make the same choice every single day. And the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, you’re going to feel uncomfortable because you’re stepping from the known into the unknown. So some people would rather cling to their self-pity than take a chance in possibility. They’d rather tell the story of their past instead of telling the story of their future. They’d rather believe in their past instead of believe in their future. It’s so much more important though to romance your future instead of romance your past. And I think if people understood that they could actually arrive at it, I think many people have done this already in their life. I think everybody at least once in their life has done something great. And when they did something great, they just made up their mind. And they made a decision in that moment to do something or to change with such firm intention. that the amplitude of energy in making that choice caused their body to respond to their mind. That the choice that they were making to change became a moment in time that they would never forget. And the stronger the emotion they felt in order to change, the more they remembered the choice. And we could say then that they’re giving their body a taste of the future emotionally. And they’re literally aligning to that destiny. We discovered that if you keep doing that every day, somehow you arrive at that destiny and your biology will literally begin to change to look like you’re living in a different life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What are some of the biggest myths relating to behavior change and I guess character and personality change that hold people back?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Probably belief. I think in so many ways that a belief is an unconscious process. A belief is a thought you keep thinking over and over again until it’s hardwired in your brain. And most beliefs are based on past experiences. And so many people have a belief about something that has to change in order for them to arrive at a new place in their life. And what we discovered a lot of times with people in this work is that they, when they say, for example, they were healing themselves of a health condition. Sometimes they would do their meditations three times in one day. And I asked them, why three times? And they said, because I stopped believing. And when I caught myself no longer believing in it, I had to sit down and change my belief again. In other words, they had to get up believing more in their future instead of believing less in it. And they have to change their state of being to do that. So I think that that’s a limitation. I also think that unconsciously we’re always waiting for something out there in our life to change so that we can change or feel the relief of the lack of what we don’t have. And I do think that’s kind of a limited model of reality. I think when you start changing inside of you and you start seeing the changes happening outside of you, you go from being a victim in your life to being a creator of your life. And I think that when that occurs, then all of a sudden it’s no longer a have to. It’s something that you want to do. You actually don’t want the magic to end in your life. So now you become a work in progress by investing in yourself. And when you invest in yourself, you invest in your future. So there’s probably a chronic disbelief that many of us have that we’re not creators of our life. And only when we get the parking space or something good happens to us do we believe that we’re the creator of our life. But imagine a world where everybody actually took responsibility in being the creator of their life and no longer the victim of their life. I think we would see a dramatic shift in consciousness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That makes people feel uncomfortable, this idea of personal responsibility. It’s almost become quite a controversial idea, the idea that we are the creator of our lives, because then I have to accept responsibility for all the bad things that happened. Dave dumped me. I got fired from work. Someone bumped into my car and it hurt my neck.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, maybe that happened by default. Maybe that happened by not creating. Maybe you were just left to the randomness. of reality that maybe you’re not creating. And the fact that you’re not creating, you’re left to the effects of your environment actually controlling you, controlling your feelings and thoughts.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

By creating, what do you mean by creating?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, if you woke up every morning and you truly made time to think like this, okay, If my personality creates my personal reality, and my personality is made of how I think, how I act, and how I feel, if I wanna create a new personal reality, a new life, I’m gonna have to change my personality. And most people try to create a new reality, a new personal reality, as the same personality, and it doesn’t work. We literally have to become someone else. So if you said, okay, Let me not default and go unconscious to that 95% of who I am that’s programmed. Let me become so conscious of the way I think. Let me become so aware of how I’m going to act today. Let me decide what emotions keep me connected to my past and bring me to a lower level, a lower level of energy. Let me not go unconscious. And then if you said, okay, The belief is just a thought I keep thinking over and over again. What thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And with attention and with intention, to begin to familiarize yourself with a new way of thinking. Meditation means to become familiar with. If you keep firing and wiring those circuits, you’re going to begin to install the hardware repeated enough times and it becomes a software program that could be the new voice in your head that says, I can, it is possible. If you said, okay, when did I fall from grace yesterday? When did I lose it? Oh my gosh, it was with, at work, with my coworkers, with my ex, with my enemy, with the news, with traffic. Acting this way is not gonna make me happy. If I had another opportunity, another opportunity, how would I do it? If you could close your eyes and rehearse in your mind, mentally, how you’re gonna behave in certain situations,

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll give you a specific one. Anyone. So I’ll give you the specific one where late at night, on occasion, I’ve eaten things that I really regret eating. Also, another one that I’m trying to work hard on is I can be very messy when I travel. So my hotel room can look like a mess. And I don’t like that about myself. And I don’t know why I do it, but it’s almost like you talk about being unconscious. I’m clearly not thinking about it, but that’s part of the problem. And it’s the same with the bloody sugar at midnight, eating, ordering things that are, and then feeling instant guilt 10 seconds after I put it in my mouth.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, it may be that on some level, well, you could actually be addicted to the guilt, not to the sugar. And so you return to the same emotional state that allows that action to reoccur. So if you said, let me decide how I am going to act, what I’m not going to do, and you rehearsed it, the research on mental rehearsal says your brain will look like you already did it. that you’ll be so present the brain won’t know the difference between what you’re imagining and what is real. The brain will begin to change to look like the experience has already happened. Now, you’re priming your brain for that behavior. Keep rehearsing it. Rehearsing it how? Well, mentally rehearsing, mental rehearsal is one of these great ideas in neuroscience where you can actually install circuits in your brain, right? So everybody has done this. Musicians do it. They’re playing a song in their mind all the time. Athletes do it. They’re always going over their moves. Dancers do it. Actors do it. So many people rehearse mentally what they’re about to do. And when they do that, they actually prime their brain. They actually can change their brain and change their body just by thought alone. Physiologically changed. Physiologically changed. You can take a group of people that never played the piano before and divide them into two different groups and do functional brain scans on both groups. One group They’ll come for two hours a day for five days, and they’ll practice these one-handed scales and chords. Now, you learn something new, you make new connections in your brain. You get some instruction, you get your body involved. When you get your body involved, you’re going to have an experience. You pay attention to what you’re doing, and you repeat it over and over again. Nerve cells that fire together, wire together. You’re going to begin to install new circuits in the opposite side of your brain. That’s common. You do the scan at the end, you see those actual physical changes. You take those people, the other group, and you ask them to close their eyes without lifting a finger, have them mentally rehearse those scales and chords, and at the end of five days, they grow the same amount of circuits in their brain as the people who actually physically demonstrated the act. In other words, they were so present with what they were doing, the brain did not know the difference between the real-life experience and what they were imagining. The brain was physically changing. to look like they already experienced it, they already did it. So now, you take those people, never played the piano before, they’ve just been mentally rehearsing for two hours a day for five days, you set them in front of a piano, and they could actually play those scales and chords, why? Because they primed their brain for that behavior. So then if you’re going to prime your brain for a new behavior, whether you’re the CEO of a company, whether you’re a parent, whether you’re learning something, the more you rehearse it mentally, the more you prime your brain and body for the act. So you could actually practice rehearsing how you’re going to change in your life. And if you keep doing it enough times, your behaviors will match your intentions automatically because you have the mind installed to do it. If you don’t have the mind installed to do it, you’ll go back to the same past behavior.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 So I play through that scenario of making the decision differently.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Exactly. And rehearse it in your mind until it feels right. Until you feel like, I could actually do that. And go from start to finish without losing your attention. And so that it gets easier each time you do it. It makes sense then, you’ll actually do it. And then if you said, okay, Enough of this guilt. I’ve felt enough of it. I don’t like feeling that way. I could actually break the conditioning of that emotion in my body. Can I condition my body? Can I teach my body to feel something differently? What would be the feeling that I want to feel if I was able to do it? Would it be worth? Would it be self-love? Would it be freedom? Would it be joy? Let me teach my body emotionally. What a future could actually feel like before it happens. If you keep doing it over and over again, you’re going to start making more of those chemicals. And it’s going to become easier for you to do it. It’s going to become familiar to you. And that’s exactly what meditation is. To become familiar with an old self. To know thyself. Become so conscious of that unconscious self that you don’t go unconscious to that self. And how many times do we have to forget? Until we stop forgetting and start remembering. That’s the moment of change. What thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? Let me become familiar with those. What behaviors do I want to demonstrate? What would greatness do? What would love do? And actually rehearse a greater way. Rehearse it enough times so that you could actually step into that footprint. Teach your body emotionally that there’s another way to feel and do it over and over again. It’ll become familiar to you. And so the model of change is unlearning and relearning. It’s breaking the habit of the old self and reinventing a new self. It’s pruning synaptic connections and sprouting new connections. It’s unfiring and unwiring, refiring and rewiring, deprogramming and reprogramming, losing your mind and creating a new one, unmemorizing emotions that have been stored in the body and then reconditioning the body to a new mind, to a new emotion. Turns out if you teach people how to do that, in seven days you can see very profound biological changes if they immerse themselves into the experience.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And what do those biological changes look like?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, so we run week-long events around the world. And I think it’s so important to do events in person with community because it’s a flock, it’s a herd, it’s a school, it’s a collective. And so that exact process in seven days, we take people through a very immersive experience. And we do functional brain scans or fMRIs or quantitative EEGs before they start the event. And then we, at the end of seven days, we look at their brains at the end of seven days. And there are dramatic changes in the way their brain works, very significant changes. Some of them are really outstanding changes. We teach people how to create more heart coherence. When you feel anger, when you feel frustration, when you feel impatience, when you feel resentment, your heart beats out of order. When you feel gratitude, when you have kindness and care, When you feel love for life, your heart beats in a more orderly fashion, you can actually train somebody to get good at feeling that way. And we use that and we see people at the end of seven days be able to regulate their heart much better. And it’s a function of really how soon or how slow we age. We take blood and we measure 2,882 different metabolites in a person’s blood. And at the end of seven days, we measure again. And I can tell you that if you’re a novice meditator, really never meditated before, kind of your first event, and you go through that seven day process, at the end of seven days, there’s so many biological changes that are taking place in the collective, in the community, not just one, not just two, the majority of people, and I mean a significant majority of people, suggesting that their body literally is living in a new environment, in a new life. and there are chemicals in their bloodstream, in terms of information, that wasn’t there prior to the event. In other words, some way, without taking any drug, without taking any exogenous substance, without changing their diet, without changing their lifestyle in any other way except going through this process, eating the same foods that they typically eat, that at the end of seven days, there’s chemistry, there’s biology that suggests that somehow their biology is changing significantly. We measure gene expression. I can tell you that you can change your gene expression in seven days. We measure the microbiome, and once again, seven days, there are dramatic changes in the microbiome, and the mind somehow is making significant and effective changes in our body. Our research is pretty outstanding because a seven-day intervention that’s producing these effects, there’s not a whole lot of drugs that are as effective. And we’ve discovered that the nervous system makes a pharmacy of chemicals right now that works better than any drug. That’s what we’ve discovered, and it’s all within you.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I am a fixer in my friendship groups. And what I mean by that is I’m someone who probably over-involves themselves in trying to help friends change stuff, which is a gift and a curse, often times a curse. But I often get, because I love someone and they’re close to me and I want the best for them, when I see that they are experiencing a recurring pattern of behavior or habit that is causing them unhappiness, loneliness, to miss the goals they have in their life of becoming a husband or a wife or a partner or whatever it might be, I have a growing sense of frustration. And that sometimes manifests itself as trying to fix and help and give advice and change them. You must experience that in a different way. You’re much smarter than me. You must experience that in a different way when you meet people that you can see having these recurring patterns of behavior. And when you see that in them, has there any has there any ever been frustration on your part? Have you ever been frustrated that change hasn’t happened in someone that you loved?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

God, you know, I think it’s such a noble act to change. And I understand how hard it is to change. I understand that process. So I think the greatest thing that I could ever do for someone is to show them what change looks like. It’s so much more profound than anything that I could ever say. And I would never offer my opinion to them. I would love them unconditionally because I maybe see a part of myself that I’ve changed and I understand how hard it is to change. Or I understand that they’re gonna have their moment when they’re ready to change. And so I think it’s really interesting because what I’ve learned over the years is that no new information can enter the nervous system that’s not equal to the person’s emotional state. You can give them the answer, the right answer to the problem and they won’t hear it because it’s not relevant, equal to the emotion that they’re experiencing. What we’ve learned is that when you take people in, let’s just say seven days, just cross the river of change, go from the old self to the new self, immerse yourself fully into it, Break free from the chains of those emotions that keep you anchored to the past. Overcome those habits and behaviors that keep you programmed into a predictable future. Overcome all those aspects of your beliefs that keep you stuck in a certain state in terms of how you’re thinking and those hardwired perceptions. Seven days break free and normally the person has the answer to their own question. I think that’s when it becomes really relevant when you have your own insight, your own epiphany, when it’s your own truth because you’ve worked to get beyond it. People, when they analyze themselves or analyze their life within some disturbing emotion, when we looked at the real-time brain scans, we saw that they were actually making their brain worse. They were driving their brain further out of balance, overthinking, overanalyzing. When you analyze something within an emotion, an emotion is a record of the past. So you’re thinking in the past the solution could never be there. Free the person from that emotion and of course they see it from a greater level of consciousness.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

For all those people listening right now that are like me that try and fix Because through what they think of as love, I may be doing it for other reasons, but what could they do to be a better ally or friend or partner to that individual? Based on everything you’ve said, that maybe they need their own moment or their emotional system isn’t in regulation with their information.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

God, any time we want to do anybody a great service is to help them out of their emotional state. I mean, it’s not a lecture that’s going to help them. Come on, let’s go do something. Come on, let’s go. Just get them doing something, just breaking themselves out of that state. It’s not like the answer. It’s that they have to change their state to get the answer. So if I were to do anything, I would want to help them shorten their emotional reaction to get beyond the emotion. Whatever that is and I wouldn’t be a lecture would be something fun that we did or something unusual that we did or just Trying something just let’s just do something And I think I think showing people what what what love looks like show them what joy looks like show them what happiness looks like I think I think people notice that I think I think they pay attention to that it gives them permission to do the same So maybe just show up as the person you would want to be around if you were feeling that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you look at the state of the world at the moment and the direction of travel, the trajectory of, you know, technology and the way we’re living our lives and the decisions we’re making at a collective level, what are the things that most concern you?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, I always ask myself, is it getting better or is it getting worse? And I think in my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the world as it is today, just with so many variations of so many things. And I question the information that I’m receiving. And I think that we need some type of intervention as a species. We need a change. We need an intervention in some way.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You question the information you’re receiving from where and what kind of intervention are you suggesting?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I just don’t know that the information that I am exposed to or information that people are exposed to is the truth. I just question that these days. Because you can get so many degrees of it. And I don’t know if it’s… based in altruism, you know, for the goodness of human beings or for self-interests. And I think people are waking up more to the understanding that something has to change, you know, for us to really survive as a species.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what are the symptoms of the cultural disease that you’re talking about? What are they?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

A lack of connection. You know, you know, we’re in 3D reality, you know, connecting, communing, cooperating. creating, I think those are things that, I think if you keep people in survival and you keep them in fear and you keep them at war and you keep them angry and you keep them in pain and you keep them confused and you can control their attention by controlling their emotions, I think we’re gonna, you know, we may not make it, you know, as a species. But I think that when people truly come together, in an elevated state. I think it’s collective networks of observers that determine reality. And I don’t think it’s the number of people, I think it’s the most coherent. in heart and brain that begin to produce effects. So the coming of a new consciousness has to be a collective. It’s not one person. It’s a collective group of people. And I believe that you get enough people collectively coming together that we can hopefully steer it in a different direction. Hopefully. Yeah. How about you? Are you optimistic? I am. I’m optimistic because I think people by nature. are good. I think there’s goodness in human beings. And I have the privilege of traveling around the world and I see that. And it transcends countries and cultures and races and gender. It transcends diet. It transcends all that stuff. It’s just when people are happy with themselves and in love with life, I think their natural tendency is to give. And I think we’re wired to do that when we’re not in survival.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

when we’re not in survival. When you use this word survival, are you talking about the fight or flight state that many of us live in?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, I would say that living in stress is living in survival, and stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of homeostasis. Stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance. The stress response is what the body innately does to return itself back to balance. The problem is, is that if you keep turning on that fight or flight system, you keep turning on that emergency system, you’ll actually cause people to stay out of balance. And that imbalance becomes a new balance. And they’re headed for some type of disease, some type of breakdown. No organism can tolerate emergency mode for an extended period of time. And when you’re in survival and that primitive system is switched on, it’s really about the self. When you’re in survival, you have to take care of yourself. The emotions of anger, and hostility, and aggression, and competition, and frustration, and resentment, and envy, and jealousy, and insecurity, and fear, and anxiety, and hopelessness, and powerlessness, and depression, and pain, and suffering, guilt, and shame are all derived from the hormones of stress. And psychology calls them normal human states of consciousness. Those are altered states of consciousness. And when we’re in that state, when we’re living in survival, we experience separation, we divide in a lot of ways. And so there’s biology that goes along with that, and the hormones of stress heighten the senses and cause us to become materialists. And now when we’re in lack or separation, we force outcomes, we control outcomes, we fight for outcomes, we compete for outcomes, we manipulate outcomes. In a lot of ways, we turn into more of a primitive self. It’s hard to change that, especially when you don’t have enough money, or you just lost your job, or you just ended a relationship, or your best friend passed. It’s really hard to move beyond those emotional states. And so I think that teaching people how to change those emotional states and move out of those are really important. And 75 to 90% of every person that goes to a healthcare facility in the Western world goes in because of psychological or emotional stress. That’s eight or nine out of 10. And emotional stress and psychological stress are the ones that tend to be the most harmful. Because if it’s not T-Rex that’s chasing you, but it’s your co-worker in the next cubicle, what was once very adaptive becomes very maladaptive. And the rush of those adrenal hormones become kind of addictive to people. And they use the problems, they use the conditions in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. They need their enemy to feel hatred. And if their enemy died, they’d still feel hatred, or they’d find another one. They need the bad relationship, they need the bad job in order to feel, and that’s why it’s hard to change. And people become addicted to the life they don’t even like. And so if you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, by thinking about your problems, then that’s the truth, you can become addicted to your own thoughts. And if the long-term effects of the hormones of stress push the genetic buttons that create disease, your thoughts can make you sick. Then the question is, if your thoughts can make you sick, can your thoughts make you well? And we’re actually discovering that that’s absolutely possible. So then teaching people then a little bit about how to manage their emotional state and to self-regulate I think is a great gift for people because when they begin to break an addiction to any emotion or the conditioning of any emotion, There’s going to be cravings that go on just like any addict. And many people overdose, and many people have bad trips. And so when they start changing and the body’s craving those familiar emotions, the body starts signaling the brain of memories, or to think certain ways, and to make certain choices, do certain things, crave certain experiences, just to feel that same emotion. And people say, well, This feels right. No, that feels familiar. That really feels familiar and and many people will tell the story of why they feel that way based on some past experience and it’s usually Not in the recent past. It’s usually many years ago like a toxic relationship or whatever that is. And so I They’re basically saying I had an event in my life and since that event I’m still living by the same emotion and I haven’t been able to change. And they’ll tell the story of that past and in psychology the latest research on memory shows that 50% of that story isn’t even the truth. They’re making it up because they don’t have the same brain as they had then. And so then people are reliving a miserable life they never even had just to excuse themselves from changing. And they embellish the stories so that it sounds really hard to change. So what is that point then for a person when they say, the only person that this emotion of hatred or anger or frustration or resentment, the only person that this is hurting is me. Because those chemicals are down-regulating genes and creating disease. And a person finally really realizes that and they really decide to change. When they overcome the emotion, the memory without the emotion is called wisdom. And that’s the name of the game in three-dimensional reality. Now they’re ready for a new experience. It’s not reliving the past. You don’t need to. You don’t need to talk about it. All you need to do is overcome the emotion. When you overcome the emotion, you’re free from the past. You can see it from a greater level of consciousness. And that’s when a person, so many times when they truly change, they’ll say this. We’ve seen it over and over again. They reach that point where they finally break through, and some of them have had some really difficult pasts. They’ll say, I would not want to change one thing in my past because it brought me to this moment. That’s the moment the past no longer exists. And they can look at their betrayers and see it all had to happen for that moment. And now they’re free. They no longer belong to the past. They belong to the future.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ve never heard the concept or idea of being addicted to a negative emotion. People talk to me about being addicted to dopamine and pleasure and, you know, and all those things and, you know, like masturbation and sugar. But the thought of being addicted to a negative emotion, it’s what you said to me earlier about the guilt.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, think about this. What do people do when they feel an emotion? What do they do? They rely on something outside of them. to make that emotion go away. So whether it’s the masturbation, or the pornography, or the gambling, or the shopping, or the sugar, or the whatever, it’s all because they’re trying to make that feeling go away. And they’re using something outside of them. So then there is some emotion that the person is regulating. That’s why they’re doing that. They’re doing that, right? So change the emotional state, and it makes sense then the need to do it diminishes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 which is not, doesn’t seem to be very easy to do, change my emotional state.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, again, I think if you understood what you were doing and why you were doing it, just like learning anything, if you understood a formula, I think it wouldn’t be as hard as you think it is. I mean, because there is a way to change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And step one in that process of change is new information.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Always. It’s the forerunner to any experience. Without the information, we doubt that it’s possible. And again, the information and the science removes the doubt.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was doing some research recently about why people change their beliefs and why they don’t change their beliefs. And some beliefs they’re more susceptible to take on, some information they’re more susceptible to take on. One of the things I read about was when they believe the source. Another thing I read about was when it’s good news. So in studies where they say to someone, you’re more attractive according to the public than you believed, they’re likely to shift rather than finding out they’re less attractive. And also things like health, you’re more healthy than you thought you were genetically, they’re more likely to shift a belief. The nature of our beliefs and the nature of belief change, I was writing in my book about how looking in the mirror and telling yourself something, like some of the sort of modern day manifestation community believe, doesn’t seem to work. Just looking in the mirror and telling myself that I’m beautiful and rich and successful and powerful doesn’t seem to be an effective way to cause actual belief change. Do you agree or disagree with this idea that you can look in the mirror and say something to yourself?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

When we study belief and the change in belief, I’ll answer it on two levels, Stephen. The first level is that in order for a person to change a belief or perception about themselves and their life, the majority of those people made a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carried a level of energy that was greater than the hardwired programs in their brain and the emotional conditioning in their body. As I said earlier, their body literally responded to their mind. The choice that they were making became a moment in time they would never forget. They’ll tell you where they were, what time of day it was, who they were with when they made up their mind to change. It became a long-term memory. And the stronger the emotion we feel, the more altered we are inside of us, the more we remember that choice. That’s why we need pain sometimes. And it’s when you said, when you painted yourself into a corner and you said, this is it. I don’t care how I feel, body. I don’t care how long it takes, time. I don’t care what people think. I don’t care what’s going on in my life, environment. I’m gonna do this. And you made up your mind. The moment you felt that emotion, you were aligning to a new future and to change is to be greater than your body, to be greater than your environment and to be greater than time. And so when a person comes out of the resting state, because your body is trillions of cells, 70 trillion cells, and they’re all spying on your brain. And if you were sitting there and you said, nine out of 10 times, I’m going to fake standing up. One time I’m actually going to stand up. Before you ever made that conscious decision, your body is so precognitive. it already knows when you’re going to stand up because it’s got to release a certain amount of adrenaline so the same volume of your blood goes to your brain. So if you’re sitting on the couch with a remote control and you got your cell phone here and your iPad here and your computer here and your dog here and your beer here and the big TV there, and you’re eating your popcorn and you say, you know, I think I’m gonna change tomorrow. What do you think your precognitive body’s gonna say? Relax, he’s lying again. He’s not willing to signal the body it’s time to ride. There’s no signal to the body. And so making that choice to change your state of being with a clear intention and elevated emotion actually changes your state to believe in that future more than you believe in your past. Keep it up. Keep doing it. That’s a big explosion in the field. That’s important. That’s a change in energy. And nobody changes until they change their energy. And when they change their energy, they change their life. So then you make up your mind to do that and all of a sudden you have that synchronicity. You have that serendipity. You have that coincidence. And all of a sudden you’re saying, hey, that worked. Something I did inside of me produced an effect outside of me. I’m going to pay attention to what I did. I’m going to do it again. Let’s try it again. Let’s the experiment continue. You do it again, and then you say, well, when did I stop disbelieving? Oh my God, I stopped disbelieving when I ran into that person, we had that conversation, and oh my God, I returned back to my old belief again. Okay, next time that happens, this is what I’ll do, and you rehearse it in. So your evolution in your belief in self changes as well. So then, so many people, second point, will actually say this, you know, I read the philosophy. I understand the knowledge. I understand what it means to change. I understand the power of meditation. I saw the testimonials. I saw people heal. I believe it’s the truth. I just didn’t believe it could work for me. This is a big moment. This is a moment where you step out of the bleachers and you got to get on the playing field. That’s the person who says, if this works, and I believe it works, I got to prove it to myself. I got to actually prove it to myself that I believe that it could work for me. And some of them show up every day for a year and never miss their work, never miss their meditation. A whole year in changing from the old self to the new self. They were doing their meditations to change, not to heal. They were doing their meditations to change and when they changed, they healed. They did their meditation sometimes three times a day because they stopped believing. They start disbelieving and they were like, I defaulted. Why? Because I’m feeling the emotion of my past. Some stray thought, some response to someone or something caused me to feel it and I forgot. I’m back to the emotion that’s familiar and I can’t believe in that future. I’m believing in my past. Let me sit down and change my state of being again and get up believing in my future again. And sometimes they had to do it three times in one day and when they understood That’s the environment that signals the gene, that’s epigenetics. And the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion, and it is. You could actually signal genes ahead of the environment by changing your emotional state. They were doing it with that intention. And when you assign meaning to the act, you get a greater outcome and you turn on the prefrontal cortex. And now your biology literally begins to change. And we have data that suggests by just having the intention to make certain genes, to make certain proteins or signal certain genes and make certain proteins, just having the intention literally begins to cause the body to make those chemicals.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what causes relapse in those moments? Because I’ve had multiple moments where I thought behaviour change had been established, and I managed to conduct a new habit cycle and new behaviour, favourable intended behaviour for a period, and then something happens in my life. almost subconsciously. Seamlessly. Seamlessly. And I’m back to the old circuitry.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

You went unconscious. You went unconscious. And normally it’s unconscious to some thought or some response in your environment. You see someone or you do something or you have some interaction in your outer world And the moment you have that interaction, it causes you to feel a certain way and you return back to the past, basically. The emotion is the past. And the body’s actually living in the past. It’s so objective it doesn’t know the difference. It doesn’t know the difference between the real life experience that’s creating that emotion and the emotion that person’s living by every day. It’s believing it’s in the same past experience again. And it will behave in the past and it will think in the past. Subconsciously? Subconsciously, seamlessly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I could, for example, if going to, I don’t know, let’s say France, I had a traumatic experience in France when I was 10 years old, let’s just say. And then I go to France when I’m 30 years old and I get back, I just start eating junk food, for example. And I don’t know why. I’ve like fallen out of my gym habit and I’m eating junk food. Theoretically, that could be my subconscious that’s falling back into experiencing that survival without me knowing it.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yes, so if to change is to be greater than your environment, to be greater than your body, and to be greater than time, then your neocortex, your thinking brain, is a reflection of everything you know in your life. It’s an artifact of the past. It’s a record, repository of everything you’ve learned and experienced to this date. And you have a neurological network for everything known in your environment. Your parents, your friends, your car, your computer, every object, every person, everything. You have a neurological network for your identity as your body, from your past, for your ambitions in your future. Your brain is a reflection of everything that’s known. And because you’ve experienced all these elements in your environment, there’s an emotion associated with it. So you have an emotion associated with certain people, different emotions associated with other people, different emotions associated with other objects and things and other places in time. So then There’s so much research to show that when you put a person in the same environment and they see the same people and they go to the same places and they do the same things at their exact same time, it’s no longer their personalities creating their personal reality. Their personal reality is creating their personality. Their environment is controlling unconsciously or subconsciously the way they’re thinking and the way they’re feeling. So when they see their co-worker, when they see their friend, when they see their parents, they’re seeing their parents, their friends, their co-workers and the neurological network as a memory of the past. And because every one of those people has an emotion associated with it, they start feeling the emotion that’s connected to them and now their state of being then is returning back to the past. So then to change then is to be greater. than your environment. To think, act, and feel differently in the same conditions in your life. That’s called change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And how would I do that? I walk in, I see my parents, mom, dad, dog, house where I grew up in. Is there something that I do in that moment, before that moment, when I woke up that morning to make sure that I didn’t slip off into the unconscious memory and then therefore get this sort of unconscious feelings about that experience?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, whatever it is that you want. If it’s overeating, I don’t know, I’m making stuff up. If it’s some emotional button that you have with your family, and you don’t want to feel that way, yeah, I would rehearse that if I didn’t want to have that. If you have a great, if you’re, I mean, I go to, when I would go to my parents’ home when I got older, it was all, most of the associations were so fond for me, just being at home and being with my parents and remembering where I grew up, it was always fun for me. And coming back and see how much I changed in coming back and seeing the life that I lived at one point, you know, one point in my timeline. So if it’s something that you truly want to change, you’re going to remind yourself how you’re not going to think. You’re going to remind yourself how you’re not going to act. You’re gonna remind yourself how you’re not gonna feel, and you gotta remind yourself enough times so you don’t forget, because the moment you forget, you go unconscious. Then you’re gonna remind yourself how you are gonna think. You’re gonna remind yourself what you’re going to do, and rehearse it in your mind, and you’re gonna remind yourself what feeling you wanna stay in the entire time so you don’t default back to the old self. If you practice that, I guarantee you, you’ll make some progress. If you lose it, nothing wrong. Tomorrow’s another day. You got another chance and we just get really good at whatever we practice. So then when you return back into your life and you say, okay, no person, no place, no thing, no object, no circumstance, no pain, no craving is gonna cause me to move from this state today. I guarantee you. If you’re able to maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day, something unusual will happen and will come in a way that you least expect. that surprises you and leaves no doubt that what you’re doing inside of you is producing some effect outside of you. And the moment you see the feedback in your environment as a result of your internal change, you’re gonna pay attention and do it again. And you’re gonna start believing, God, did I really create that? Did that really happen because of how I changed? That’s when the game really begins to become exciting. Practice. Practice. I’ve been at it a long time.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I can tell. Practice. People hear that they go, Joe, how long? How much practice? You know, are you talking about, I’ve got to, I’ve got to do this for three, four, five years or, you know, and that practice, what does that look like practically for someone like me who hears everything you’ve just said and wants to make changes and curious of my life? Okay.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

There’s two times when the door to the subconscious mind opens up. When you wake up in the morning, because your brainwaves are going from delta to theta to alpha to beta, and when you go to bed at night, you go from beta to alpha to theta to delta, and you slip through that scale pretty quickly in the morning and the evening. But your brainwaves start to change during those times, and one of the features, one of the important elements of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind. And what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. So 5%, as we said, is our conscious mind, 95% is programmed subconsciously. And if you’re gonna try to change yourself with your conscious mind, you’re outside the operating system. So then you got to learn how to change your brainwaves, slow them down, get beyond the analytical mind, and enter the operating system where you can rewrite a program, where you can make those changes. And so learn how to do that, practice, learn how to do that. And again, it’s not a big deal. It’s easy to learn. And then once you can slow your brainwaves down, and you’re more suggestible to what you’re thinking, now you can reprogram. You can’t do it with your conscious mind. You can say, I’m healthy, I’m healthy, I’m wealthy, I’m wealthy, I’m unlimited, I’m unlimited, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m whole, I’m whole, and your body’s saying, no, you’re not, dude, you’re miserable, you’re unhappy. That thought never makes it past the brainstem to reach the body, right? So… It’s important for us to, in the morning or the evening, instead of reaching for our cell phone as the first thing, as a habit that we do, and checking our texts and our WhatsApp and our Telegram and our social media and our Instagram and our Twitter and Facebook, whenever else people do their emails, they get connected to everything known in their life. Before you start that, try this out as an experiment. Before you start your day, instead of falling into that redundant habit, you know, go on autopilot, just say, okay, if the change is to be greater than my body, to be greater than my environment, be greater than time, and the environment’s so seductive, and my body’s craving certain emotions, and it’s programmed to get up and do things, I’m gonna sit my body down, I’m gonna tame the animal here. And when I’m ready to get up, we’re gonna get up. Not when it’s tired or when it wants to go. You could literally go inward and forget about your outer world. No longer think about anything out there. If you could lose track of the familiar past or the predictable future and fall into the present moment. And if you were sitting there in silence aware of nothing but you and you said, okay, what is the greatest expression of myself I can be today? and do that exact process. Let me write down two thoughts that are not going to slip by my awareness unnoticed by me today. Two memories, whatever it is. What are two behaviors I want to change today? Let me stay conscious of them and not go unconscious to them today. Even if it means how I speak. What are two emotions that I live by every day that I can literally change? I want to become conscious of what they feel like in my body. I want to catch them the moment I start feeling them. Let me review them over and over again, enough times so I don’t go unconscious. Okay, now I’m conscious of my unconscious, that 95%. How do I want to think? How would greatness think today? Let me review it. Let me repeat it. Let me remember how I am going to think. Let me remember how I am going to think. Let me remember how I’m going to behave here. How am I going to act here? Let me rehearse a change I want to make in a certain circumstance. Let me think about how I do want to feel today. Let me open my heart to life again. Let me feel kindness and care and love and gratitude and appreciation. Let me just bring up that feeling. Let me feel it with my heart. Let me keep bringing it up so I can bring it up enough times, I want to get so good at bringing up this feeling with my eyes closed, I can do it with my eyes open. Practice that, and you not make a decision to not get up until you feel that emotion. And ask yourself, can I stay in this state my entire day? And if you can’t, and you go unconscious, ask yourself at the end of the day, how’d I do? Where do I go unconscious? Okay, tomorrow morning, new day, new lifetime. Let me go again. Let me try again. And it’s the practice, it’s the repetition that causes the change. Now here’s the beauty behind this, because all of a sudden, when those synchronicities start to happen, when the coincidences start to happen, it’s no longer a have to. It’s no longer all cheese. I gotta go create my life. It’s not like that It’s like the magic is happening. You don’t want it to end like you you realize that you are actually creating outcomes in your life And now you’re not you’re you’re you’re you’re wanting to do the work because you want the magic to continue in your life And that’s kind of what I’m super proud of with our community. We’re doers, you know we they do the work not because they have to because They love all the changes that happen in their life as a result of it, whether it’s a mystical experience, a transcendental moment, a great opportunity in their life. They’re like, wow, I somehow had a hand in creating this. So the excitement of life, the adventure of life, the unknown becomes the quest.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m so, so I’ve got to admit, I’m one of those people that wakes up in the morning and then just gets dragged, dragged off out of the bed by my phone and notifications and off into my day, totally unconscious. And there’s been so many things that I reflect on in my life and go, man, I just really want to, I’ll get home at the end of the day and I’ll look at certain instances where I responded in certain ways and go, man, I hate that about myself. And I really want to change that. And it happens again the next day. And I come home and I think, man, I hate that about myself. And I really want to change that. And it happens the next day. And it’s been happening for two years.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

When do you want to change that? When you’re ready to change that, you will. When it becomes boring and it becomes predictable.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I don’t want to have to wait for a crisis.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, now that you know, you can’t not know. Now that you know, you can’t not know. And on some level, you may have a belief that you think this is hard.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I’ve struggled with it. Yeah.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah. And it’s just like, uh, you going, learning snowboarding and never taking a lesson. Right. It’s going to be like, it’s going to be tenuous. It’s going to be challenging. It’s going to be difficult. Put your time and learn how to do it. And it gets easier as you do it. It’s just like, you just, you just have to learn the formula. There’s a formula that we’ve discovered that it’s, it’s actually enjoyable when you do it right. and you actually like it. People want to do more of it because it feels so good. I mean, you look at the HRV measurements of our community, look at our brain scans. These are people that, they’re not faking ecstasy. They’re not faking it. Their brain is at such a level of arousal. And the arousal’s not pain, the arousal’s not Fear, the arousal is not aggression or anger. The arousal is ecstasy. The brain is going in this heightened state. They’re making a connection to something really big. And that feels really good. And when they realize that they’ve hit something really big and it’s not coming from anyone or anything outside of them, they stop looking for it out there. And they realize it’s been within them the whole time. I think so many people, want so many things in their life, but what we really want is wholeness. Because when you have wholeness, you can’t want. How could you want when you’re whole? You only want when you’re in lack. When there’s brain and heart coherence, there’s a level of wholeness that takes place where a person is no longer interested in separation or lack. They feel like they have everything they want. That’s a great place to be in. And we’ve discovered that the more relaxed you are in your heart, the more awake you are in your brain. It’s relaxed in the heart and awake in the brain. And we teach that. People actually can get good at doing that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I really wanna talk to you about this brain coherence and this heart coherence. I have to close off on that morning routine thing by asking you exactly what did you do this morning? Ooh.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

This morning. I was up probably around 4.30. Yeah. Why? Because there’s nobody that can bother me at that time. There’s no emails. There’s no texts. There’s no, there’s my, it’s my time. What time were you in bed? Um, probably between 10 and 11. Okay. That are not enough sleep for you, huh?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Well, no, that is, I think I actually measure my sleep. So I, and I look at it every day. That’s part of the reason I’m dragging out of bed, but

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, for me, four in the morning, five in the morning is a really great time. I’ve just conditioned my body that way. That’s the time. And I spend a little time remembering what I’m doing. What am I doing? What are you doing in this meditation? Why are you doing this meditation? What are you about to do? I like to just get myself in my think box, organizing what am I not going to think about? What am I going to stay away from? What am I not going to do in my meditation? Let me review that. What am I going to do? Subs by www.zeoranger.co.uk When I get that all worked out then I get in my play box. In my play box there’s no thinking. I’ve got all the thinking done in my think box. In my play box it’s really about me changing my state. And so I allow for two hours every morning. Doesn’t mean I always take it or need it, let me say that. But I allow for two hours. Sometimes I like to just get my mind straight and then I do the work. I do the work and I like to get to that point where when I’m done I feel like something changed. Yeah. What does the work look like? It’s meditation. Yeah. It’s finding the present moment. It’s getting into the unknown. It’s getting beyond myself, disconnecting from my body, getting beyond any thought of anyone or anything, getting beyond time, moving beyond space and time. Turns out when you focus on nothing, there are so many amazing things that happen to your brain. I’ve seen the scans over and over again. What have you seen in the scans? Well, there’s this thing in the brain called modularity. And when we’re living by the hormones of stress, and stress is when you can’t predict something, when you can’t control something, or you have the perception that something’s going to get worse, you switch on that fight or flight nervous system, and the rush of those chemicals causes us to become alert, to become aroused. and we narrow our focus on the material world. And so when you’re not able to control everything in your life and you can’t predict everything in your life, you start shifting your attention to everyone and everything, every person, every object, every place. We’ve all had that experience when we’re under stress and every one of those people, those objects, those things, those places has a neurological network in the brain. So like a lightning storm in the clouds, the brain begins to fire out of order very incoherently. It becomes modulated or compartmentalized. It’s a house divided against itself, and those individual compartments don’t talk to the rest of the brain. And we tend to get over-focused. You never notice when you’re under stress, you’re obsessing about something, you’re over-focusing about something, you’re over-thinking something, you’re over-analyzing, you’re driving your brain higher and higher into higher states of arousal, high beta brainwave patterns. We discovered that if you teach a person to go from a narrow focus on something physical, something material, and broaden their focus, open their awareness and put their attention on space, on nothing, and create what’s called a divergent focus, the act of sensing and no longer analyzing thinking, begins to slow the brainwaves down from that beta brainwave state to a low-level beta and then all of a sudden to alpha. If they keep doing it, sensing space tends to cause those different compartments that were modulated or divided to begin to synchronize. And what syncs in the brain actually links in the brain. So the brain starts firing in a more holistic state. In other words, every single area of the brain is resonating at the same frequency. And now the brain is functioning as one neurological network instead of individuals. And that kind of holism, that kind of order feels really good. It feels really good. And so people practice slowing their brainwaves down, not only to get beyond the analytical mind, but to cause the brain to fire in a more coherent way. And if we’re going to have a clear intention about what we want, the more coherent the brain, the clearer the intention. So we’ve seen in seven days, even in four days, these dramatic changes in the levels of coherence and order that take place in the brain. The brain’s firing in a more holistic state. That’s when the person notices a change in their anxiety and their depression and their PTSD, whatever it is. There’s more order in the brain. And the act of focusing on nothing and opening your awareness to space creates that kind of amazing change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Did you set an intention this morning? I did. Can you tell me what it is?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Oh, I want to be relaxed and awake. I want to be present with everything that I do. I want to stay in my heart the entire day. And I want to be inspired by, you know, the idea of helping people change.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you struggle? I do. Yeah.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

What do you struggle with? Wow. I run a lot of different aspects of my company. I have events side. We have a product side. We have corporate consulting. We have 250 corporate trainers. We have a vitamin company called Biocentropy. We work with remote coherence healers that actually are, we do research and they’re remotely changing people’s health. We have a huge research team with University of California San Diego. We have a lot of players on the team. We have non-profits. What else do we have? We have an inner health coalition for physicians and doctors and healthcare practitioners around the world that want to teach a different model. So I have a lot of different things that I have my hand in. And I think, you know, I’m creative by nature. And I like to be creative. And sometimes I have a lot of obligations in terms of making decisions for 2026, decisions about things that I need to do, documentaries, whatever it is. And I think I struggle with not having, wanting more time for being creative. And that’s kind of the fun part of my job, whether I look at the data, I see the research, and then I go, oh my God, I want to do a meditation. Now I understand how to do this meditation or teach this better. All the information that we’re gathering in our research is to teach transformation better. That’s why I want to close the gap between knowledge and experience. So we have billions of data points, and it’s a lot of time to look through all that and to learn about it. But if I would choose to do something, I would love to study the research more, love to create more meditations, teach some more unique courses. And so I think one of my challenges really is to be able to stay creative with everything I have going on in my life.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 I think everyone that’s a high achiever always wishes they could pause time.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think we’re at such a level of growth right now too, just globally. I mean, our events sell out in 10 minutes, you know, five, 10 minutes. And we have a waiting list of sometimes 10,000 people. That’s a problem. You know, that’s a, And I won’t give up doing live events. I won’t do it online. I think there’s something special that happens in community.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And so. I’ve never met someone who is so mission driven and doing so well in this department that also isn’t paying a personal cost for the mission in some regard or capacity.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, I think I’ve learned a few things over the years about that. I think one of the great things, number one, is I have an amazing team. I mean, I am nothing without my team. And they’re creatives, and they’re cool, and they’re emotionally intelligent, and they’re not nine-to-fivers. They share the same mission with me. They see the same vision. They do it for the same reason. Somehow they’re part of that change and transformation. And so my team is able to allow me to do something really, really unique, and that is to focus on what I love to do more than anything else. So my team is a super, super huge help for me. So I think that it’s an important element. The other thing that I work on, I think, every day of my life is to be the example of everything that I teach. I mean, that’s important for me because I want to be in the game with everybody. So when I see transformation, when I see miracles, when I see healings, when I see change, when I see poor people become rich, whatever that is, and I’m a part of that, I think it’s really, it humbles me. It really makes me more humble in seeing what’s possible for human beings. And so I never want this work to be about me. I want it to be about you. I want it to be, I want to celebrate your story.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know, I,

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I want to be there for that person when they open their eyes and we’re blind and they’re seeing for the first time. I want to be right there. I want to be there. I want to remember that moment and her joy. So for me, I work on being the example in every way that I can. And sometimes it requires a lot of extra time to do that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What is the, and this is an interesting use of phrase, because I’m saying the word cost as if it’s a negative, but I just, I think everyone that’s leading a mission, whatever that might be, and they’re really dedicated to that mission and the way that you are flying around the world, continuing to do it in person, where most people, you know, everyone knows you could just do it online and you’d probably make more money, to be honest. You know, there’s people that just have moved online post-pandemic. You’re giving a level of dedication and personal investment into this mission. that must, well I assume, it must come at a personal cost to some degree.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

You make sacrifices. You have to sacrifice relationships at times, you know, sometimes you can’t be where you want to be. But I think that the people in my life that love me understand my mission and they respect that. Sometimes I’m on six different time zones in four weeks and that’s a lot for my body, you know, but God watching somebody on the stage just the other day tell the story of how she overcame trifacial neuralgia in one moment in the event. She wanted someone to chop her head off. That’s how much pain she had in her face for years. One moment. She said, I have no pain. That was the first time I’ve not had pain in years. To me, like, that’s worth all the lost luggage, the missed flights, the jet lag, that to me is worth more than all the gold in the world. I mean, I don’t know, it’s just so uncommon and yet something innate in us wakes up. Something wakes up in us when we see that. We forgot. We forgot and somehow we remember. You ask my staff, what is the greatest part of their job? They’ll tell you being a part of transformation, being a part of it, being a part of that. So there is a cost always. And at the same time, I really work on figuring out ways to do things better. I mean, I think that’s one of the things I love about myself is just learning from my experience, learning from my past. And I think experience is the greatest professor. and just saying, okay, if I had another opportunity, how could we do it differently? How could we serve better? You know, how can we make it easier? What can we do differently? And again, I just have a great team that’s super committed to whether they’re running events, whether they’re creating logos, whether they’re doing a brand, whether they’re managing the website, whatever they’re, you know, running them, composing music with me for meditations or doing research. We just have really people that share that same mission. And I think changing individuals one by one to somehow make a change in the world, And being a part of that’s pretty cool.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Was there a catalyst moment in your life that sent you more so in this direction?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Sure. I mean, I got run over by a truck in a triathlon in 1986 in Palm Springs, California. And I broke six vertebrae in my spine and I had bone fragments on my spinal cord and I had the neural arch of T8 compressing on the cord. So the typical prognosis for that, you know, is, is, uh, Harrington rod surgery. They, they put these long stainless steel rods in your spine. So in my case, it would be from the base of my neck to the base of my spine, stabilize the entire spine. And, um, I just had four opinions from four of the leading surgeons in Southern California and I was in my 20s and I just couldn’t imagine myself living on addictive medications or not being able to do whatever I love to do physically. So I decided not to have the surgery. I just went against the opinions of the experts and I just thought maybe there’s a way that my mind could heal my body. And so that started my journey and somehow it worked. So I’ve been spending the rest of my life studying that.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Had that not happened, do you think you would have gone in a different direction? Sure.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. What if the worst thing that happened to you is the best thing that happened to you?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And that starts this, you create this belief in your mind that you can heal yourself using your mind.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Well, it was kind of crazy because I think when you’re faced with crisis in a situation like this, we tend to focus on the worst thing that could happen instead of the best thing that could happen. And that’s because of the hormones of stress and emergency. You always prepare for the worst. Better chances of survival if you think about the worst. It took an enormous amount of energy for me to stop that, to stop thinking that way and stop feeling that way. Six and a half weeks of a dark night of the soul, I would say. Because I couldn’t get my brain to do what I wanted it to do. Even though I theoretically and understood it, I just kept defaulting. And I spent hours. And finally I was able to kind of get control over it. And then as soon as I started noticing some changes in my body, that’s when I just, The moment I started feeling my limbs again, and the moment I started noticing I was moving a little better, I knew somehow I was having an effect. And that’s the moment it all changed for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Running all these businesses, Joe, and you have such an empire of businesses and projects and people and teams all over the world. How have you managed your relationship with technology? Because technology is omnipresent in my life. And that’s why I say I get dragged out of bed by it.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Steven, I never planned on doing any of this. I never planned on doing any of this. I mean, all the corporate stuff just came out of a few lectures because there were CEOs and presidents of companies that urged me to create a model for change for companies and organizations. I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to do an inner health coalition with doctors, just our community. There’s an emergent consciousness that says, please do that. So we’re working on, in the same vein of the same mission, giving people, our community, listening to our community and creating more of that for people. I don’t have any difficulty if it’s part of the mission to do any of those things. I think it’s, I think if I were just doing my events, and that’s it, and we could just do that, my life would be a whole lot simpler. But all these other things that we’re doing now in terms of, they also bear a lot of fruit. I mean, the research that we’re doing right now is, I can say right now, Stephen, that what we’re doing is no longer pseudoscience. I can say that now, it’s no longer pseudoscience. I could say that in seven days, your body can make a pharmacy of chemicals that work better than any drug. I can tell you that one intervention called meditation can change a host of different health conditions. There’s no drug that does that. So if I weigh all those different things that I have to evolve in some way against the effects it’s producing, it’s always, for me, worth the effort.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Are you happy? Yeah.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

What does that mean? That I don’t need anyone or anything to make me happy.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That’s your definition of happiness?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think, yeah, I mean, if you have a kind of a freedom of expression without any real limitation and you’re comfortable with you and you love what you’re doing and you feel good about it. And sure, I mean, I’m always in the river of change. I’m always looking for blind spots. I’m always working on evolving who I am. I always want to evolve my experience. I always want to look to see if it serves me. Do you have sad days? I have days where I’m overwhelmed by just everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what are the symptoms of that overwhelm?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

It takes me a little bit to focus my attention again. Just too many things I have to think about. So I have to take a little time and get centered and organized. But do I have sad days? I don’t know. Sad. I don’t really know sad, but kind of days where I’m kind of introspective without needing much emotion. Yeah, I have those days, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If this were to be your last day on earth, Joe. Wow. And there was just a central message that the millions of people that could be listening right now, you felt that they needed to hear, that would serve them the best and serve us collectively the best. What might that central message be?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

it’s important for people to believe in themselves. I think it’s really important for people to remember that they’re the creators on some level and they have a hand in creating in their life. And that possibility is something that they should always keep their mind open to. I think that we’re greater than we think. We’re more powerful than we know, more unlimited than we could ever dream.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you realize how many people you’ve helped um gosh i don’t know i don’t know maybe you must be moved by the feedback you get because i was reading through testimonials and messages and all the top comments and stuff and it’s really really profound stuff you know and it’s hard to imagine a world where that that doesn’t touch you know

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

sit with you, for better or for worse. You know, people stop me a lot of times and I’ll be somewhere and they’ll say, hey, I know you hear this a lot, but you really helped me or you really changed my life. And I always say to them, I never get tired of the story. It’s the feedback for me that inspires me to keep doing what I’m doing. So I love the stories. I love those. I love to hear them. And it challenges many times my own belief about what’s possible. So yeah, I think I love to celebrate that with people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

This next chapter of your life is successful. We sit here 10 years from now and you say, Steve, that was a fantastic decade for you. What would have happened in that decade for you to say that?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Gosh, we would publish a lot of papers that show how powerful people really are. We would have our own research center where we could do even further studies on cancer, on all different chronic health conditions. We were studying the effects of healing on others, and we have really profound data on that as well. I think that the conversation in healthcare and medicine could change on some level. I mean, the conversations that I’m having with researchers and physicians are not the same conversations I was having just two years ago, especially when they look at our data, they kind of fall out of their chair. I mean, it’s, I mean, as an example, a drug study is about 25% causality. One in four respond and it’s usually you know, 60 days, 90 days a year before you see a change. Our data is between 75 and 85% causality. That means eight out of 10 people are getting a response and they’re not taking anything, no exogenous substance. In other words, their nervous system is producing a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than any drug, right? So I think the conversation around emotional regulation and emotional health could change. That’s something that I’m interested in. I think meditation could be something that is a way of life for more people to be healthier and to be happier and to be more whole. I mean, when I started this journey, you couldn’t even say meditation in public. You couldn’t say it in certain organizations, corporations, government agencies. It was not allowed, right? Now it’s sexy, now it’s cool, right? So, demystifying that process, because there’s so many colloquialisms and slangs and idioms that have to do with meditation, demystifying that process. You know, we don’t teach any traditional meditation. We don’t teach anything that’s based on culture or religion. We teach meditation based on the data we see, based on the brain scans, based on the HRVs, based on the data that we’re collecting. We know the words now, we know the music, we know the timing, we know a lot of things in terms of transformation that has helped us in so many ways.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What do you think is going to become sexy in 10 years from now that’s not sexy now? Like meditation?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

God, I hope it’s not AI. I hope it’s not. I hope it’s not. I hope it’s something that has to do with the human spirit.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m interrupting this broadcast with a very special announcement. Two years ago, I started writing a book based on everything I’ve learned from doing this podcast and meeting all of the incredible people that I’ve had the privilege of meeting. but also from my career in business, from running my marketing businesses, my software business, my investment fund, and everything else that I’ve been doing in business and life. And from this, I’ve created a brand new book called The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws for Business and Life. If you want to build something great or become great yourself, like the guests that I’ve sat here and interviewed, I ask you, please, please, please read these 33 laws. The book I always should have written. If you like this podcast, this book is for you. And it is available now in the description of this podcast below. And every single day until it’s out later this month, one person that pre-orders it, that takes a picture of their pre-order, uploads it to their story on Instagram or social media and tags me, will win a gold version of this book signed by me. And there’s only 33 copies of those available. So pre-order it now, tag me on social media when you do, and 33 of you are going to win a very, very special book. For those of you that don’t know, this podcast is sponsored by Whoop, a company that I’m a shareholder in, and I’m obsessed with my Whoop. It’s glued to my wrist 24-7, and for those of you that don’t know, it’s essentially a personalized, wearable health and fitness coach that helps me to have the best possible health. My Whoop has literally changed my life. Weep is doing something this month which I’d highly suggest checking out. It’s a global community challenge called the Core 4 Challenge. Essentially, they guide you through a set of four activities throughout the month of August that are scientifically proven to improve your overall health. I’m giving it a go and I can’t wait to see the impact it has on me and I highly recommend you to join me with that. So if you’re not on Weep yet, there is no better time to start. If you’re a friend of mine, there’s a high probability that I’ve already given you a Weep because I’m that obsessed with it. It is the thing that I check when I wake up in the morning. It’s the first thing that I look at. I want the information on my sleep to then plan my day around. So if you haven’t joined Whoop yet, head to join.whoop.com slash CEO to get your free Whoop device and your first month free. Try it for free. And if you don’t like it after 29 days, they’re going to give you your money back. But I have a suspicion that you’re going to keep it. Check it out now and let me know how you get on. Send me a DM. Much of your work is now trying to bring people together in 3D. And I saw this as I was on your website earlier on today. I was looking at some of your upcoming initiatives. One in particular was this walk that you’re doing, which I found really, really interesting. This is the first ever global walk that will take place on Saturday, September the 23rd, 2023 this year. All the details are at www.walkforthe.world. And I was reading about why you’re doing this, and the words community came up, the words illusion of separation came up.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, I think, you know, if you study the peace gathering projects that have been done, peer-reviewed articles of peace gathering projects, when people come into a community, they meditate on peace, a city. The crime rates go down, violence goes down, car crashes, car accidents go down, economic growth goes up. Somehow there’s a change in the collective. But when the meditation ends and the peace gathering project ends, the crime rate returns back to the same, the car accidents and the violence return back to the same ceiling value as it was before. It’s not enough to just pray. It’s time to be the prayer, right? So walking meditation, we do in our community and we do a lot of them because you’ve got to be able to walk as it. You’ve got to be able to do it with your eyes open. Doing it with your eyes closed is a practice so you can do it with your eyes open so you can demonstrate it. Demonstrate peace. Demonstrate love. Demonstrate change for the world. And so the walking meditations, there’s four types of meditations. There’s seated meditation, we do a lot of that, and that’s traditional. There’s a standing and a walking meditation. And there’s a lying down meditation. And we teach all of those. But the standing and walking meditation is a great way to stand up for the world. and decide, if I change and enough of us change, we could actually change the world. So meditation starts with our eyes closed, standing up with our eyes closed, and getting into an altered state. Music changes, we open our eyes, and we walk as that change. We embody that change. We live that change. We think about what we’re going to leave behind for a new world. What if I change? Am I part of the whole? Could I affect the whole? And so a person walks for a period of time, they stop again, they close their eyes, they recalibrate, they get back in that feeling, they open their eyes and they walk again. And so walking meditation is a great way for thousands and thousands of people from around the world to walk for change in the world. And we have such compelling data about collective networks of observers with brain and heart coherence that somehow when you have a random event generator in our ballrooms, and people change their state and they have an intention, that random events become less random and more intentional. In other words, a machine that’s programmed to toss a coin a thousand times a second, multiple times a second. The more you toss a coin, the more you’re gonna get 50-50, right? So if you have a machine in the room and nobody’s in the room, you see just kind of this line stay right around the 50-50 mark. But when you fill that room with people, and they change their state and they have an intention, all of a sudden you see that line break way out of normal. And a program machine that’s normally flipping zeros and ones starts behaving very differently. It tells us that collective networks begin to determine reality. And it’s not the number of people. It’s not the amount of energy. You have entropic energy. It’s the most coherent group of people. So if we come together on one day, and this will be one of many walks, You leave everything behind. Bring your family, bring your friends, bring your co-workers, bring your neighbors. You never have to have done a meditation before. We’ll guide people through it. We’ll give them the mp3 file. And we have just over 800 or 900 cities now from around the world that are from people from around the world that are participating. And the numbers are growing, so we don’t know where it’ll go, but it’s our first attempt to just say, if we just can move the needle one degree and off that trajectory, off that timeline, just in another timeline, then it’s served its purpose. So yeah, we’re excited about it. It’s the first one, and hopefully we’ll do some more.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll put all the details below wherever you’re listening to this so you can check it out. I was wondering as you were speaking, Joe, I was asking myself, you’re someone that’s constantly doing research and developing new ideas and hypotheses about the world and the way humans are and the way the universe is. Do there exist beliefs in your head that you’re too scared to share?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

You mean beliefs that I have that are from experience? Or beliefs that I have that are conjecturous?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Either. Both.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, I have a very strong belief that the probability of us seeing the truth in reality is zero. I think that we perceive less than 1% of reality. The brain is missing out on a lot of data. And I think we should never exclude ourselves from the unknown. You know, I think there’s a whole part of the unknown self that we’re unaware of, that I think exists beyond linear time and space. And I do believe that it’s real.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 And you don’t know what that is?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Oh, I do, yeah. I think it’s a realm beyond space and time that I think, you know, your eye right now is perceiving a very small spectrum of frequency, a visible light. It’s a very tiny slice in the electromagnetic spectrum. And that visible light, red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet, is actually bouncing off of the slowest and most stable form of energy called matter. And that gives us this perception of separation, right? Well, that small spectrum is less than 1% of what we actually can perceive. So I think that our senses plug us into reality, into three-dimensional reality. But I think there are realities that exist beyond space and time that we’re unaware of.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That we can tap into?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Yeah, yeah, I do. And I think there are latent systems in the brain that, once activated, allows the brain to transduce that energy, that frequency, into profound information.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

 Does psychedelics drugs work in that way?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I think psychedelics give a person a perception of reality that’s beyond three-dimensional reality. We’re discovering that the nervous system makes its own pharmacy of psychedelics. In fact, we have really recent data that shows that many people that have a mystical experience in our work that have fMRIs look like they’re on psilocybin. Yeah. And yet your nervous system’s making that natural chemical endogenously.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And how were those mystical experiences triggered?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

I’ll give you the short version. There’s a tiny little gland in the back of your brain called the pineal gland. And the pineal gland has tiny little crystals inside of it that are stacked up on top of each other, rhombohedron in shape. And that little tiny gland acts like a radio receiver for electromagnetic frequencies. And when those crystals can become activated, like a radio receiver, they can pick up frequencies that are beyond your senses, the quantum. And they can transduce. It’s called a transducer. It can transduce that frequency like a TV antenna into profound imagery, a very full-on sensory experience without your senses.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Explains a lot. Explains a lot. My girlfriend always talks to me about the penile gland and DMT and, you know, and the power of everything you’ve just described. I just want to remain open minded. because being closed-minded at any point in my life is not conducive with progress and growth. So my desire in doing this podcast generally is just to learn from people that have new perspectives on the nature of the world and to remain humble in the fact that I know very little. So what you said at the end there about us knowing, almost knowing zero about the nature of true reality or whatever that might mean, I do believe. I do believe that I know very little about the true nature of reality and my senses have deceived me, whether it’s in psychedelic states or other states, so I’m very aware of the fragility of this experience or, you know, whether truth is what I think it is.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

 Yeah, well, I think it only takes one mystical moment, one transcendental moment for us to realize that we’re missing out on a little bit of reality.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they’re leaving a question for. If you were made president of this country and you had to implement laws that would make our lives better, What would you do and why?

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

Wow, where do we start? Oh boy. Well, I would consider education to be a much bigger priority for both people that teach, that they’re rewarded in a better way, and the educational system to be more Socratic and more stimulating for people to question and to have healthy debates. I think that’s great. I would consider looking at the medical model a little bit more and really look to see if healthcare is really helping people in this country. I would find ways to unify different sects or different organizations or bring them together, bring them to the middle in some way. I think standing up for principles instead of politics is a really healthy thing to do. I’d probably try to figure out a way to reduce the debt, to end war, to find ways that we could coexist with other countries. I’d certainly think a lot about artificial intelligence and decide if it was really, really healthy for human beings. I would encourage in many ways different religions to come together and find ways to get along. I would spend a lot of time with regenerative agriculture in bringing life back to the soil and back to the earth and figure out ways to help the oceans and species that are passing. and to address healthy food, food that is good for people, that is medicine for people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Joe, thank you for your work and thank you on behalf of all the people, the millions of people all around the world that you’re clearly helping without really even knowing it. I’ve never seen such profound testimonials in anything I’ve ever seen. And also the reason why I actually have this on the table isn’t because you asked to promote me. I think your team actually said I didn’t need to put it on the table, but it’s because one of our members of our team, their elderly relative has been going through a lot of pain and struggle in their lives. and they read your book and it really, really helped them this week. So they asked if I could get it signed on behalf of them, which I think is a testament to the impact you’re having on people. So thank you so much, Joe. It’s an honor.

DR. JOE DISPENZA:

No, thank you, Stephen, for all the work you do also. I appreciate it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It’s funny, every year around this time of year, for whatever reason, I go on a little bit of a psychological shift. And that psychological shift, I think, is somewhat inspired by summer. But it’s also inspired by the fact that I want to feel strong in this season of life. And as I age, strength training is my number one form of training. And the question becomes, how do you build muscle? And how do you become strong in terms of supplementation? And this is where Huel’s nutritionally complete protein product is my best friend. for a couple of reasons. One, it tastes better than any protein product I’ve ever tried. Two, in terms of the nutritionally complete aspect, it has the vitamin and minerals you need. It’s about 100 calories, so it’s incredibly light, but it also packs over 20 grams of protein into every serving. Try the salted caramel flavor. It is the bomb. And let me know how you get on.