 Boom, we're on. Today's guest, we've got Dr. David Hamilton. First of all, David, thanks for coming on the show. Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. It's so great to be here. Yeah, how are you? Oh, fantastic. Good. So, a man who had a PhD, who got a PhD, you worked in the pharmaceutical industry, one of the biggest in the world, and then you changed your, a man who believes on the placebo effect, a lot of attraction, kindness. You've wrote 10 books. I watched your documentary on Netflix called Heal, which was amazing, by the way. Oh, thanks. Yeah, it's good to have you on. I have a lot of serious criminals on, which is a lot of big hitters for people, but this is the stuff I love to talk about, the mindset, the change, believing in yourself and anything's possible. So, you're doing amazing things. You're everywhere. We'll go right back to the start, though, where you grew up and how it all began. Oh, wow. I never get a sneeze correctly. This is that I love talking about. My background, you know where I, I grew up in a wee village called Bankknock. Where's this? It's in central Scotland. It's about, it's about nine miles south of Stirling and close to Falkirk. It's in that weekend out of the Forth Valley type area, maybe 18 miles from Glasgow, actually. And so I grew up there, tiny wee village, you know, tiny wee place as well. And it's close to a mining community. So there was minor, my dad grew up in a wee village called Croy, just a few miles away, and that's a miners community. Bankknock had an open-cast coal mine. So it's very much a working-class little village that's expanded over the years. But when I was there in the 7th, when I was born and grew up there as a child in the 70s, my mum and dad still live there. It's very much a working-class little community. So how was your upbringing then? Oh, great. You know, we were poor. But this one, even though we were poor, because my dad worked in the building trade, he was, initially, he was a labourer, then a demolisher, and then he became a cement-finisher expert. But my dad, for years, was in and out of work, because, you know, Scotland, the building trade slows down in the winter, so everybody, all the newer casual workers get paid off, you know, November, December. So every Christmas, my dad was out of work for a month, and my mum was struggling. So she was always taking loans for the, you know, payday loans. A provident, a guy from the provident used to come every Thursday, Tony, the collector. That's when you locked the door and shut the blinds. But he was a lovely guy, and he used to come with a lined book, and it was Jeanette Hamilton. My mum has paid, like, a pound or five pound. So we were poor, but I never seemed to want for anything, because my mum and dad always did the best they could. And, you know, I had great upbringing. I had three sisters. I had three sisters. And we were all pals and stuff. So even though we were poor, I don't really feel like I wanted anything, because I was happy in that kind of environment. So how did you get into the pharmaceutical industry? Kind of roundabout, kind of way. Well, I did a degree at university. I never, ever imagined going to university. I mean, I think I was the second person in the entire village of banknotes who had ever gone on to higher education. And it was only because it wasn't a thing. It wasn't the thing that people did in banknotes, in our village, especially back when I was growing up. And I remember my chemistry teacher, Mr. Tracy, he took me aside after my hires, and he said, if you ever thought of going to university, and I went, oh, God, my mum and dad couldn't afford that. And I honestly, this was like 86, 86, maybe. And I honestly thought that there was only two universities in Britain. And that was Oxford and Cambridge. And maybe I thought there was a few others that had seen a university challenge. And I had this perception that you had to be really clever, because I'd seen Oxford and Cambridge on the boat race. And I thought you had to be really, really massively intelligent, or really wealthy, or very well spoken. And all three of those things isn't what I knew. And I just, it seemed so above me. And Mr. Tracy sat me down and he said, oh, no, you can go to university. You're really good at chemistry. And here's how it works. You get a grant to not used to get a grant and that would pay you for the year kind of thing. And I suddenly, I did chemistry only because it was Mr. Tracy, my chemistry teacher, who explained it all to me planted the seeds. Yeah, and I might have gone done maths, but because maths I was slightly better at, but I did chemistry because Mr. Tracy made it sound so exciting. And all the things that you could do if you were a chemist, you could even go into medicine and all that kind of stuff. And so I went to university and hit the ground running, did really, really well ended up doing a PhD in what's called synthetic organic chemistry, which is like Lego. But instead of taking instead of taking Lego bricks of different shapes and sizes and colors to assemble a variety of shapes, an organic chemist takes atoms instead of Lego bricks, but atoms are our Lego bricks. And you get like a carbons and hydrogens and nitrogens and oxygens. But the principle of assembling a variety of shapes is the same. And the variety of shapes is pharmaceutical drugs. And that's why I ended up in the pharmaceutical. And so what kind of drugs were you making for? For patients or cardiovascular mostly and also cancer? Right. So literally, you're assembling different shapes that we've already found through a previous research step, that maybe show a good ability to, you know, change the activity, something inside the arteries or change something around the pathology of cancer. How long did you do that for? Four years. And then the light bulb moment for the pharmaceutical industry to then the placebo effect. So where did that snow? Where did that drop? Well, do you know, after my youngest of my three sisters was born in 76, my mum had postnatal depression. And it wasn't understood very well there. You know, the psychiatrist said, give yourself a shake. This was 1976. And that's not how you treat someone with postnatal depression. But my mum ended up with this con this idea that she's not a good mum or she's not a strong person because she just assume everyone must feel this way. But the they must just get through it because my mum, it wasn't explained to her properly. She didn't. It wasn't understood. So my mum thought, I'm just not a strong person. Now we know postnatal depression is very, it's not it's much better understood. But my mum ended up depressed going through the depression because it wasn't treated very well. And I found a book in the school library as daft as it might sound. I was my first week at high school, I think I was 11 years old, a book fell off the shelf, the magic power of your mind. I thought, well, I bet I can help my mum. So I just took it. I didn't know you're supposed to join a library, you know, got a yellow card, get it stamped. I just put it in my bag. We've still got it. That was 38 years ago, 37 years ago. Anyway, it really helped my mum. Now it didn't cure depression in a day, but it taught her strategies about positive thinking and it taught her about affirmations and belief in the power of the mind and meditation. So my mum put all these things into practice and she used to do pumper fist with positive affirmations. So I grew up in that environment, my mum and I often talking about the power of the mind. And because my mum was so excited about the power of the mind, because it had worked for her. And she was so passionate about it, it really, it was contagious. And so all the way even through my PhD, I was reading books on the power of positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale, one of the first books I ever read actually, and it was a positive thinking book. And so when I went into the pharmaceutical industry, although I loved the science of organic chemistry, building drugs, I was so drawn to the placebo effect, because that was a demonstration of the fact that something in someone's mind was having a physical effect in the brain, but also a physical effect in the body. And I used to ask my colleagues and they didn't understand it. They would just say, oh, it's just a placebo effect. But they didn't understand because they hadn't really thought and realized that something in the mind wasn't just making people think they feel better, which is what my colleagues said, oh, they're not getting better. They just think they're getting better. But that was completely wrong. There's actually a physical change in the brain and a physical change in the body. Once I really took that to heart and realized there's something really powerful here. And nobody knows about this. So I'm going to resign and I had this idea that I'm going to write a book and I'm going to go out and teach people how they can harness their mind and emotions and even positive feelings like love and compassion and kindness and have a beneficial health giving effect. And so it was so strong in me that I just decided I was at Tony Robbins, unleash the power of a thing weekend. And he got us to do this visualization where he said, now, think of a time in your life when something happened that if it didn't happen, your life would have gone in a different direction. And I could think of a couple of things. He said, now, make a decision that will change your life. And I just decided and leave my job and I literally resigned the next day back at work. That takes a lot of bottle, especially in that industry. If people are reading from textbooks and trying to find cures from pharmaceutical drugs to help patients and you're kind of gone against that. We're saying, you can basically change your mind, change the chemistry in your body. The brain only repeats what it knows. So how will you treat it then when you were saying to people about this placebo effect? If they didn't quite understand it, did they think you were going crazy? But all of those things, actually, I'd say my closest friends were so supportive because it wasn't, I didn't tell them really the full truth. I told everyone that I was really going over, I was really going into teaching personal development. But what I really meant as a big part of that personal development was mind and emotions and how they affect the body. I just didn't say that to everyone because I was aware that people would think I was a bit daft. But then my close friends did know that that was my interest and they didn't disagree with me. But I think a few, there was murmurs throughout the company and I knew a few people must have thought I lost my marbles to use their language. I think one person said you've lost your marbles kind of thing and only because they didn't understand. I think some people also, I think many people have a passion in life but don't have the courage to follow it. And I say some of the people maybe that were resistant to that, it was because it pressed their buttons because they wanted to follow the dream and just didn't have the courage. It wasn't that they didn't believe what I was doing. It's just, it presses your buttons sometimes. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong in life. They've got great ideas, they've got great visions but as soon as they share it with someone else who doesn't understand that, then they reflect their fears on it and then it's very off-putting. So to create ideas and go, you know what, I'm stuck to my guns and I'm going to stick to it. So the placebo effect, David, can you explain this for people then who don't quite understand it? Yeah, so the placebo effect is that effect, that thing that happens when you believe that something is a drug, something will help you. So the placebo actually comes from the Latin for I shall please. So a placebo could be, you know, a cup of water. If you, for example, told me, let's say I had a really sore head. Let's say I had a really sore head and you said, oh, I've dissolved some aspirin or paracetamol or some other dissolvable painkiller in that water and it's so good, it just tastes like water. And I really believed you because maybe you're a doctor, right? And you said that to me. And I'm going, oh, thank you very much. And I go, and my headache starts to go away. So the placebo effect is the fact that my headache goes away, but there was just water in there. And I just believed something about, I believed something about that water and my headache went away, tricked to mine. And what actually happens, the reason why the pain goes away is because my belief generates biochemistry and the biochemistry that's generated in my brain is exactly what's required to deliver to me the thing that I expect. So I'm expecting a reduction in pain. So it's like my brain said, OK, you're expecting a reduction in pain. How do we do that? Well, we do that by producing our own painkillers. So the brain now produces its own painkillers. They're called endogenous opiates, like opiates, like morphine and stuff. Endogenous opiates means your own version. And so the brain produces its own painkillers, i.e. endogenous opiates to give you that reduction in pain because that's what you believe is supposed to happen. And that's how the placebo effect in large part actually works. Do you believe the brain can cure anything? I wouldn't go as far as saying that only because you have certain true genetic disorders. I say that your mind can generate huge positive effects, whether it can actually, whether the power of consciousness let's let's even take that a step further, can cure anything. I don't think we understand that well enough. I have my personal beliefs about the nature of reality, but generally from what we understand in science is that even in the placebo effect, there seems to be you know, not I don't like the term limits. I don't think there's any real limit. I think everything's limitless. But I think what we understand in science so far takes you so far, you know, so your belief can have a powerful effect, but you can strengthen your belief and you can use visualization techniques to dig even deeper. But I wouldn't ever like to offend anyone by saying that I think the mind can cure anything because that's if I was in such a position and someone said that to me, I said, well, I've tried everything. It doesn't kind of work. And and so I think there are true real genetic disorders, even someone visualized for cancer, for example, it might help some people, but most people require some therapy as well as using visualization. So I always say to people, if you're using your mind, it's not instead of medical advice, it's in addition to and clinical studies show, for example, if someone's taking medication like chemotherapy for radiotherapy for cancer, but in addition, they visualize their immune system as well, then it enhances the treatment and the immune system actually becomes far more active through the visualization. But if you ask someone just to visualize their immune system instead of taking any medication or lifestyle change, I think on the whole, that isn't very clever, because most people don't we don't have the knowledge yet. I think it's possible that consciousness can have a massively powerful effect. I think the point I'm trying to make is we don't understand how to do it yet. I think that's the point. I want us to I want us to understand that we're limit limitless. But I just think we don't know how to do it yet. So I tried to stay away from saying that the mind can cure anything because at the moment statement at the moment, yeah, at the moment, we don't know how to do that. You know, we just do. So I always I always say, use your mind in addition to whatever else you're doing, not instead of because I just think we don't know how to do it yet. We've been studying the brain for so long and we'll keep studying it as something that is not really being cemented down how to understand it because our thoughts can make us sick. But the good thing is they can also make us better. Absolutely. So for you then, what do you think? Why do you think like depression and suicides on the rise just now? Oh, great question. I think there's a number of a number of factors. I think people get a bit disenfranchised with with the world. I think people feel a lot of people feel more and more powerless. You know, social media is good for some people, but it's not so good for others. One of the things I was looking through for one of my books, I wrote a book called I heart me all about self esteem. And that in one sense, I found research showing an increase in depression and suicide rates around in teenagers. But some of that was connected to feeling that everyone else's profile was better than theirs. And you needed to get more likes. And we stopped looking at who we actually are and start looking for comparing ourselves to other people and trying to artificially inflate ourselves and having a profile that isn't really who we actually are. And so I think there was a definitely a connection between self esteem, obviously self esteem and, you know, depression, suicide but there was also a connection with why that self esteem issue arose in the first place. And some of it, for many teenagers, especially, was linked to their online persona and trying to be better so that everyone could see them as something else. And so one of the things I've always tried to do is say to people, you're enough just as you are. Yeah. But again, it's trying to get people to believe that if you're getting talk, you're not good enough. If you've been abused mentally, physically when you're younger, you can be stuck in that rut, but you can break the chain. You can break the chain. The brain is like a sponge. Should we be changing the school curriculum? How do you spell that? Say that again. Curriculum. Curriculum. Do you think we should be changing more about the mindset, love, compassion, honesty, money management, absolutely yoga techniques, breathing techniques, because we're learning things that are in the past also. And some of these things are great, but the majority of things you learn in primary school or secondary, you don't use in the workplace. I wish I had learned self-management tools and self-management, meaning the ability to understand your own state and change your state. You know, maybe this is how I'm feeling. Is there a tool that I can do to change how I feel? I'd love to have learned meditation, for example, as a kid. I've been into quite a number of schools now, primary schools and high schools, talking to kids about kindness. And I talk about the five side effects of kindness, you know, how kindness makes us happier. It's good for the heart, slows aging, it proves relationships. It's also contagious. It has a ripple effect. One thing leads to another. One, a small act of kindness can affect, can ripple out and affect thousands of people. And kids are so interested. I mean, they literally love that stuff. And the teachers that want me to come in and who, in fact, I recently spoke to 156 formers and the teacher, the head of that section wants me to come back now and talk to all of the years and some of the parents because they see learning about kindness and compassion and love and generosity of spirit as something fundamental to what children should learn. Because if you think about it, children are going to be the leaders of the next generation. So if we can, through education and still in them, how important it is to be, to have an attitude of kindness. And I'm talking not just about doing acts of kindness, but having an attitude of kindness where the attitude of the desire to help people to be nice is something that infiltrates everything that you do. It's just your kind of way. It's how you think about people. It's how you speak to people and think about the different types of decisions that might be made in governments and in corporate leadership situations. If everyone had learned about these principles of kindness and compassion at an early age. But do you think that's why these things are in place so people can't really think for themselves in school? You use it at the left side part of your brain, which is predominantly your memorization, your rights, your creativity and your individuality. For me, kids at school, I worry for the generation. I've got two kids. The next generation, I've got two kids myself. And people who go to schools, there's more kids with iPhones, design their clothes. They're kind of forgetting the real purpose in life when it's hard because I'm still learning. You're still learning and not necessarily what we're saying is right. Do you know what I mean? But it just feels right. So there was a study at what's one of your videos was a six week study where people showed acts of kindness. Can you explain that also? Yeah, so it was in one study, two groups of people. And one group were asked just to be normal. These are what you call a control study. And the other group were asked one day a week. So let's say you picked a fry, for example. So you select one day a week. And on that day, you've got to do five acts of kindness between the time you're waking up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night. And if to do that, every that every Friday for six weeks. And they found at the end of the study that those people had actually grown in happiness having done the kindness and they were significantly happier than the people who were just leading their lives as normal. There's other variations in the study where you don't just do one act, five acts of kindness in one day, but you spread them out over the week. But all of every version of that study, there's lots of versions of it. We're saying to try different things. But every version comparing being kind versus normal, just control group, as you say, every single study shows a net increase in people's overall happiness and well-being. So why is everybody not jumping on this? Why are they not? Why is this not getting shouted from the rooftops? Not enough people know about it. You know, it's one of the it's part of my work. My one of my real passions is to educate people about the benefits and, you know, really all the science of kindness. And the reason why I do the science is it's it brings something new to the conversation. I find a lot of people just read a wee book about kindness and many people think, I already know about kindness. So I bring something else to the conversation. Here's what happens to your heart. Here's what happens to your arteries. I mean, being kind because of how it makes you feel softens, leases attention on the walls of your artery, reduces blood pressure. You know, people don't know that. And kindness generates a hormone in the bloodstream that acts in the skin and helps to slow down the aging process of skin cells. And it's the exact opposite to what happens when we're under chronic stress. We know chronic stress ages us, but there is a the body has a natural opposite process that gets switched on when you're being kind because of how it makes you feel. And it's the exact opposite. So the aging process of cells slow down. So I bring all this new to the conversation to get people immersed in the idea and the notion of kindness. Then I throw in things. So by the way, kindness is the right thing to do. Look at the ripple effect, how you can change people's lives. So if you look at my social media profile, I'm pushing kindness all the time. Every other, I'd say, maybe two thirds of all my posts have something to do with kindness. And even though I could I've written 10 books, I have tracked my stats and I could easily be always pushing some of the stuff for my other books, which would get far more likes and it would get far more reach. But and I even did a survey and 90 percent of people wanted to hear about the mind, body connection. So I still put that in with self esteem and stuff. But even though I know it doesn't sell as well, I still keep pushing the kindness because to me, it feels more important and more valuable because it's free. And it's free. And even though it doesn't raise my profile, it doesn't sell my books very well. My kindness books sell technically less than my other books. But I still keep pushing it because I think it's so important and I think there's not enough people shouting it from the rooftops because it feels right for you. It's crazy that our bodies are the most expensive piece of machinery on this planet. You are what you speak. We'll clean our cars, we'll clean our house, we'll polish our shoes. But yet we'll go and smoke, take drugs, eat shit, including myself. We've done it for many years. It's difficult to understand that because it's Dr. Amoto. I did my I did a course. I was going through a change. I'm a boy from a rough area. So I was going through a massive change. I didn't know what the fuck was happening, David. And I ended up reading a lot of books and I ended up doing a reiki course. I ended up becoming a reiki master. I'm sitting in a room full of women and we're all giving each other energy. And I'm looking around and I'm going, what the fuck am I doing? I'm losing my shit. But she showed me a video. I went to a seminar, a man called Dr. Amoto. Dr. Amoto used to take photos of water crystals and he used to speak to the water. Now, this sounds crazy, but Google it and check it out. He spoke to the water, beautiful words. I love you, you are beautiful. He took photos of it. He also did it with crystals and water that he froze and spoke bad to it. The ones who spoke nice to was like beautiful snowflakes, crystals. And the one he spoke bad to was like red and yellow and all bad signs. I think there's a jam jam challenge you can do also. You get two jam jars, Felix Jamjabu rice. Say I love you to one for 30 days and I hate you to one for 30 days. After the 30 days, the one you say I love you to is still pure white. And the one I say I hate you is all black and blue and moldy. So you are what you speak. And if you're speaking, let's you you're going to feel that shit. Do you know what I mean? I know I know about that research very well, because I did Reiki as well. Actually, I had a similar experience. I was the only guy. This is I think I did my Reiki training, became a Reiki master in 2001. And but it was great. But that's when I also became familiar. I think it was my Reiki master at the time who told me about Emoto's work. And I decided as a scientist, I wasn't long out the pharmaceutical industry. I'm going to replicate his research, but I didn't have the microscopy techniques. It's a technical dark field microscopy that allows you to photograph like ice crystals, for example, and you can put a light through them so that you can photograph them in the dark. I didn't have the equipment. So I decided to do the exact same thing, but instead I would use biology. So I took 3,000 seeds of cress, 3,000 seeds, and I put in any any pots of 50. So I had 60 pots of counted out, uncounted 50 cress seeds. And then I took some water and I took cups like this paper cups and in one paper cup, I wrote love and one cup paper cup. I wrote fear, one cup cup. I wrote happy, one cup. I wrote sad. Another cup I took rose quartz, so ground quartz. And I ground it up with a wheat powder and I taped it to the underside of the not in the water, but the underside of it. Then every day I filled each cup with water. So now the cup was was in the cup. Now the water was in a cup that had love, fear, happy, sad. And then I took a syringe and I took exactly one millilitre. This was me doing science, exactly one milliliter. And I injected the one milliliter into all of the 60 pots. And I did that and I covered them and every day for seven days, I did exactly the same. So a row of pots would get love water, a row of pots would get fear water, a row of pots would get happy water, a row would get sad water and a row of pots would get water infused by the energy of the energy of the magnetic field of rose quartz. Anyway, amazingly, when I measured them at the end of the week, I literally measured them with a pair of tweezers, stretching them on a ruler. And you could see a visible difference, but I measured 3000 seeds of cress. That's eight hours of my life. I'll never get back. That was a long day. But get this, the when you looked at them and measured them all out, the seeds that had been watered with happy water were significantly taller. Sprout is much taller than the seeds that had been watered with sad water. The seeds that had been watered with happy water. Sorry, love was much bigger than fear. The the seeds that had been watered with happy water were much taller than the seeds watered with sad water. So love was stronger than fear. Happy was stronger than sad and rose quartz was stronger than anything at all. Rose quartz combined with positive emotion, the seeds were significantly bigger. It just goes to show, though. I believe we're biology, everything's frequencies and energies. I believe that again, I spoke about this months ago about the piano. Some people physically played it and some people mentally played it. Can you explain that also? I think when I explained that, I'm probably about to show that. Yeah, yeah, study at Harvard. It was done by a professor called Alvaro Pascaleon, very famous neurologist. And they got a group of volunteers to sit in front of a piano and play a sequence of five notes, each of the five fingers of plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk. Up and down a scale for two hours on five consecutive days. That's quite tiring. So you don't really just go plunk plunk plunk. You go plunk for a minute, you rest for a couple of minutes, you plunk rest. But for a period of two hours on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, had the brain scanned every day, and they focused in on the region of the brain connected to the finger muscles, and they found that that region grew like a muscle. So by the Friday, it was 30 to 40 times bigger than it had been on the Monday. So five days of the phenomenon we now know is called neuroplasticity, so the brain changes. But a second group of people, instead of sitting in front of a piano playing the notes with the fingers, they sat with their hands flat on a table, closed their eyes, and imagined they were doing that. It's called kinesthetic imagery, and what that means is you're imagining the feelings of actually moving. So hands flat on the table, closed their eyes, and just imagined to the best of their ability that they were going plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk again for two hours and five consecutive days. They also had the brain scanned every day. And amazingly, by the fifth day, their brain had also grown in that region by 30 to 40 times. And if you hold the brain scans side by side, you cannot tell the difference between the group who'd physically played the notes with their fingers and the group who'd played the notes with their mind. It was exactly the same. That's crazy. They say we have, is it 60,000 thoughts a day? Yes. Or more. So for people who are in the struggle, for people who's got addiction issues, for people who's got anxiety or depression, what advice or tools or techniques would you give them to maybe change in neural pathways and get a better understanding of that? You're the one who's creating the thoughts, but you're also the one who can fucking change them. Yeah, I think what I've noticed gives a lot of people a sense of hope is just understanding that way about science, that the brain is rewiring all the time. Sometimes if we see, if we know that there can be a light at the end of the tunnel, like if you know, for example, you can maybe rewire a pattern in two or three weeks or some studies suggest a wee bit longer than that, if you know that you can do that and you've looked at some of the research and you think, my God, if I can keep this up for two or three weeks, I might actually be physically changing the wiring in my brain. And I think that that kind of idea gives people hope because you know that there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's not a case of someone just saying, try this and we all know what it's like to break an addiction. If you know that in a short space of time, relatively short space of time, you can actually rewire the brain and when it begins to rewire, the cravings will begin to disappear. And so I find sometimes explaining just that goes a long way to helping people break patterns, break addictions, just knowing that there's light at the end of the tunnel. If I do it for this period of time, even if it's just two or three weeks, it is possible I can actually rewire my brain. Yeah, they say it takes 21 days to break a habit, 21 days to create a new one. There's all different studies and theories. For me, when I was going through the change, I wrote it down, no drink, no drugs, no gambling stuck in the wall. And every day I would write 10 affirmations and repeat them for 10 days and it worked. Fantastic. It seemed to work. It's clearly worked. But for people who don't believe it, give it a go. Write down two things you love about yourself or you're happy with or that you want to change. Repeat it. If you constantly repeat it, is it neurons that fire and wire together? Wire together, yeah. So if you do it consistently, then it will create that pattern. Yeah, what you actually did, you added some really vital onto that. You created a different state. You know, sorry, it may sound like the end of the tunnel, but what you actually did is you did something else, as well as believing you can break this habit. You actually created a different state by writing down 10 things every day, by focusing on that. So as your brain's rewiring, it's rewiring in a positive way because of the state, the emotional state and the psychological state you're creating. So you're wiring your emotional state and your determination and your gratitude, you're wiring that. And so when the habit changes after 21 days, it's changed to something else. And you've actually decided what that something else was, which is gratitude, positivity, all these kind of things. I still get negative thoughts every day. I still feel it fucking crack. I'm going to be honest, this isn't just sitting in mountains and jumping in waterfalls and meditation and breathing. It's, there's struggles real. But I can handle it more maturely, I think. Don't get me wrong, I have my moments and I will get out of depression for maybe a day or two and I can't be asked to leave in the house. But then I go, I don't want to leave my legacy like this. I need to get up and fight against that. You're very big against for the love of attraction. You are what you think, like attracts like. How strong did that belief start to come for you when you started to go, this is working? I've always had a belief ever since I was a child that that which you are, your being isn't inside your head. Maybe it was intuitive. From as young as I can remember, maybe I was about 12 or 13 when I started to really formalize it. I had this strong feeling that, you know, what you see when you look in the mirror is only a tiny part of you. And this might sound daft for like, let's say a 12-year-old, but I had this belief that we're all interconnected and even though you and I are sitting opposite a table, if there was some kind of scanner that could show my consciousness and your consciousness, what you would actually see is two lights and but those lights wouldn't be one over the one over there. There'd be a focus over here and a focus over there, but there'd be a big connection and there'd be a big connectedness between us at the moment. And then everyone else that you know in your life is also a connectedness. So what you get is your focal points of consciousness, but it's like strands that interconnect everyone and everything. And that's how I intuitively saw the world when I was a child and my intuition about it hasn't changed at all now. It's just got stronger and I've been looking for the science, bits of science that might validate and explain some of that. So I think when you have a hope or a dream or a desire and affirmation and you start to imagine it intensely and keep thinking about it, keep thinking about it, what you're actually doing is you're sending off a pulse like a radio broadcast that said, this is what I would like, please. And then people who can help you, who might be able to play a role in that, through this connected as you call it a web and through this connectedness, people start gravitating towards you coming into your life who have the answers or the solutions or the ability or who have some role to play in helping you to manifest the exact thing that you're imagining and the key to making it work is just that you talked about the brain. You can only change the brain through consistency. So similarly, when we consistently put it out there, this is my hope, this is my dream, this is what I'm imagining and affirming. Through this connectedness, we're pulling things, we're attracting things, people and situations to us which are in harmony with the state of our own consciousness with the thoughts that you're thinking. Yeah, I believe everyone's frequencies. When I was drinking, taking drugs, gambling, my whole surroundings was the people who were doing the exact same. So when I stopped at, don't get me wrong, it is a lonely journey, David, you probably tend to see that yourself or constantly searching. But for me, when I became a better person, I started more like-minded people also who kind of understood the journey, I didn't really feel alone then. Because the gut-mind connection also, is this true, the gut's made the same material as the brain? In many ways, the gut has a vast amount of neurons. So it's almost like your gut has a brain. Yeah, your second brain. Your second brain, yeah, and it plays a... I think we're only just beginning to understand in science the importance of gut health for your clarity of mind, your health of your mind and your brain, also your immune system and all these things. Have you ever heard of a thing called sun gazing? I've heard of it. I don't know what it is. So sun gazing is looking directly at the sun. So for people watching this, it might sound crazy. So everything that's grown from this earth, fruit, veg, trees, plants, all the good stuff. So the stuff that we eat from there, to say, is most important for us, which is the sun reserves. So if you cut that out, there was a guy who I watched in India who was on for over an hour, powerful stuff. I don't even know what it's called, but I'll put it in the bio. So sun gazing is looking directly at the sun. It's her main frequency. The reason why cancer rates so high in Scotland is because not enough at Monday. So the sun, if you look at the sun, an hour before sunset or sunrise, you can start off 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. If you look directly at the sun, they say it gives you your proper nutrition and aligns everything back in your body and it cures you all disease. It's powerful, powerful stuff, sun gazing. Yeah, I'd heard of it, but I wasn't familiar with it. Yeah, it's powerful and it sounds crazy for people, but look up, check it out. You're YouTube sun gazing. You know, in a sense, plants are really the sun's energy just being transformed chemically. I mean, the energy, the frequency of UV light from the sun, so that sunlight from the sun causes different processes to occur in plants and what the plants are really doing is they're capturing sunlight. So as a plant is growing, the plant is essentially capturing sunlight. You're eating a plant. This is maybe one of the spiritual reasons why, as well as affecting the gut and the brain, a whole foods plant-based diet which is getting all of your nutrients from plants, ultimately, energetically, you're eating light. You're eating the sun, so sun gazing is what you're doing is cutting that off and getting directly from the sun. They say you go blind when you look at the sun, unless I'm not a doctor, but there's no studies to say that anybody's ever went blind. That's why they tell you to look at it and the sun set or sunrise when the rays isn't as strong. It's pitiful stuff. So when you wrote your first book, how did that come about also? Well, it was a dream actually when I left the pharmaceutical industry. I knew as part of my journey going out and speaking that I wanted to be a writer and it's funny because I failed my English at school. And if anyone had said to me when I hated English, I hated it. I loved chemistry. I loved maths. I loved the technical stuff. Oh, my God, I hated English. I found it so boring. And I passed it my second time. I had a teacher who really helped me a lot when I resat the English guy called Mr. McCall. And if anyone has said to me, oh, by the way, you'll write for a living. You'll be a writer. I don't laugh. I'm like, oh, absolutely no chance. But yet what changed in my mind was realizing that writing is really just a vehicle. It's just a way that I can express what I'm teaching. And so my writing style is very much, in some ways, it reflects my speaking style. So my writing, as I construct a book, what I'm actually doing is I'm teaching. So maybe there's a proper way to write books where you build certain ways. But I don't write books in that way. I write books when I'm actually teaching because I want people to understand the power of these techniques and principles. So the first book was something I wanted to do. I tried, I stopped and started umpteen times and threw it away because I really didn't know how to write and I didn't really know what I was writing about. And then I'd run a charity, I'd set up a charity with some friends called Spirited Foundation, which is still thriving under David Heyman, the actor. Working people look at, get this. Spirited.org.uk, I think is a site, David Heyman and I. Working people buy your books also, David? Amazon. Amazon. Really, any place where books are sold. And I decided I'd finished a big charity project and I decided, you know, I'm going to start writing now. I've put it off for a few years because I didn't really know how to write. You've got a feel there as well. Oh, absolutely. I was pushing myself away really because I didn't know how to do it and I just decided, you know what, I went bankrupt, right? So I ran the charity. It got really big, it grew really quick and I was absolutely broke. David Heyman, it was absolutely broke and a few of us founders of it had put all of our resources into it. We ended up all of us broke and I needed to leave and get work. So I took a job as a lecturer. I taught chemistry for a year and ecology. We bit of maths and I tutored at Glasgow University in the Adult Education Department for a year and during that time I started researching and writing my first books. The University Library actually just looking through medical journals and other stuff and just building a picture of the science that I wanted to talk about in my first book. It's called It's a Thought that Counts and I covered such a broad subject from not only the mind-body connection but evidence for prayer and evidence for hands-on healing and evidence for vibrational medicine and evidence for consciousness. I pulled it all together and once I had all the information I had no idea how to write. I just started writing and it took me two years. I just wrote it all in one continual chapter and I put it all the pages on the ground and I said well that goes with that and that goes with that and I moved it all together and assembled the book into what seemed to be chapters and I learned how to write. I think a lot of people want to write a book but they don't because they don't know how to and I always say to people just start and there's no right way to write a book or a way. Just start and see what happens and I figured it out and learned how to write in my first book when I gave birth to it. I still call it my baby and I sent it to every publisher in the UK and all of them said no. Some of them are really complimentary. It just didn't work for them at this time. So I self-published it and then a year later one of the publishers Hey House who'd said no the first time literally took the hand off me. Please we'll take this book and it's something I always say to people if a publisher rejects you or someone rejects you in life it doesn't really reflect who you are or the quality of what you're doing. Sometimes it's just timing. It's just an opinion. It's just during that time my publisher had decided that one of the things they want to do is have more books from a qualified people like doctors and scientists and so they just decided in that time from rejecting me the first time to signing me up the second time during that time they decided we want scientists and doctors and so it wasn't that they didn't like the book first time it just didn't fit for them. But rejection is scary. I took it hard. Yeah it's heartbreaking. You're not good enough. You can't do it. That's why 99% of people fail. Dave is because the rejection after two and three attempts. Consistency is key. You proved it. Consistency keep chipping away and you eventually got the break. I used to listen to a lot of Les Brown back in the day and he used to say all the time people's opinion of you does not have to be a reality. 99% of success is failure and the only person that can fail is yourself. So the documentary Heal, brilliant by the way. Absolutely excellent. You appeared in it a few times. So how did that come about also? Well the director and producer they'd almost finished it. They'd been filming for months actually Kelly Noonan the director and they'd been filming for ages and just trying to assemble the story and the narrative and I think they were looking for something you know just looking for a few extra little cross the T's dot the I's kind of thing and one of the other authors or other people in the film had mentioned me and they looked me up online and they thought wow exactly what we need so they gave me a phone and you know a week later I was in New York City and we were filming in Central Park in this great big hotel room and we just you know it went really really well they asked me all the relevant questions that I think needed to fill the little gaps that were missing in the film and you never know when you're in a documentary when you get filmed if you'll actually make the final cut I remember when it first came out and I was like I didn't want to watch it you know I know my interview was an hour long and then another 45 minutes maybe in Central Park afterwards and I thought they might not use anything I was pleasantly surprised to see I think I'm in it seven times yeah but that's brilliant and plus it raises your profile and especially if you're trying to promote kindness love compassion other people then start to it's crazy because if we see someone on a TV then we start giving them a bit more recognition which is weird so your profile would rise and that's all part of the process some of my social media following my Instagram following literally doubled within a few months you know just when he'll come in to Netflix anyway because Joe Dispensers and I watch a lot of Joe's stuff as well Joe's a lovely guy and he was in a bad car accident I think he used to do it at Ironman and he with the power of the mind put his spine back in place just visualising it every day and he said it was like a hitting the golf ball sweet to just click back in and again the science is there to prove it the mind believe in yourself affirmations consistency write them down don't just again we spoke earlier before the cameras were on it's as much as we can preach and promote it's try to live it yourself because I have my down days what's your day like on a daily basis what's your schedule like for when you wake up in the morning it varies the first thing I do actually after my shower is I meditate it varies it depends how much I've got on I always make time for it but probably at the very least 15 minutes but sometimes half an hour and if I do only 15 minutes I will commit to doing another maybe 2 or 3 or 5 minutes so sometimes I'll sit in my computer and I'll just close my eyes and I'll meditate for 5 minutes during the day to try to make up half an hour a day so I probably manage about half an hour even if it's only a 15 and 3 fives or a 20 and 2 fives or a 20 and a 10 or a half hour one go but I try to get about half an hour a day because I recognise how much I need that how much value that I get in terms of my peace of mind but my ability to manage my state so just to ground yourself again kind of balance everything out what do you think about the technology then I believe I'm addicted in fact I don't believe I know I'm addicted to my phone just now and I'm in there as well David where I'm getting a lot of attention but I'm focusing a lot on my energy on it and wasting value bubbles I believe to know really pushing the boat out and going another level in my career so what do you think of the technology in mobile phones just now I think I love technology I love the ability to access information and to be able to communicate I use social media for example to teach and to inspire so I have a very positive experience of it yeah everyone gets negative stuff we bits of abuse from time to time how do you deal with that I just ignore it I never engage I don't give my energy at all I just engage block see I still get about 80 go where I go 99% of the time I've learned but sometimes I'll go no I'm not putting up with that I'll let it go that's not a reflection of them see some people just fire off comments without really thinking and it's not always sometimes it is but sometimes it's not really a reflection that people maybe someone's angry at the time about something and they're just venting on you and if you take it personally you're actually imagining the person to be something that maybe they're not actually some people probably are these kind of people but a lot of people are just venting and I just don't bite I ignore it you know it's not worth my energy I don't get it very often to be really honest what about for people what books would you recommend for people including obviously your own but other books that has helped you along in your journey the first book that really massively impacted me was Norman Vincent Peel's The Power of Positive Thinking that's what guided me on the path another huge book for me was Anita Marjani's Dying To Be Me another great one was The Power of Now we talked about that offline I had to listen to his audio book it was putting me to sleep but it took me about two months to listen to it it was just to have a wee ding and then his voice I just used to just knock me out I know Anita quite well the Tim Marjani so actually the Conversations With God series Neil Donald Walsh that was good for me when I first left the pharmaceutical industry in helping me to tap more in line with compassion Wayne Dyer's books were great for that as well as his audios so I've had a number of books I'd say that have impacted me quite heavily I'm reading one now called Lifespan by a Harvard professor called David Sinclair that's all about how aging can be slowed and affected in different ways nutritionally but through supplements and stuff so I find from time to time books just grab me and I keep my best books I've got my best series a very metaphysical series by a medium called Jane Roberts you know the nature of personal reality, Seth's books do you have the gift for that? I think everybody's got the gift for that I think everyone to an extent is something I haven't really explored I've explored me about some science I've done a few experiments with myself you know not necessarily precognition sensing stuff statistically with me as a sample size it seemed to be pretty powerful I just think with the technology nowadays I think it would be more evidence there to show that there is maybe entities or ghosts or spirits or even UFOs because when they show these footage I watch a lot of shit on Netflix sometimes I'll go down to the rabbit hole and I'll explore I always want for a human shit the repeat for the 70's 60's 80's I just think with the technology nowadays I think there would be more cutting images that okay there is something there because if you had the 21g as soon as the body dies as soon as you die the body goes 21g lighter but they say that's like an energy of the soul leaving the body which is weird yeah it's weird the 21g I think it's cool so for yourself moving forward for the future David what's the plans? what's the visions? just writing more books and teaching and doing more teaching online everywhere around the world travel a lot from time to time I get little clusters I was in Paris for a conference a few weeks ago it was the second time this year in France I've been in Europe, Germany this year as well Australia it kind of comes and goes most of my teachings are in the UK most of the general public I get hired with quite a lot because they're really big into the message of kindness because I teach how kindness is the opposite of stress so rather than managing stress I show them how to induce the exact opposite conditions in their mind and emotions and physically so to be just writing more books in my field mind body connection, kindness, that kind of stuff I love doing it and I love communicating I love putting free content out in social media online talks and stuff and I think my thing is just to educate and inspire and I love taking bits of science and simplifying them into a way that everyone can understand so all the places you've been in the world is there any place that stands out and you go this is a real good place people really know how they love life here and they're happy everywhere kind of the same just different environments I don't know if I would say any one place I've had a really positive experience in Australia I've taught there twice in the Gold Coast and it's a conference called Mind Heart Connect they have it every two years and I found the Australian people to be very similar to the people that I grew up around or certainly the people that were in that environment very similar to Scottish people I don't know if that's a compliment to Scotland or Australia but I found a lot of similarities I felt quite comfortable in Australia I felt quite natural and they seem to understand my Scottish accent okay they say I read a book called Many Lives Many Masters Brian Vice they say if you feel happier they've probably been there in their previous life they say also the problems and worries you've got in this life if you don't sort them you take them into the next life and you add something on is that through? Not through but it was in the book it was in the book here's an interesting you know I gave that example of if we look physically separate than now but if you could somehow have a camera that could only see consciousness you would see it focused here and focus there and you know there'd be two lights but these lights would be blending as we communicate the lights would be mixing and blending and some of my colours would be impacting yours some of yours impacting and it's happening all the time every time you pass someone in the street there's a blending and mixing of energy but that energy these lights also go back and forward in time so you're also blending and connecting with a past previous even a version of yourself 10 minutes ago or a version of your child self but also a version of your 91 year old self you're also blending and mixing we know from quantum mechanics when you get to the quantum level there is no time so all time is simultaneous so in many ways you are connected to that past self in terms of if you want to use the past life example and connected to your future selves so but I don't see it exactly as you know if you don't resolve something now you'll carry into another life because there are multiple possible futures and you're also connected to multiple possible future use and I think when you do like a past life or a future life aggression or a future life projection all what you're actually doing is you're resonating you're remembering that version of yourself that's most strongly connected with the space that you're in right now because Brian Vice found that if you changed something about if you process something right now then you actually change the future trajectory in other words if you were let's say a future life then you find yourself you're remembering a different future and all of these futures exist so there's multiple versions of you not just one possible timeline but multiple versions of James in the future so when we do a regression or a projection into the future we're really just resonating with a version of yourself that's most closely related to where you're at right now and if you you know process something right now then you'll find that the version of yourself that you'll remember will be that that is more closely aligned with who you are or who you're becoming if you ever think about that's a head screw eh if you think about someone then either bump into them or they call you is that because you've got that connection through that connectedness because deja vu as well where you feel as if you've been there it does say that it's because everything is connected to everything else so what do you think we are then assuming beings it's a question more than millions of times but different angles but what do you think we are to be really honest I believe we are pure consciousness having a soul having a human experience so pure consciousness having an experience of being physical and at this moment in time a part of my consciousness is focused on this body and a part of your consciousness is focused on that body but it does not mean that that is all that I am and that's why I think when we end this when this lifetime expires if you look at the accounts of people who've had near death experiences you just suddenly become part of the larger version of yourself and that's why people have this massive sense of expansiveness that I am the universe kind of thing because that which you are is infinite in space and time so suddenly the focus removes from this small part of the body and your focus rejoins your very essence which is infinite in time and space so many people Anita Marzani, Marzani in her book Dying To Be Me said her experience after leaving her body after technically dying it was that she experienced herself as pure consciousness as I am you couldn't say I am this or I am that because putting anything after I am just diminished the size of who she was and she experienced herself as infinite in time and space and many people have had a similar kind of experience but I think that's what you we're all infinite in space and time but we're also all connected in that deepest possible way and maybe we're all just part of the same energy that's expressing itself in a variety of different ways Do you think we've already got our blueprint when we're born our purpose already here or do you think we can change our path? I think both I see destiny in free will as you know you're born into a river a big wide river and you're on a canoe and you have a paddle and the paddle is your mind and you can paddle to the left or to the right or do what many people do keep paddling around in a wee circle repeating the same things in a sense what you're doing is you're using the law of attraction to attract what you want but if you were to stop paddling you realise that the river has a current and the current is the current and if you were to do nothing then you'll find that the river will take you to certain destinations to people to circumstances and events sometimes you'll smack into a dirt great big rock because that was on your path so I believe there's a blueprint not just genetically but spiritually you know in terms of your actual essence and where the evolution of your spiritual self is going so there's a genetic component in that so I think there is a blueprint but absolutely we can decide to paddle away and just say I feel that ahead of me but I think I'm just going to take a different path so I think destiny and free will can intertwine and sometimes the most appropriate thing is to paddle and other times the most appropriate thing is to let go what do you think of the pineal gland to say this is a seat of the soul to say this as well I think some people believe that the pineal gland is a large concentration of say when the consciousness is focused on the body then a large concentration of it focuses on the pineal gland the pineal gland I say is I think in the middle or the bottom of the brain it used to actually be it's funny it's in the brain but it evolved from the roof of your mouth the roof of the mouth over millions of years went up so the pineal gland sits in a wee pocket that's actually not technically but in one way it's technically not it's just went up from the inside I think or I may be getting that wrong but I don't know much about the pineal gland other than the spiritual stuff that I had read in some books where they say that's a concentration of spiritual energy because I've said it before fluoride I think because it's on toothpaste and some water they say it kills the pineal gland I've had dentists message me because that's what they're for fluoride and toothpaste and stuff but the spiritual side of it they say it is bad for you and it it really harms to be honest I haven't read that much about the pineal gland they say that's what gives you your intuition yeah powerful stuff so before we finish up anything you'd like to finish up on yourself or anybody that's in the struggle or anybody that's wanting to change I would say do you know the most powerful call us a spiritual practice I've ever known outside of meditation is to be kind and I'm not just referring to doing random acts of kindness helping someone with their shopping or make someone a cup of tea absolutely do that it's very important but what I'm really meaning by being kind is let that be your attitude so try to be kind in how you think about people and your attitude towards people being patient with people but a slack having compassion for people so in your mind first and then how you communicate with people and then how you interact with people and that's benefiting people obviously but as a spiritual practice what I found is it brings you home to yourself and I found out all the spiritual practices it's the one that fills me with warmth and I know when I'm filled with warmth I feel huge I feel expanded and many people talk about seeking enlightenment and we won't search of all these things and we practice umpteen trillions of hours of meditation but the strongest practice I've ever found is any practice that aligns me with the thoughts and feelings of being kind so whether I meditate on kindness or for me it's just about thinking kindly and nicely about people and trying to be kind in how I think how I speak, how I communicate and how I do it and it really brings me home to myself and I do feel that warmth that sense of warmth and expansiveness and clarity of mind and just kind of knowing the right thing to do because you're acting out of love and not fear and so you don't have to do a wee practice to think about it you're already there and I find it brings me home to that warmth space so quickly and all I actually have to do is think nice about someone doesn't even have to be anyone I know it could just be thinking nice about somebody that passed in the street you know it doesn't matter For someone who's maybe depressed or negative all the time and maybe put on that spiral downwards spiral for maybe 10, 20 years for them then to try and think like that and do that, it's difficult but if you do it consistently you will eventually change it but it can be done there's plenty of people out there that are scientific studies that it can be done David so and that's been my story that's very much appreciated check out David's books on Amazon Waterstones really anywhere the books are sold the documentary Heel on Netflix definitely watch that but tell me your story brother appreciating all the best for the future thanks a lot it's been my pleasure it's been great today Namaste