 I'm excited to introduce our next speaker. His name is Colin and he's from Alchemy42. And I just spoke with Colin for a bit. Really interesting guy, really looking forward to his talk. His specialty is around therapy and socializing, inner game. He trained the first project Rockstar, if you guys have heard of that. And he's been coaching for eight years. Used to live with two girls, not just as roommates, but what he calls a unicorn relationship. He's lived all over the world. He has a very deep understanding of eastern philosophy, spirituality, lived in Hong Kong. He trained Nick Krauser, who's a famous blogger. And people refer to him as the mad professor. Because he often gives advice and two years later, people kind of understand that advice. It's a funny thing. I'm sure you guys can relate to that. You hear something and it doesn't really make sense, but then as you grow, you're like, ah, I remember what that guy said. So, pleasure to introduce Colin. Thank you guys. Right, so hi guys. My name's Colin, as Robbie was saying. I'm a bit of a last minute addition. I was obviously brought in to replace Keychain. I was obviously brought in to replace Keychain. So it's a little bit last minute. I was literally told I was speaking yesterday. So this might be a little bit rough. So please bear with me. So I'm gonna start off with a little joke. So the Dalai Lama, everyone know who the Dalai Lama is? Yep, he walks into a pizza place and he says, excuse me, can you make me one with everything? All right, okay, anyway. So the reason I'm asking is, hands up here, who is spiritual or religious? Okay, so about 50-50 split. Fair enough, don't worry. I'm not gonna start getting all God on you and stuff. As a non-fiction one said, that's a rap group. He said, Muslims, Jews and Christians, we all want the same thing, money, drugs and bitches. And anyone that doesn't, they rub me suspicious. I think that's pretty accurate to most people in the world. We all kinda do want the same sort of stuff. It's just a matter of how you actually get there in the first place. So my talk today is gonna be on science and philosophy. Are they the same thing? Are they different? A little bit of theology. So I'll be talking about people like Buddha, people like Jesus, people like Bruce Lee. So yeah, are these two the same sort of thing? Or are they completely and utterly different? In my experience, what I've found is that science and philosophy, especially theology, the ancient religions, tend to be coming at the same problems from different angles. And previously obviously you had religion which was the sort of the common language. Everyone saw the world through that lens. Nowadays you look at it through the lens of science. But the thing is, like I said, they're coming at it from different directions to the same point. What we're talking about today is basically ancient knowledge and how science has now caught up to that and how it can actually explain a lot of the concepts that you would have maybe heard of through things like Buddhism or Taoism, things like that. Things like inner peace, spirituality, calmness, being centered, that sort of stuff. So first of all, to start with, I'm gonna give you a little metaphor that I like to use. So if you would like to imagine that big black screen over there is a fish tank. I'd like you to visualize it in your head. Really imagine it, picture it as clearly as you can. Picture everything that's in it and all that sort of stuff. Okay, so what do you guys see? Anyone? Okay, so you've got the goldfish. Excellent, what else do you guys see? It's one of those fish tanks from a Chinese restaurant. Okay, right. So you probably see some water, you probably see the fish, you probably see little bits of seaweed or whatever it is, some rocks, that sort of stuff. Maybe some bubbles. The one thing that most people normally tend to not say when I ask that question is that they don't see the glass walls of the fish tank itself. Now, the reason this is important in psychology is that that fish tank is you. That is what we call a reality and that is effectively what you perceive. Everything in the world that you see, everything that you experience, fits inside your fish tank. Now, the glass walls of your fish tank, these are what we call assumptions in psychology. Assumptions in psychology are the things that you don't question. So you don't question gravity. Gravity just is. It's just something that is so fundamental that you never even consider that it could possibly not be there. Now, that's an obvious one, but most people tend to have assumptions within themselves, about themselves. It might be about your attractiveness, it might be about your abilities, it might be about how many people like you, it might be about how good you are at your job. But the point is that they're so fundamental to how you are as a person that they literally create the world that you live in. They create the structure in which you put every experience that you've ever had and that experience forms your lens, the way that you actually see the world that you're living in currently. Does that make sense to everyone currently? Yep. Okay, so we'll come back to the fish tank later on. I just wanted to give you that little piece. So moving on to a little bit of a Taoism. What is Taoism? Taoism's basic tenets and principles are things like compassion for yourself, compassion for others. Enlightenment is obviously the big one that everyone knows of through things like Buddha and things. It's also about self-acceptance. Now the reason that Taoism, and as I said, this is ancient knowledge, has been so recurrent all the way throughout history and why it's making a resurgence now and especially why a lot of people in the sort of self-help community really quite like this is that it works. If you want to be truly happy, one of the main things that you have to learn to do is accept yourself. You have to actually learn to let go of your desires, let go of the things that you're looking to achieve. You can still achieve them. You can still go for them. You can still want to achieve them. But if you place all of your energy into wanting this thing that you don't currently have, what you're doing, and from Taoism they'll tell you this, is you're creating unhappiness within yourself. I grew up in a very privileged environment. I went to school with some of these Salt and the Brunei's nephews, things like that. So I went to school with a very, very rich. And the one thing that I noticed between them and my friends in Scotland, where they were mostly on the dole, was that there was very little difference between the levels of happiness. And in fact, the richer people tended to actually be less happy. The more stuff that you have in your life, the more stuff you have to lose. That causes fear. And fear causes inaction, fear causes dissatisfaction with your life. It also causes jealousy, envy, all these sort of other things. And these are the things that truly make you an unhappy person. The situation that you find yourself in the world can be anything. You can be in prison, you can be the head of a CEO, 500 company. It really makes no difference. But how you perceive what you have currently is how you actually feel in the world. I mean, that sounds like quite an obvious thing. But when you're out, for example, say trying to make some friends and people aren't wanting to respond to you or something, by desperately wanting those people, you're not only making it less likely to want to be friends with you because you become needy and you need their validation. But at the same time, you're making yourself a lot unhappier and it's obviously something that you'd probably rather not be doing. Now, within Taoism, they always talk about things like meditations, conquering your mind. As the Buddha once said, your mind is your greatest enemy. But once harnessed, nothing can help you so much. Now, with the fish tank metaphor that I was talking about previously, that's kind of what he's talking about. The assumptions that you make about yourself are the assumptions about the world that you make. Oh, people should like me. I need to be rich. I need to be successful. I need to get that girl. People must all love me. These are all assumptions that you make that you will then try and enact in the world. And the more you try to enact these things that the world doesn't quite fit into, the more resistance you're gonna come up against. Now, it doesn't matter how strong you are, how successful you are, how powerful you are, the world is bigger. It'll always be bigger and always has been bigger and you can't fight it. What you should try and do is go with it. Learn to live within the world that you're in at the moment. Try and change the world around you a little bit. As Gandhi once said, be the change that you want to see. But always accept that whether you succeed or fail, that's not really the point. The point is that by doing it in the first place, by trying to attempt these sort of things, you're actually bringing more to your life than the goal itself. You've probably heard the phrase, the map is not the territory and the destination is not the journey. That's exactly what they're talking about. As you're going through life, being present, being in the very present moment, something that Eckhart Tolle would talk about, it's also basically stolen from Taoism and Buddhism, being in the present moment is the best place to be. I once heard a phrase and it said, those who are depressed live in the past and those who are anxious live in the future and those who are happy live right now. That is very true. If you can learn to accept that one part about life, if you can truly learn to live in the moment right here right now, accept who you are right now and know that whilst you're always changing and eventually you'll be a different person, right now you're still worthy. You're still the sort of person, the best person that you could possibly be right now. Within you, there's all the things you need to succeed. So what does this matter? Like I said, it's for things like calmness. It's for things like happiness. It's for things like strength and it's for things like drive. The more calm you are on the inside, the more people are gonna like you. Have you ever had that moment where you're talking to someone who just seemed so, just so with it, so confident, so casual, so relaxed. They're not in your face, they're not aggressive, they're not boasting. They don't really seem to mind what's going on but they have that calm feeling to them and you just sort of drawn to them. You want to be around them. You sense that they're sort of in control. Now, like I said, the world is a much bigger place than you, me or anyone else and this is why most people try and fight the world. They try to gain control. It's something that human beings do naturally. We need to live in a world of control because obviously living in a place where you feel you're out of control is a scary thing. This is more about the Taoism, Buddhism, the meditations. Getting to a stage where you can accept the things you cannot change. You can accept the things that are the way they are and you can just live with them and move with them. Much less resistance, much more happiness. It's a very, very hard thing to do. You know, like many, many people have spent many, many decades in a cave somewhere and a hill meditating and trying to get to that point and still haven't quite achieved it. But this isn't a zero sum game. This isn't something that you do it and you either win it or you don't win it. It's a constant progression and every day that you're doing it, your life will be getting just a little bit better, just a little bit easier. And what you'll also find is as you become more calm and as you become more self accepting of who you are as a person, other people will become much more accepting of you. Women will find you more attractive. Men will want to be your friend. People want to give you jobs. They like being around you. No one wants to be around the neurotic guy who's down in himself and low self esteem and is always whining and complaining. That's not a fun person to be around. But the guy who's just like, ah, well, you know, such as life, you know? Kind of Bob Marley style. So, you guys have probably heard of a thing called the Yin Yang, the circle with the two halves and whatnot, yeah? Well, Yin Yang is the Taoist symbol. It's actually from Taoism specifically. It talks about hard and the soft, the dark and the light, the good and the bad, the male and the female. And it's a very good metaphor for life. Everyone in here currently is a man, but within you there is a little bit of woman. Now, within every single woman, there's a little bit of man as well. It's the combination of the hard and the soft. Anything that is far too hard is brittle. It's unflexible, it's unyielding, and when it comes up against a force that is superior to itself, it will break. It'll snap, it'll crumble, it'll disintegrate. But obviously, the other side, if you're far too soft, everything just goes through you. You can't hold anything to you, you can't resist anything, and you're at the mercy of the world. Now, the key to this is to have the combination of both, like the Yin Yang symbol, half and half, a good mixture. Tapping into your feminine side, tapping into your sensitive side, tapping into your strong side, whatever it is that you currently are, trying to enhance the other side, just that little bit more to give you that balance. Now, you've probably heard of my friend Bruce Lee. He once said, be like water. You've probably seen some of his movies, it's one of his famous quotes. He said, be like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes a cup. If you put water into a teapot, it becomes a teapot. And this is what you have to be in life. You can't force the world to fit you, but what you can do is learn to fit the world better with the skills that you have. So by actually having that flexibility, having that softness, this can be very, very useful. Now, in terms of like, say, dating and things like that, having this softness can simply be as simple as being more relaxed, being more easy going. You meet a girl, you get her number or something, and then you call her up the next day, and she can't quite meet then, but you know, it's a couple of weeks away. You can either sit there going, oh, well, how do I, how do I figure out how to make this girl meet me tomorrow? Oh, I'm gonna lose her, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. Or you can just go, okay, cool. Be like water, be soft, and allow it to pass, and then get back in touch with her a little bit later, and then you'll probably end up picking up with her. So, what would Jesus do? I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Gnostic Bibles at the moment. The Gnostic Bibles are the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are scrolls that were found in the early part of last century, and they were hidden away around about the time when the current Bible was written because the Catholic Church went across the world trying to burn all the other Gospels they didn't want people to hear. These include things like Gospels from Mary Magdalene and some of the other apostles that aren't included. There's only like four or five in the current Bible, and they talk about Jesus in a way that is totally different to the Bible. What they talk about Jesus as is more like Buddha but with a Hebrew accent. He effectively was saying that the kingdom of God is within you, and not as in God as in like, oh, some bloke with a beard, but like the kingdom of God as in heaven, the place where you are eternally happy, the true happiness. What he was saying was that you don't go through the church. What you do is you go through yourself. You connect to yourself, you believe in yourself, you learn exactly who you are as a person. You figure out what your fish tank is. You figure out where the walls of your fish tank are damaged, where they're out of shape, where they don't quite fit in a truly functional manner. You figure those things out, and once you've figured out what your issues are and where they come from, things like that, this is effectively what therapy does nowadays. You figure out where you've gone wrong, basically. What's happened to you that has created this little thing in your head that's making you unhappy? What's making you needy or anything like that? So what you do is you figure those out and then you learn to let go. It is truly like Taoism and Buddhism. Learning to let go is one of the strongest things that I've ever learned myself and pretty much everyone that I know who's very, very successful, who's a winner, has the ability to recognize that even if you fail, that doesn't really matter. In the grand scheme of things, there's very little in this world that matters. Maybe catching a terminal illness, a friend or family member catching a terminal illness. If you have children and you suddenly don't have enough money to feed them, these sort of things matter. But in the grand scheme of things, most things don't. Losing your job, who cares, get another job. Losing a girl, who gives a fuck? There's lots and lots of girls. It really makes no difference as long as you can recognize that life is a stream. It constantly goes on. I think it was Marcus Aurelius who once said that you can't step in the same river twice because the river is always flowing. You have to accept this and recognize that you can't go back to the past. You can't go somewhere else and get that girl that you couldn't get back then. All you can do is continue with the river and see where it leads you. You can't fight the river either. So like I said, effectively, heaven is within you. Everything is perception. Everything in this world is perception. You all have a very different perception of this particular moment right here right now and it comes from every single experience that each one of you has ever had. So right now some of you will be sitting there going, hmm, this guy's kind of interesting. And some of you will be sitting there going, God, this guy's lame. I wish you'd shut up. And that's okay, but that's your perception. It comes from somewhere inside yourself. The point is that to create heaven within yourself is perception. One of my friends, a guy called Tom, he was the guy who trained at AFC Adam. He says that you can choose how you feel in any given moment and he's entirely right. And I've never met someone who's more happy and easygoing and successful than this guy. He literally, in any given situation, no matter what happens, he'll look for the bright side. He'll look for the positive in it. He won't focus on the negative. He won't sit there getting angry about things. He'll just be very pragmatic. You go, okay, well, that happened. Well, you know, silver clouds and silver linings. Here's the positive side of this sort of thing. I'm going to focus on that and that's going to make me happy. And it does, he's always very happy. And since I've known him, I've been trying to do the same thing. It doesn't always work. I haven't quite completed this sort of journey myself, but I am a lot happier than I've ever been in my entire life. So let go of your desires and learn to accept what is and learn to focus on the positive things. Figure out where your issues come from. Any time you have a reaction to something that seems to trigger something within you, sadness, depression, anger, frustration, jealousy, envy, whatever it is, figure out where it comes from. Figure out why that's doing that. And like I said, learn to let go. It's a very, very, very useful thing to do. So what would Bruce Lee do? Well, you've probably also heard the other famous Bruce Lee quote where he says, if I point at the moon and you stare at my finger, you're going to miss all that heavenly glory. You don't look at the finger, you look at the moon. And that's very similar to most of what you guys are probably doing just now. You probably have a very specific goal in mind that you're focusing on that you really want to go after. And that's a good thing to have. It's always good to have goals, good to have things to aim forward to achieve. But the point is that what you're doing right now is so much bigger than whatever your goal is. Self-improvement isn't about getting the girl. It's not about getting the job. It's not about anything else, really. What it is deeply about is yourself. It's about improving yourself to a point where you don't need other factors in the world. We'll talk about this later. It's called internal and external referencing and I'll come back to that. But fundamentally, it's being content right now with yourself. If I put you in a desert island and you had nothing else except some coconuts and a hut, would you be able to be happy? Or would you constantly be thinking, oh, I miss MTV or I want to drive a fast car or whatever it is? Could you be happy in that particular moment? Because if your happiness is dependent on things external to yourself, you're no longer in control of your happiness. And if you remember what we said earlier on, people like to live in a world of control. So if your happiness is resting on someone else, you need them to do something or to give you something to validate you, to make you happy, to give you joy. That joy can come from within yourself and it really, really should be coming from within yourself. True deep joy like that is very rare and it's a very, very, very attractive quality. If for nothing else, it will get you a lot of stuff. People want to be around those sort of people, like I said. So try and focus on the correct things. I personally think that this stuff that I'm talking about just now is the correct thing. It's the thing that you should be focusing on, sorting out your perception of reality so that reality then starts to mirror how you want it to mirror. It'll just be perception. It won't change at all, but you will think that it's changed. It'll seem to be a different perception to you. Life will be easier, life will be more full of joy and more fulfilling. Now, the other reason that I say that it's much bigger than this is you're chosen whatever it is that you're trying to learn. It might be health and fitness, it might be dating, it might be financial stuff, it could be a hobby, it could be a sport, whatever it is. If you achieve the highest level of anything in this world, I mean true mastery, truly deep understanding of anything to get to a point where you are one of the best in the world. You will have effectively learned all the skills you need to have achieved mastery in anything. Now, obviously Bruce Lee did it through martial arts, but if you've ever read any of Bruce Lee's books, he's more like a philosopher. He talks in much deeper terms than your average martial artist. He tends to see that the problem with learning a skill is not the skill, it's not the doing of the skill, it's yourself. You are the person that holds yourself back. You're the person, you're the thing that is getting in the way of you doing whatever it is that you're trying to do. So the Buddha did it through enlightenment, through spirituality, other people have done it through many, many different things. But the point is that to master a skill you must first master yourself. As the Buddha said, the mind is your greatest enemy, but once harnessed, nothing can help you so much. The people who are truly effective in this world are the ones who know where they are, what they're doing, what they're about, where they're going, and more important than that, what are the things that hold them back? What are the things they cannot do? And they accept those and find ways around that. So as Bruce Lee once said, you should learn the form and then forget it. You're all learning information right now. You're all taking on information and what you should be doing is taking that and going, right, what's valuable and what's not? What do I think is gonna help me? What do I think is not? Then you take all the bits of information, you put them all together and you sort of practice it until you get a form or a cater, or whatever you would call it in martial arts. But then you throw that away. Then you do it yourself. You have now, hopefully by that stage, turned your fish tank into something that resembles the world a lot more accurately. You got rid of most of your issues and things like that, or at least the major ones. And you should then be able to actually form your own path, figure out what you truly believe is the way forward. What is the best selection of events or strategies to actually get you where you need to be based off of what you truly believe and who you truly are? One of my favorite quotes of all time also comes from Bruce Lee. And it's actually stolen once again from Buddhism, from the Buddha. And he said, before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick. After I started to study the art, a punch was no longer a punch and a kick was no longer a kick. But now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick. And that's very true of anything. Before you do anything, you don't know you don't know how to do it, so it's just a punch. And then you start learning and you realize actually I haven't got a clue how to punch. How did that come? Where did that come from? And then once you actually get really down to it and you've actually internalized it to the point that it is you, you're no longer doing a thing, you're being whatever it is that you're trying to be, then it just becomes like natural. And that's kind of what he's talking about. A lot of this stuff that you'd be learning throughout this seminar and this weekend will probably be outside of your reality in some cases and some things will look very, very hard and some things will just be simply confusing. However, once you've gotten to a stage of true mastery or understanding, all these sort of things will simply make sense. And it's so much easier in the world when you know what you're doing. So I spoke earlier on about internal versus external referencing. Now this is where science comes in. Because what I've been talking about so far is spirituality. The previously common parlance was religion and theology, the idea of God and whatever. And nowadays obviously we talk in science. We talk about psychology, sociology, biochemistry and neuroscience, all these sort of things. And science has finally caught up to what these people knew thousands of years ago. And like I said, one of the things that they talk about is internal versus external referencing. Now referencing is effectively the locus of control within your mind as to what gets value. So internal referencing is where you decide for yourself what is valuable in any given situation. Moral judgments, anything like that, you decide. And external referencing is the opposite. It's literally someone else or a society or whatever it is telling you what the world is, how the world should be and how you should be. That means that you are at the whims of fate. You're literally in the hands of other people. It's what I was saying earlier on. If someone else is the one who controls your ability to be happy, then you can't just turn it on and off like a tap. And that's why internal referencing is so much more important. It's so much more powerful than external referencing. Almost everyone in the world is externally referenced to a greater or lesser degree. The only examples that wouldn't have that would be psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists because they have a lack of empathy and they don't really care about other people. They're just objects. But most people tend to have some element of external referencing. This is healthy. You do need this. It can also be understood as things like empathy. You do need to have these sort of things so you can connect to the world so you don't become that weird creepy guy who's doing his own thing to the extreme and just sort of freaking people out. You need to be able to fit into the social hierarchy as it is, but at the same time maintaining your distance. So it's like fitting into a company but also at the same time doing your own thing. That's kind of what we're talking about here. And like I said, it comes from the fish tank. Your fish tank, one of the assumptions could be something like, other people know better than I do. That may have came from a parent who was always telling you off or a teacher who was always telling you you were stupid or it might have been from bullying. It could have been from many things. But the point is that that sort of thing can get inside you and make you externally referenced which will really, truly very, very much affect everything you do, certainly within dating. The reason that it's actually so important in dating actually is because, as I'll come to later on, one of the things that a woman will be judging you based off of is actually how internally referenced are you? How in command of your own world can you actually be? Or are you at the whims of the world in the same way that she may be? So we'll come back to that in a minute. So yeah, like I said, it's kind of like a Taoism. In Taoism they talk about achieving enlightenment, things like that. And enlightenment is basically figuring out your fish tank, figuring out how to fix it, and then being internally referenced. Having the ability to choose how happy you are, having the ability to not listen to those little voices in your head. You know when you think to yourself in your head, you have a little voice and there's another thing that seems to be listening to that voice, which one are you? Anyone? Sorry? The one that's listening. Exactly, you're the one that's listening. You're the part that doesn't actually have any language skills or anything. The other part is what is effectively the ego. It's the thing that's always like the little naturing voice in your head telling you various different stuff. But the true you is just that language-less consciousness. It's effectively the reptilian brain actually, if you know anything about neuroscience. It's somewhere back here. It's away from the language centers. It doesn't have language, but it is the absolute core piece of who you are as a person. It makes all judgments, it makes all decisions. Most of the time when you make what's supposed to be a random, instantaneous judgment, that's actually occurred 10 seconds before that and has then been transmitted through. So by getting to a stage where you recognize that that little voice is the true you and all the other little voices are just remnants from your fish tank. Little parts of your fish tank that are a little bit broken or warped, like I said, that's what's causing that. But the true you is something else. It's something much deeper. It's kind of like the difference between being in the present and not being in the present. When you're in the present, it's just you and that little consciousness and nothing else kind of matters. Those other voices sort of die down. You're not thinking about the future. You're not predicting the past. You're not doing any of that sort of stuff. So why is this important in the first place? Well, social hierarchy theory, and you may have heard this if you're in the community at all, states that the strongest reality always wins. And this is true. You'll see this in nightclubs when maybe two guys square up to each other as they're about to start a fight. They'll be staring into each other's eyes. They're effectively trying to out-sike each other. They're trying to man each other out. At some point, one of them will see in the other guy's eyes that he's won, and that's the end of the fight. Or he won't see that in the last fight. But the point is that it's two dominant realities coming together, clashing, and that is effectively how you get the social hierarchy. Because when you go into a room, you kind of naturally subconsciously ping people to see who has a stronger reality, who is above me, who is below me, and you find your place in that hierarchy. Now, certainly for males, the male hierarchy is kind of like a wolf pack. It's kind of like very clearly delineated. And once you're in a certain position, it's quite hard to move up or down without a lot of hard work. But the strongest reality is always the leader. And there's a reason for this. Human beings are a social species. We have a lot of inbuilt mechanisms in ourself that have allowed the human species to get to where we are. If we were constantly fighting with each other, not knowing who's on top, who's on bottom, who's the leader, whatever, we would never have had a leader, we would never have worked in cohesion and we wouldn't be here where we are today. It was cooperation that built this building, cooperation that built the cities that we live in, cooperation that built the entire society that you live in. Human beings are a social species. It's good to be sociable, it's good to be around other people. But that means that there has to be a way in which people can figure out how to interact with each other. And that comes down to your reality. And I'm gonna explain this in a second as well. But your reality is a description of who you are as a person. It's all the information the world has ever given you about your value, about who you are and about your place in this world. And it's all being fed back out. It's your psychology. It's basically like a big storage system that says, this is the value I have to the world because this is the value the world has told me I have. The feedback that I've gotten throughout growing up. Now that is important because it's like a CV. It's like a resume. It's literally every time you talk to someone and you're giving away little micro behaviors and things that are gonna be displaying to them exactly how you feel about yourself. So for example, when you're talking to a girl, you're talking to her and you're all like, oh, hi, can I talk to you about your drink or something? Does that come across like someone who's confident, someone who feels like they are entitled to talk to that girl? Someone who feels like that girl's probably gonna respond well because other girls have responded well. Or is that the sort of person who's thinking in the back of his head, every day I've ever done this, every girl's just been like, no, get away from me. She's gonna pick up on that. She's gonna know, who is the best judge of your value as a human being? Is it you who's lived your life from whatever to whatever, actually experiencing things, actually doing things and seeing how the world treats you? Or is it someone else who doesn't know you? It's obviously gonna be yourself. And this is how you pick up on these sort of things. You can quite often see it, you know, like the guy who sort of stands like this, obviously not very confident. The guy who sort of stands like this, probably a bit more confident. There's little micro-behaviors that you see and some of them are so minuscule and tiny that you can't consciously really spot them. But they are there and you're picking up on them. As the blueprint says, the self is always coming through. The self is always coming out. It's your fish tank. Your fish tank is always coming out. You can't hide from it, it is you. You are literally that fish tank now. And everything that that fish tank thinks and feels and says and believes will be coming out of you every moment you're interacting with anyone else. Now, like I said with the social hierarchy, that's what's happening. People are pinging off of each other and picking up on these little things. So the person who sits at the top is the one who is the most in line with his instincts. The one whose reality is most closely matched to the actuality of the world. You know, like if you're delusional, if you think that you can fly, people aren't gonna follow you because that's not effective. And this is what I'm getting to. Social leaders are the ones who, people in the society look at and go, that guy has a better idea of what he's doing. He seems more in control of what he is. He knows how to get me where I want to be. So I'll follow him. I'll listen to him. I'll allow this person to lead me because he has a better understanding of what's going on. Mostly, like I said, that's what we call being the eye of the hurricane. That inner calmness, that inner peace that you get from things like meditations, from therapy, or even just from getting a lot of experiences like you're probably getting whilst you're doing this sort of stuff. So what is the human USP? What's our unique selling point? What is the thing that separates us from animals? Anyone? Come on, guys. Yes, the ability to think. Conscious mind. We are the only species who can consciously and rationally think through logical problems. That's our USP. Elephants have their trunks, giraffes have their necks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what would a woman be judging you based on? What do you think is the most important thing in a very instinctual, biological, natural, evolutionary perspective? What is the thing that she's gonna be judging you on? It's gonna be your conscious mind. It's gonna be this thing that separates us from everyone else, the thing that's given us everything in the world in society. That's your USP and that is your fish tank. You can see everyone else's fish tank, but you can't see your own. Those sets of assumptions I was talking about, they sit just behind your conscious mind. You can't ever see them, but everyone else can see them and you can see it in everyone else as well. You know those people you talk to and you just know they don't get, they're really annoying. Or you talk to someone and you get that they don't realize that they're actually worth a lot more than they put out there. They can't see it because it's a part of what nature's done to us on purpose. It's an evolutionary mechanism for making sure that the best people for mating get their genes passed on. Because you can't see it, but everyone else can. Like I said, it's like a big billboard for every single girl and every single person you've ever met to look at you and go, oh, that's what that guy thinks of himself. That's how he sees himself, how he sees the world. That is what you're being judged on. And like I said, you don't have to have a perfect reality. You don't have to have a perfect fish bowl. You just have to have one that is more well rounded than most other people. And that's really not very difficult because the world that we live in is very, very much a materialistic selfish sort of place where everyone is almost exclusively referenced nowadays, capitalism, consumerism, all these sort of things. These have done people no favors whatsoever. Right. Now I'm gonna move on to another of my favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche. Does anyone know Friedrich Nietzsche at all? Yep, cool. Well, he had a concept, his most famous concept was effectively the difference between the Superman or the Uberman, as he called it, and the final man. Now, the final man is what we have right now. And the Superman is the idealistic version where everyone is self-actualized. He talks about the human species as going from animals along a tightrope towards the Superman, the enlightened being, the place at which all humans become happy, content, compassionate, giving, loving, successful. But we are on this tightrope sort of in the middle. We are on the tightrope in the middle and that's what he's talking about when he's talking about the final man. He's talking about the sort of consumerist, corporate nature of the world today. And he said this a couple of hundred years ago, 150 years ago, something like that. And he spotted it. You could see it coming. And the point is, he said the human race will either kill itself and fall off the high wire trying to be this final man, this ideal man, this perfect vision of something that someone else has said should be the way you are as opposed to becoming the Superman, which is what we should become. Eventually human beings, I think, will get there. But this conference is that. It's trying to achieve that. It's trying to achieve self-actualization. Trying to achieve that place at which we become the Superman. You may not be Superman yet, but you can get there eventually. Like I said, once again, this is ancient knowledge. The Buddhists have said it, the Hindus have said it, the Christians have said it, the Jews have said it, Nietzsche has said it. Pretty much every philosopher that's actually worth his salt has said this in some format at some stage, up to and including Bruce Lee. People who are diverse from all spectrums of the world have all said the same thing. Smart men who've achieved things in life, who people listen to have all said the exact same thing. There must be something to this. And like I said, science is now catching up and explaining why they were correct. Things like realities, things like frames, things like therapy and psychology and sociology. We understand how this works now as a species and it's correct. This ancient knowledge has been around for so long, but people seem to constantly miss it or forget it. Now, I'm going to wrap up just now. I'm going to give you a quote. It was actually from the Gnostic Bibles, the things I was talking about earlier on. And it's actually, strangely enough, a quote from Jesus. I'm not religious, by the way, don't worry. He said, and I want to get this tattooed on my heart because I think this is really very fundamental. It's been probably one of the most fundamental things for me. And he said, there was within me a stillness of silence in which I heard the blessedness whereby I knew my proper self. That stillness of silence is the quieting of the voices, the voices that are constantly trying to hold you back and negatively criticize you. The blessedness was the true happiness, that moment of oneness with the world in which nothing matters and everything matters all at the same time, both the hard and the soft coming together in a beautiful crescendo, whereby I knew my proper self, where you'd figured out exactly who he was and everything else simply was something that he would just accept. For me, that has been a very large step forward because that allowed me to let go of a lot of the ideas of what I should be, or as Nietzsche would say, the final man. I could get rid of this ideal thing that I had to become and now I can just live my life. And strangely enough, I'm actually becoming what I want to be much, much faster than I was and I was working at it constantly in very, very narrow focus. Now I can actually kind of amble through life, enjoying the process a lot more, enjoying the journey a lot more. And I'm actually getting a lot closer to the destination than I ever have been. And I think that that'll probably be the same for everyone here once you've achieved this journey. Thank you. If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to take them just now. Yep. You mentioned both self-improvement and self-acceptance. Yep. And I find it really difficult to combine both. So on one hand, improving yourself and on the other hand, accepting yourself, how do you combine both? That comes back to the yin-yang. I understand what you mean. Self-acceptance is basically, it sounds almost like I'm saying, just don't try, just accept who you are just now. You know, it's like the fat guy with a T-shirt and number one, so why try harder? But it's not quite like that. Self-acceptance is just understanding that you're not completely worthless. You are a good person. You're not completely worthless. You are a good worthwhile person that you have all the skills and all the things necessary within yourself to achieve whatever. And even if you don't right now in this very moment, you can still be happy. Then the self-improvement aspect is taking that idea and going, okay, well, this is me right now and I'm moving forward anyway, so I'm gonna move forward in, say, that direction because I'd like to sort out some of these sort of things. It's trying to hold two ideas in your head at the same time is a very hard thing to do. But it's like the hardness off that I was talking about. The soft is the self-acceptance. I'm okay as I am. And the hard is the self-improvement. I'm okay as I am, but I'm gonna go in that direction and I'll be okay as I am over there as well. Does that make sense? Okay. Kind of similar. I mean, you talked a lot about how your true self comes through and it's like the glass is kind of your assumption. There's nothing you can, you know, to get to where you wanna be, you want to have a strong sense of self and a good quality, I guess, sense of yourself. But I guess a little bit more concretely, how do you, what kind of habits or activities do you recommend to bring yourself in that direction? What sort of habits and activities do I recommend to do what? To kind of improve your sense of self and your internal strength. To improve your sense of self, yeah. Right, okay. The first thing you have to do is figure out who you are and what actually matters to you. What are the fundamental beliefs? What are the moral judgments you make about the world? Then you have to live in line with those in the first place. And this is very, very hard. It's like in Star Wars you have the dark side and the light side. The dark side seems very, very interesting, intriguing, fascinating, whatever it is, because it gets you what you want and it's quick and it's cheap and it's nasty. But the point is that that's never gonna actually get you what you want in the long run. And all that's gonna do is get you short-term gain. The long-term gain is the light side, living within your own moral judgments. Making the hard decisions that mean that sometimes you don't get what you want, but you can look yourself in the mirror as a man and go, I did what I felt was right, you know? I'm a good person. I didn't crumble to the world and do something selfish just to get what I wanted. That's one part of doing it. Another part of doing it is actually getting the reference experience points. So going out, doing things, challenging yourself. You've probably heard the bit of advice to do something that scares you every day. That's a very good bit of advice. Maybe not every single day and it doesn't have to be something terrifying, but do something that makes you a little uncomfortable. Expand your awareness. Expand the experiences that you've had, because what you get is you have a comfort zone and you have a stretch zone and you have a panic zone. Comfort zone is where most people live. You don't like getting out of it because it's uncomfortable. But every time you come out of your comfort zone and do something and get a little reference experience point, that comfort zone grows a little bit and then grows a little bit and grows a little bit until eventually the entire world is somewhere that you feel completely comfortable. You feel completely confident. You know what you're doing. You've been there before. It's not as terrifying as it was before you'd done it. That's one way of doing it because then you go through life never being scared. You can be scared, obviously, but you're never so terrified of losing, failing, of falling, of whatever it is that you can actually really be much more effective because you're now no longer living in a place of fear. You're actually calm, you're collected, and you can actually take stock of your life and actually take charge of it as well. So basically internal referencing comes from reference experience points living within your own sort of moral judgments. You can also do stuff like meditations. You can do therapy or just going out and doing things that are a little bit scary. The point is to sort of try and map out the different areas of your psyche and stuff and figuring out, like I said, where they're coming from, what's actually caused that, and then doing something about them. I could go into that in a lot more depth but we don't really have time today but pretty much any therapist worth their salt will be able to do that for you. You also get vipassional retreats in the UK and probably other places where you can go along and do like 10 day meditation retreats where they basically stick you in a room, give you all the resources and then force you to meditate and from what I've been told by most people who's been to that, after the first few days as hell because you're just all fidgety and stuff and then you go through a period of a bit calm and then you go through a period where like all this crazy stuff is coming up that you'd never even thought about, you'd like sort of repressed and it's almost like people've had panic attacks and then you get another period of calm because all that sort of stuff's come up, you've been forced to accept it, you've mapped out that part of the territory. A lot of your fish tank will be stuff that you don't want to go near. Those times you were bullied, you might have been abused, it might have been something else, whatever it was, something is locked down in a corner that will be fucking up everything in your fish tank. So digging them out and actually finding what they are, polishing them off and then bringing them up, reasserting them and recombining them into the rest of the fish tank will actually help you to move on. Does that answer your question at all? Cool. Love your speech while we're away, so thank you very much for sharing. Thank you. It's sort of a flow on from that question, I was gonna ask a very similar question, but is there any other teachers or that you found beneficial in sort of directing the path that you're now walking on? Probably the best one is David Ada, where the superior man. That's an excellent book. It's a bit too spiritual for me, which is ironic given what I've just been talking about, but his language is all flowery and a bit camp for me. But the ideas are very solid. He's talking about this ancient knowledge that I'm talking about and he literally puts it into very, very good terms when you kind of account for the language itself. And he talks about things like having your mission in life and your mission in life shouldn't be women or whatever it is, it should be the thing that truly gives you the most joy in the world. And this actually comes back to what you were saying. If you're doing the thing that you love the most, you can look yourself in the mirror. If you're doing something that you truly believe is valuable, when you look yourself in the mirror, you look at yourself and you go, I'm awesome, look at my life, I'm great, you know? I have a friend called Chris and he got into rock climbing at university and he found a real passion in it and it's just accelerated and accelerated. Now his entire life is based around it. His job is based around it. He does various ab-sailing type stuff for companies. He goes skydiving and windsuiting and parachuting and all sorts of things. And I've never met anyone who is just that content. Every day he's living his life, he's actually living his passion. He's doing the thing that really gets his rocks off. He absolutely loves it. And I think he looks like a modern art masterpiece. He's not a particularly good looking guy. Women just fall all over him instantly because he's a man who's living his life for passion. When a woman meets him and they talk to him, they literally get this sense that whenever they actually get with him or whatever, if they're a part of his life, they get to share in that experience. They get to share in that joy. They get to share in all that wonderful, wonderful feeling of happiness that most people nowadays don't get. But he does, because he does what he loves 100% of the time and that's all it takes. Cool. I agree that you've got to be in a present moment to enjoy every experience and learn the most from it and just living a life in general. But how do you balance that with living in the future to plan out how you want to be successful and achieve your goals, as well as living in the past to appreciate what you've achieved in your life and reminisce of memories? There's nothing wrong with enjoying the fact that you've succeeded in the past and remembering those things. It's definitely good for your self-esteem. In terms of living in the future and planning, it's the difference between a belief in an idea. A belief can't really be changed. It's something that's kind of solid, but an idea is something that's constantly changing. It's what Marcus Aurelius says, you can't step in the river in the same place twice, same place twice. And it's the same thing as that. Always have an idea of roughly the direction you're going in. Don't have something very specific that you're aiming for. Have a sort of, give yourself some range is what it's called in psychology. Some sort of just a general direction and anything that happens in that direction is a good thing. Allow yourself to do that and you maintain the freedom whilst also maintaining the correct direction and movement forward. That's kind of the best way of doing it really. Okay, so thanks very much for having me. It's been a pleasure being here and I'm sorry if it was a bit rough around the edges. And good luck with the rest of the conference and thank you.