Dr John Demartini Exposes How School Is Creating Drones | DSH #2080

Summary

Digital Social Hour - Episode Summary

Episode Title:

Dr John Demartini Exposes How School Is Creating Drones
Episode #: DSH #2080
Date: July 25, 2026
Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Dr. John Demartini

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking conversation, Dr. John Demartini dives deep into the problems with modern education, the nature of human potential, and the power of individual values and curiosity. Joining Sean Kelly remotely from his ship, Dr. Demartini unpacks everything from the rise in mental health diagnoses, the pitfalls of labeling children, society’s obsession with comparison, to the philosophical and scientific quest for objective truth. With personal anecdotes, memorable metaphors, and a relentless faith in human adaptability, Dr. Demartini urges listeners to question convention, discover their unique values, and become “geniuses,” not “drones.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Education and “Creating Drones”

• Dr. Demartini opens by critiquing how modern schooling suppresses innate genius in favor of conformity:
  • “We’re making drones instead of waking up geniuses... I’ve been teaching young adults inspired destiny programs...and watch them wake up.” ([00:00])
• Labels from educators are often based on incomplete understanding of the person, leading to limiting beliefs and subordination to authority. ([00:00], [15:56])
• True learning comes when education is linked to what is meaningful to the learner.
• Notable Quote:

  “I haven’t found a child that didn’t want to learn. It just wants to learn what’s inspiring and meaningful to [them]... Linking what we think is important to what they think is important is amazing.” – Dr. Demartini ([15:52])

2. Diagnosis, Labels, and Hidden Gifts

• Increase in diagnoses like ADHD and autism partly due to redefined criteria and evolving diagnostics. ([02:30])
• Dr. Demartini warns against over-emphasizing labels:
  • “Many of the people that are diagnosed with that also have so many other gifts and talents... Sometimes it’s unwise to label the condition.” ([03:29])
• He highlights how supposed “conditions” are often linked to unique talents seen in high achievers like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. ([03:29])

3. Personal Development and Human Potential

• Dr. Demartini splits life into seven areas: spiritual, intellectual, business, wealth, family/relationship, social leadership, and physical well-being. ([04:27])
• Core principle: Any area of your life you don’t empower, someone else will overpower.
• Achieving balance and mastery in all seven areas is possible with prioritization of personal values. ([06:12], [07:06])

  “Any area of your life you don’t empower, other people are going to overpower...” – Dr. Demartini ([06:12])

4. Reading, Memory, and Subconscious Learning

• Dr. Demartini’s legendary reading habits: reading every day since age 18, once buying 40–70 books a week. ([07:23])
• On learning and recall:

  “Much of what you read doesn’t go into your conscious awareness... If something comes up that makes you need that info, it comes up from that unconscious.” ([08:25])

• Importance of having someone prompt information out of the subconscious through questioning. ([10:24])

5. The Role of the Subconscious, and Human Behavior

• Most reactions are triggered unconsciously, milliseconds before conscious awareness. ([12:14])
• People rationalize past actions by backdating decisions—creating explanations that weren’t the real triggers. ([12:28])
• The illusion of choice is a recurring theme; awareness of this can help break free from automatic, conditioned responses.

6. AI, Technology, and Social Media

• On AI: Tools are neutral – benefit or harm depends on intentional, values-driven use.

  “We can fill it with misinformation as much as we can wise information... but I don’t think we can deny it’s accelerating access to information.” ([16:59])

• Social media’s “distraction” is often value-driven selective attention; perceived laziness may actually be focused curiosity. ([18:19])

  “Many people try to be second at being somebody else instead of first at being themselves.” ([19:21])

7. Limiting Beliefs & The Dangers of Comparison

• Most limiting beliefs form from subordination—feeling others are superior and internalizing their values. ([24:02])

  “Anytime you put somebody above you, you’re going to inject their values, you’re going to cloud the clarity and you’re going to be living in the shadows...” ([29:13])

• “Owning the Traits of the Greats”: a self-development exercise for realizing your own strengths by recognizing in yourself the admired qualities in others. ([25:44])
• Personal anecdotes about transcending early learning labels and setbacks. ([20:34])

8. Critical Thinking, Questioning Authority, and Objective Truth

• Dr. Demartini advocates for respectful dialectic (thoughtful debate) and continuous questioning, citing Einstein:

  “My contempt for authority is what made me the authority.” ([31:16])

• On truth: Certainty often leads to inspiration, but true objectivity is an ever-evolving pursuit. ([33:55])
• It’s better to live with “holy curiosity” than to claim absolute knowledge.

9. Science, Religion, and Myths

• Dr. Demartini respects scientific inquiry and religious symbolism, seeking perennial truths (“the mirror of truth fragment theory”). ([36:37], [39:04])
• He rejects narrow religious dogma; instead, he finds value in comparative religion and universal laws. ([38:10])
• “Nothing more than brain development... [religion is] how we filtered and responded to environment and attempted to solve the mysteries of the time.” ([41:12])

10. Ancient Civilizations, Human Longevity, and Anthropology

• Debunks the idea that we’re necessarily the most advanced humans ever—evidence shows older, possibly advanced civilizations. ([43:45], [45:13])
• Archaeological finds like Jericho and the Dead Sea Scrolls are shifting our understanding; the search for origins is ongoing. ([47:18])

11. Generational Trauma, Perception, and Emotional Transformation

• Trauma and ecstasy influence genetic expression across generations (epigenetics), but perceptions can be neuroplastically reworked.
• “There’s nothing the mortal body can experience that the mortal soul can't love.” ([50:05])
• Events themselves are neutral; how we label and perceive them determines our experience. Adaptability flows from shifting perspective: seeing events as happening “for you,” not “to you.” ([53:37])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Education and Genius:

  “We’re making drones instead of waking up geniuses.” ([00:00])

• On Labels:

  “The labels people put on us may not be anything but just their incomplete understanding of who we are.” ([00:00], [21:53])

• On Self-Realization:

  “Many people try to be second at being somebody else, instead of first at being themselves.” ([19:21])

• On Learning:

  “If you ask me a question, I can access the rest [of what I’ve read]. So instead of sitting there and judging myself for not getting all the information... I just let it in.” ([10:24])

• On Comparison:

  “Any area of your life you don’t empower, other people are going to overpower, and you’re going to create symptomatology to wake that up.” ([06:12])

• On Adversity:

  "It doesn’t matter what happens to you. What matters is how you perceive, decide and act.” ([23:33])

• On the Human Mind:

  “There isn’t a stress out there. There’s an event out there that we label stressful because we haven’t seen the other side to it.” ([52:49])

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Important Segments & Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp | |-------|-----------| | Opening critique of education (“making drones") | 00:00–00:52 | | Diagnoses, labels, and children’s talents | 02:24–04:19 | | Seven areas of life mastery | 04:27–06:12 | | Reading habits and subconscious retention | 07:23–12:08 | | The unconscious mind and behavioral reactions | 12:14–13:42 | | The education system and meaningful learning | 13:42–15:56 | | Social media, value-driven attention | 18:19–20:26 | | Dr. D’s personal story of overcoming learning obstacles | 20:34–21:53 | | “Owning the Traits of the Greats” exercise | 25:44–30:21 | | Science, objectivity, and authority | 31:09–33:49 | | Approaching religion and myth scientifically | 36:37–43:45 | | Outdated narratives in history and anthropology | 43:55–47:18 | | Trauma, perception, and emotional transformation | 50:05–53:51 |

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Tone and Style

The conversation is deeply reflective, philosophical, and scientific, blending motivational storytelling with rigorous analysis. Dr. Demartini demonstrates humility, curiosity, and an insistence on questioning dogma—whether educational, social, or scientific. The tone oscillates between inspirational (with personal anecdotes) and academic, punctuated by memorable metaphors and a persistent optimism about human potential.

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Conclusion

This episode challenges listeners to look beyond societal labels, habitual comparison, and mass-produced knowledge, urging everyone to discover and honor their unique values and learning modalities. Dr. Demartini’s journey—from a labeled “lost cause” to globally recognized thinker—serves as a model for unlocking one’s own genius. The core message: Embrace curiosity, question everything, and realize nothing is missing inside you—provided you look deeply enough.

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Learn more about Dr. John Demartini: drdemartini.com
(“There’s a website there that will keep them busy for at least a life.” – Dr. Demartini, [54:13])

Transcript

[A]

So we're making drones instead of waking up geniuses. I think the reason I say it is because I've been teaching young adults inspired destiny programs. And I'm giving sometimes children that are rejects from schools because they've been labeled everything imaginable and identify what their values are and watch them wake up. Absolutely amazing. And so the labels people put on us may not be anything but just their incomplete understanding of who we are. Well, many limiting beliefs emerge from the subordination to outer authorities. Anytime you see somebody you think is smarter than you, or more wealthy than you, or business savv than you, or more stable in relationships or more socially connected or more physically fit or more spiritually aware or whatever, and anytime you minimize yourself and are too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you, you tend to inject their values, which clouds the clarity of your own calling. You might say.

[B]

Okay, guys, here on a remote episode Today, we got Dr. Demartini here joining us from his ship. Good to see you, doctor.

[A]

Thank you for having me on your show.

[B]

Like you're the first guest I've had on a. On a boat.

[A]

Well, I'm out a lot.

[B]

How have things been with you lately? Busy.

[A]

Been very busy. Yes, it's been fantastic.

[B]

What's the latest project you're working on? New book or anything?

[A]

I am, I'm just working on a new book. A textbook on oncology.

[B]

Nice. Find anything interesting there? I'm sure you did, but maybe don't want to throw it too much.

[A]

I've been very, very fascinated on that topic since 1978. 9. And I've been writing on the topic and researching that topic for 48 years.

[B]

So the rates are rising right now, correct? Pretty dramatically.

[A]

Certainly there's other are declining. So there's been a. There's been a variation.

[B]

What's your theory on why some are rising, some are dropping. Is there a common theme there?

[A]

This. It's multifactorial. There's stress levels, there's genetics, there's environmental factors, there's dietary factors. They all play a role. And there's definitely also the diagnostic intensity, how far we look at that condition. We find more if we look for it. So sometimes it's just a description of how well we're now identifying the condition earlier. So that's another factor.

[B]

Yeah, that's what I wonder with the mental health conditions like ADHD and autism, are we just detecting more of it or was is there an actual spike?

[A]

Right, the spike. And there's also a redefinition of the criteria for it, which then makes it more prevalent. So we sometimes we change the ICD9 codes, 2000, I think 12 or 13 or something. And. And that also made it more prevalent because now we're lowering the criteria to be able to put it into place to label that condition, to treat it.

[B]

So when you see these stats that are pretty crazy, they're like 1 out of 12 kids in California have autism. What do you think about that?

[A]

Well, I wish I could say that. I know I've studied that. I won't say extensively. I've studied it over the years and I still don't know if I can pin down what's going on there. I've got theories but can't state with certainty. But it certainly is seemingly more prevalent. Definitely.

[B]

Do you worry about that, continuing to follow that trajectory?

[A]

I wish I could say that I worry about it as much as probably be wise, but I have other preoccupations many times in my life that I work on. So I can't say that I give it 100% attention unless I'm starting to get a lot of clients with that. I don't put as much focus on that. That's not my typical issues. And I also find that many of the people that are diagnosed with that also have so many other gifts and so many other talents that I sometimes wonder if it's not wiser to focus on those talents and let those develop and not even put a label on in the first place and realize that there's a lot of upsides on some of those cases. We find that even people like, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates and others sometimes have a tiny portion of that spectrum. So we, we don't want to. It's almost unwise sometimes to label the condition.

[B]

Sometimes 100 agree with that. So you said you have a lot of clients. What are the, the main problems that they're coming to you with these days?

[A]

Well, I'm. I don't. The clinical is not my only thing. I'm involved in personal development for all these years also. So anything to do with maximizing human awareness, potential and achieving in business or in your career, your goals, things of that majority of my clients are entrepreneurs that want to achieve things. And I help them navigate through the obstacles and perceive challenges that they might impose on themselves towards these objectives. So I'm mainly entrepreneurs, but I do still have clinical cases and clients that I work with, specialties that I still work with and I'm fascinated by really. I like to divide life since I was 18. Divide life into our inspired quest. Some people call it spiritual quest, our mind development quest, waking up our genius, our business development, our wealth development, our family or relationship development, our social leadership development, and our physical well being. And I've been doing everything I can, studying as much as I can in each of these areas to help people have a well rounded, more fulfilled and more expanded life. I believe you can master all those and do amazingly in all those areas. And I've tried to exemplify that in my own life. So I try to help people in all those areas, but health is still one of them. And I still write a lot on the correlations between the psychology and the physiology. That's been my specialty for all these years, particularly in the Cantor.

[B]

Got it. Yeah. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they thrive at some of those five, but not all five. Right.

[A]

Very much. Sometimes they really excel at their business, but they're not so wise in relationship dynamics.

[B]

I see that all the time.

[A]

Their health.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So, you know, our hierarchy of values dictate how we perceive beside an act. And the hierarchy of our values is dictating, in a sense, our direction and destiny. So some people have a high value on business and finance, for instance, but maybe a lower value on family and social. And so they excel in business, but they're not as bright in relationships. They go from one relationship to the other, dealing with that. And others are really great at their spiritual quest or their intellectual quest as academics, but they don't have any money or they don't know how to take care of their health. So I try to, well, round those individuals and try to give them insights on how they can efficiently empower all those areas. Any area of your life you don't empower other people are going to overpower and you're going to create symptomatology to wake that up, to try to make that a value enough to put energy into it and help it develop.

[B]

Yeah. And you believe you can excel at all five, you said, right?

[A]

All seven of those areas? Yeah, I've been doing that pretty consistently for four to five decades and I've been teaching for four, five, 54 years now. November.

[B]

You still doing a lot of reading? I know you're like pretty famous for reading a ton of books.

[A]

Read every single day of my life. I don't go a day without reading.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And I've been reading since I learned how to at age 18. So I've been devouring books and now just ongoing literature. Most of it's now online, but yeah, I used to buy 40 to 70 books a week on average. Going through those.

[B]

Holy crap. I just found out the average reading level in America is a ninth grade level, and it's going down.

[A]

Doesn't surprise me. You know, a lot of people learn through visual and auditory now, and so reading is a little bit less. And we used to have bookstores. Now we go on Amazon and get them. It's more efficient. But. Yeah, I don't see as many people reading it today. But I'm. I don't know how to even go through a day without feeding my mind in some way.

[B]

Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah. I do only listen to audio now. I don't physically read. I wonder if there's a retention level with audio versus reading.

[A]

You know, share something about that that I found really interesting.

[B]

Yeah,

[A]

I started reading at 18, really, because I had learning problems as a child. And I pulled out a dictionary and I started memorizing 30 words a day. And I would recite them 20 times, write them out 20 times, the definition 20 times, and pronounce them 20 times. And my mom would test me on those 30 words to get my vocabulary up. And it grew my vocabulary like 20,000 words in two years. And then I just wanted to read encyclopedias because that had the most diversity of words. Just to try to feed my mind and catch up with the other kids that were way ahead of me. That really paid off. But I found that if you're trying to read, much of what you read doesn't go into your conscious awareness. So you have very small percentage of whatever goes in. You have a pulvinar nuclei in the thalamus, that is a gating filtering area. When sensory information, particularly visual information, comes in a small percentage through the thalamus is gated. And only a small portion goes to the conscious awareness. The rest is kind of blindsight and hindsight, and it's sitting there kind of in the subconscious. But if something comes up that makes you now need that information, it comes from that unconscious subconscious area and comes up the surface. So it goes from the what is called the amygdala and hippocampus area, and it goes up in the cortex. So I learned at 24, when I was doing a presentation on dentistry. At the time, I had a group of really challenging dentists that were throwing questions at me. And I surprisingly remembered something that I wasn't conscious of, that it just surfaced and I was able to visually see the entire page of a Grey's Anatomy text.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And people, they throw out this Question. And I didn't know. I knew that. And there it was. And then I realized when somebody asks you a question that is really pertinent, that is meaningful, information that is not normally prioritized now comes up to priority, and it comes out of the unconscious and up to the conscious level. So when I did that, I started experimenting with that, and I started realizing that I can devour literature, pages, pages, pages, pages, pages, pages. And I may get a certain percentage of that consciously accessed and clear. But if I need it, you ask me a question, I can access the rest. So instead of sitting there and judging myself for not getting all the information and having complete photographic awareness, I didn't even judge it. I just let it in. And so I just started devouring sometimes up to 11,000 pages in a day. Just devouring information to try to find out, and then having people ask me questions from the text to see if it would surface.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And I trained myself to allow that unconscious to come up and be there. And that's one of the reasons I love Q and A sessions, because you get to discover things you didn't even consciously know that you've read and studied, and it brings it up and it's vivid all of a sudden. So I realized that anything that's linked to what you value most and that is pertinent at the moment goes from the unconscious into the conscious mind and allows people to read vastly more without an anxiety or judgment on themselves for not retaining it all immediately. And that really helped me devour information to be able to use that information for presentations and education.

[B]

Got it. That is so fascinating because they say a lot of our thoughts and actions are from the unconscious or the subconscious mind. Right.

[A]

Most of what we do, you know, a lot of the things we think are our decision from a cortical level are actually going on 200 milliseconds before we're even conscious. Where the sensory information.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

So we're having automaton reactions from the amygdala and the cerebellum before we even get to the cortex. So some of that information that we think, what we do is what is called backdating. We backdate the decision 200 milliseconds. When we actually become conscious of it, then we pretend that we actually made a decision, and we didn't even make a decision. But we don't want to face the idea that we reacted. So we come up with some rationale. Kind of like on the stock market, at the end of the day, they do wraps up on the stock market and they come up with all kinds of reasons why they think the stock market went up and down and only 6% of them have been proven to be true. But they come up with something and we kind of do that. We come up with rational explanations of why we do what we do. But many of them are actually not even on the conscious level. And they're just reactions. And those reactions are because of information stored in the hippocampus that were painful or pleasureful in the past that this is associated and reminds us of. And so we're reacting with an avoidance or seeking mechanism, a prey or predator response, without even knowing we're doing that. And so a lot of it is not on the conscious level that we're functioning many times like we're driving a car, not even being paying attention to it. Same kind of thing.

[B]

It makes you wonder if the education system's teaching people wrong, right? Because they're teaching us memorization and to focus on the conscious, but not really the unconscious.

[A]

Don't get me going on that one. What was it the gentleman called it? Mass habituation. But I, I believe that every child, and we're all children, no matter what our age are, all children have a desire to learn what is deeply meaningful to them. And if we can't perceive and link in our brain how the topic that we're going to study is helping us fulfill what's most deeply meaningful to us. We filter it out and it goes into short term memory and is not applied until something comes along where that information is now important and then it comes back up. So our schooling is imposing from, you know, the ideals of what society the drones are to learn, you might say. And they're imposing this ideal about what you need to learn without actually always factoring what it is that inspires that individual. So we're making drones instead of waking up geniuses, I think. And the reason I say it is because I've been teaching young adults inspired destiny programs and I'm giving sometimes children that are rejects from schools because they've been labeled everything imaginable and identify what their values are and watch them wake up. Absolutely amazing learning capacities in a very short period of time once they're engaged. So I don't like the idea of labeling the kids. I really don't think that's a sign of intelligence on the part of the educators because I haven't found a child that didn't want to learn. It just wants to learn what's inspiring and meaningful to that. But we think, well, that's not important. You should be learning this. But linking what we think is important to what they think is important is amazing. It's like communicating what I would like to say in terms of what you would love to talk about. Then you're engaged. I think that children deserve that. I really do.

[B]

Absolutely. Yeah. I got labeled with a learning condition, with adhd, with autism. And I used to think I hated.

[A]

Instead of having a PhD, you know, doctorate, MD, and everything else, we just get all the labels that people like to put on it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. At a young age, very young age in, like elementary school, they. They told me all this and tried to put me on medication, which is crazy at that age. And I used to think I hated learning because, like you said, I didn't care about the topics and everything. But now I love it, dude. I get to read what I want.

[A]

You're astute. And it's not that you had any learning problems that you just. You had topics that were not inspiring to you, I'm sure.

[B]

Yeah. 100. Which is most of school. Right. I mean, the stuff they teach now,

[A]

it's kind of crazy how they've set it up, but I guess they're doing it mass instruction and instead of master development, awakening.

[B]

Yeah. So where do you see AI fitting into all this? Are you optimistic about it helping people learn more, or do you have. Yeah. Where do you fit in on that?

[A]

I like to think of technology from its root, you know, techne, which means a means to an end. Teleology was the end in mind, and techne was the means to an end. And so I don't label it good or bad. I don't think the moral language putting on it. It's how we use it and how effective we use it and how we develop it. And we can fill it with misinformation as much as we can fill it with wise information. And so screening out the AI to our advantage and having checks and balances on the information so we're not misinformed is wise. But I don't think that we can deny it's accelerating our ability to access information. So I'm very grateful for that. I mean, I'm putting this textbook together and I'm using textbooks, I'm using articles, I'm using AI. And there's no doubt it speeds up. You get a creative idea and you can explore that more effectively than you can trying to look up an article for each of those thoughts. So there's. There's great use of it, but it's like anything, like social Media, if you use it wisely, it's a great tool. If you don't, it can be a great distraction.

[B]

Yeah, it's interesting because I make a living off social media, but I recognize for a majority of people maybe it's not a benefit to their life, you

[A]

know, well, it depends. I, I'm, I, I've, I did a, I had a gentleman that I analyzed. We did a little analysis on what he actually spent his time on and stopping and looking at in social media. And he was basically judged by his parents and then judging himself, thinking that he was being distracted and non productive and all this other stuff. But what we did is we actually identified what his hierarchy of values were. We identified what he was actually noticing on Instagram and these kind of things. And it wasn't everything that was going by, it was only certain things that were going by. And we narrowed it down and looked at the probability of it and found out there were three topics that were consistent that was grabbing his attention and they were linked to what he valued most. Once we identified that, his perception of himself, of being lazy, being distracted, changed. And then he realized that he had a very strong interest in a topic and this is what he kept being called to. And then we actually identified what he wanted to do in his career. What he did, he broke down into tears. He goes, so what you're saying is instead of me being distracted, I've been selectively biased in my selection of information that's helping me get what I really want. And I said, exactly what's happening. And he goes, this is revealing because I've been labeling myself and buying into everybody else's belief system about what I'm doing and they don't value what I'm valuing. And so I bought into that and subordinated to their labels of me and questioned myself. And now I don't need to, I'm going to go forward on it. I'm going to specialize in where I want to specialize and use these tools. I said, great, now you're taking command of it. Instead of being, you know, many people try to be second at being somebody else instead of first at being themselves. And they live in the shadows of others and subordinate to outer influences and let the voices and the visions on the outside overrule the knowing on the inside. And giving yourself permission to be yourself in a world that doesn't want you to be is very powerful.

[B]

100%. That's so relatable because when I went to college, looking back at it, it was because I didn't want to be judged of being a dropout and being a loser, you know.

[A]

Well, I'm a dropout. I left school when I was, I was told I would never be able to read or write or communicate or mount a thing and never go very far in life. In first grade because I couldn't read and couldn't speak. And I had a speech pathologist since I was one and a half years old.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Now people. Hard to believe that they don't believe it. I was just here on my ship a couple days ago with a guy that lived in a tent with me. I used to live in the streets and lived in a tent.

[B]

What.

[A]

And so this guy used to read for me 55 years ago. And he was here visiting me when I was in Los Angeles the other day. And very inspiring to hear his story with my new partner. He was telling the stories about my speaking ability at the time and reading capacity. I couldn't do it.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

So he used to read to me and make sense to things for me. But today I've worked extensively, I mean, phenomenal amount of hours to transcend that. So I do very strongly believe, I'm a neurologist in background also and I really strongly believe, believe that we have neuroplasticity to remodel our brain. And so the labels people put on us may not be anything but just their incomplete understanding of who we are.

[B]

Yeah. Reminds me of Jim Quick too, if you know him.

[A]

I've been interviewed by him, sure.

[B]

I mean he was called the boy with a broken brain and now he's the number one memory coach in the world. I'm sorry. I'm sure you meet all sorts of interesting people on your ship, right?

[A]

I have definitely been blessed to meet amazing people, without a doubt. I, I had that as a goal when I was very young at 18. And I've been blessed to meet thousands of people that I, I, I wanted to make some sort of difference in the world. I'm, I have no doubt that you, you've had some of that in you and, and I wanted to, you know, make a mark. And when I was 20, I kept, in my science studies, I kept seeing Isaac Isimoff the futuristic and I, and I, and no matter where I was going, I kept seeing his name in books everywhere. His name just kept popping up in all kinds of books. And I remember writing down with a tear in my eye and I said someday I want to be able to make enough of a contribution like him to be referenced in a thousand books. That was my goal because that would be a way of measuring that I've done something, you know, some sort of contribution where people are remembering or something. And we're at the 800. We just broke the 800 mark the other day. So I really believe that if you associate with people that give themselves permission to leave a mark in the world and you can do the same, there's nobody that can't do whatever they set their mind to in that respect. And I met a guy that was a quadriplegic that ended up surfing big waves and was told he would never be able to be in the water even.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And I've seen people that were burned and covered completely like that become a professional speaker. So it doesn't matter what happens to you. It doesn't matter what you're going through, what you've been through. What matters is how you perceive, decide and act and what you decide to do with it and the direction you see it, helping you get to. Yeah, it's really quite amazing what we're capable of doing. That's what inspired me.

[B]

Yeah. A lot of people have these limiting beliefs, I've noticed. Right.

[A]

Well, many limiting beliefs emerge from the subordination to outer authorities. You know, anytime you see somebody you think is smarter than you, or more, you know, wealthy than you, or more business savvy than you, or more stable in relationships or more socially connected or more physically fit or more spiritually aware or whatever, and anytime you minimize yourself and are too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you, you tend to inject their values, which clouds the clarity of your own calling, you might say, and makes you have uncertainty and makes you question yourself and have an internal conflict. Freud called it the superego. And it moralizes you and it makes you judge yourself and it makes you think you know, when you're doing what they're doing, you're proud. And if you're not, you're ashamed and you get caught in the moral vicissitudes instead of the clarity of purpose in life. And so that's why we're not here to compare ourselves to other people. We're here to compare our daily actions to what we value most. Because if we're congruent and live by priority, our day doesn't fill up with low priority distractions which are all the amygdala impulses and instincts that keep us from living in our executive function where we're objective and reasonable and pursuing with strategic planning and a time and space horizon that allows us to create an incremental momentum building legacy in life. So I'm a firm believer in prioritizing your life and saying yes to things that are really, truly important and giving rise to saying no or delegating lower priority things and say thank you but no thank you to the people that are imposing and trying to grab your attention and testing you to see if you believe in yourself.

[B]

Yeah, comparing can be dangerous. So you don't do any comparing when it comes to your life.

[A]

Well, I learned many years ago. I started doing an exercise called Owning the traits of the Greats. And anytime I came across somebody that I thought was extraordinary, I wanted to associate with them, I wanted to interact with them, I wrote them down. I wanted to have them as clients or friends or whatever. Just because I knew that you associate with people with bigger dreams, you're probably going to do bigger dreams. But I also realized that many times I would compare myself to them. And then I thought, wait a minute, what is it that I perceive them demonstrating, displaying that I'm too humble to admit. And I started doing an exercise, what I call Owning the traits of the greats. Anything I saw in them I would look at. Where do I do it, when do I do it, who do I do it to and who perceives me that way until the quantity and quality were equal. And then it liberated me from subordination and comparison and allowed me to honor the form mine was in and my values and honor the form theirs were in their values and realize that their genius I already have, it's in my area, but not their area. And I don't need to be second at being them. And that opened up the doorway to participate with more of those same individuals because it leveled the playing field. I was writing a book on cosmology and astrophysics, a two volume set that I did in 2018, and I was fascinated. I've been interested in looking at the stars since I was three. I wrote this big text, these two volumes. And during that time I did the Owning of the Traits the Greats of Stephen Hawking because I was fascinated by his life. My mom had Lou Gehrig's disease and so did he. And so I was especially connected to that, you know, how he was able to do what he did. And I went through and I own 19 traits that I really looked up to and admired in him. And I identified where it was in my form. And then seven months later I got, I was doing a CNN interview in London and the lady after the interview she said, I'm working on another Project I would really love to know if you'd be interested in. I said, what's the project? Well, we're doing a project on 12 people that made a difference in the 21st century. And I said, of course I'd be interested in that. I said, who else is in there? And he said, well, Stephen Hawking. We just filmed him before he died. And we got him in there, and we've got Robin Williams in there, and we've got Anthony Quinn before he passed away. And they said, we'd love to have you in there. And Sadhguru. And there's Tom Ford, a bunch of interesting people. And I was in tears of inspiration because I realized that when we are not subordinating to people, but we're honoring what we see in other great people. We have in Romans 2:1, it stated that whatever you see in others, positive or negative, you do the same things. And you wouldn't admire it or despise it unless it was representing something you're proud of or ashamed of, but maybe unconscious of. So I realized that if I go and take most amazing people on the planet that I really think are doing extraordinary things and find out what I admire in them and then own it, the level of opportunity that I get in life expands. And that's opened up doorways for me in all kinds of fields. And so I try to teach my students to not subordinate, because anytime you put somebody above you, you're going to inject their values, you're going to cloud the clarity, and you're going to be living in the shadows and. And be a follower of a culture instead of leader of a culture.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I want. I wanted to be able to build a culture, not follow a culture. I didn't want to subordinate to a tradition, a convention, a moray, just because it was there and it's been handed down and stagnant. I want to innovate and create and be an unborrowed visionary along the way. And so I. I found that that tool was very useful. And any human being can do it. I've taken. I've watched. I watched a girl do that who is young, who wanted to be in this music industry, and I had her do it on Lady Gaga and Madonna and Beyonce and Taylor Swift and these iconic females. Two and a half weeks after she did Beyonce, Beyonce was driving in Los Angeles and happened to see a. A bus going by with the advertisement for one of her performances in la. And she looked it up, went and pulled up one of her songs, loved the song, and Invited her to her home to do a present her song in front of a lot of very influential people. And it raised her positioning. And she ended up with four of her songs in movie.

[B]

What?

[A]

Because she owned the traits of the greats. And I tell people that there's nothing missing at the level of the essence of the soul, which is the real, authentic you. The state of unconditional love, the one that's not judging. Nothing's missing in you, but the level of the senses, where you're judging people. And living in the phenomenal world of the misperceptions and distortions of the amygdala. You perceive things missing, and the only things that are missing are the things you're too proud or too humble to admit that you see in others, but you don't see in you yet. You haven't wakened it up and realize it's all inside you. Nothing's missing in you. And that's. I love helping people see that, because the moment they open those doorways, their opportunities expand and their potential to create what they really have in their heart to create is expanded from it. Very inspiring.

[B]

Yeah. The human body, it's so fascinating. When you look at all the top scientists, a lot of their answers came from within, Right? They didn't look to outside sources.

[A]

Exactly. Well, I learned that from Einstein when I was 18. I asked my mom, what exactly is a genius? She said, but people like Albert Einstein and da Vinci. And I said, well, then get me everything you can on those characters. I want to start reading about it. And Einstein had a guy named Philip Leonard, who was a mathematician, and he challenged Philip Leonard's photoelectric ideas. And he had gotten a Nobel Prize, Philip. And he challenged it, and he didn't like to be challenged because he was. He knew there was a flaw in it, and he wanted to get rid of Einstein. He literally had a hitman on him for him, and a German, Hitler was involved in it. And it's a very interesting story about it. And so Einstein said, you know, if God doesn't discover what I sing, I feel sorry for God because I'm that certain about what I'm saying. And he ended up getting a photoelectric Nobel Prize because he outdid Leonard's thing. But Leonard was the authority. And Einstein said, my contempt for authority is what made me the authority. He had the courage to not just subordinate and make assumptions and parrot things, but to actually think it through and make sure it had reason and logic through it and to make sure it was sound. And many People are so used to just parroting what people are told and never questioning it. And I think the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. And questions make unconscious conscious so you can be fully conscious in life.

[B]

We seem to be moving away from questioning authority these days. Right?

[A]

Well, there's. There's respectful ways of doing it. And I sometimes, you know, get my buttons pushed and I fall into my amygdala and go into debate. But I just had a nice debate, kind of a debate the other day on a podcast, and it was. It was great. He was very intelligent, he was very respectful, and we bantered really well. And I said that wasn't a debate, that was a dialectic we both learned from each other. And that I respect. I'm not interested in having absolutes and rights and wrongs and black and whites and stuff because there's no growth there. You're just trying to argue for your position. But the dialectic I'm interested in and the synthesis and synchronicity of opposite information, which seems to be clashing and contradictory, actually has a complementarity to it. And I'm very, very, very in favor of having those kinds of dialogues because I think that's where we grow.

[B]

Do you believe in objective truth? Because now there's a whole debate about what is actually true, right?

[A]

Well, that's been a debate for centuries. Can we actually transcend our subjectivity and approximate objective truth? Or they just still stuck in bits of opinion and whatever we know. I mean, you know, the idea of gravity with Newton was assumed to be the final truth. And then Einstein with general relativity and special relativity came up with distortions of the fabric of space time. Now they've got quantum gravity as a quantum loop gravity ideas. And now they've got. Eric Lynn got the idea that it's bits of information, it's quantum information. So, you know, it's an ongoing, deeper exploration. And I think, as Einstein said, it's wise to live with holy curiosity instead of assume you have the final answer. So in that respect, continually going through and being humble and pursuing greater levels of objective truth, I think makes sense. But sometimes we reach a state of certainty that I think is pretty profound, where there's a tier of inspiration that lets you know that you've captured something and you know, to follow it and to. To stick with it. And I think that those are found. And when I studied the Nobel Prize winners, all the biographies of them and what they did, I found that many of those tiers of inspirations were the guides to some of the greatest discoveries. So I believe that you can get it close enough to gain a certitude enough to be able to come up with new information. You know, a scientist would not pursue science if it didn't believe that there was some sort of rational order in the universe, there wouldn't be a purpose for it. And yet the idea that there's no. It's all random and it's probabilistic and everything else with, you know, Schrodinger's equations, it's just probabilistic. Even Boltzmann questioned that there may be some underlying hidden order in the universe and that we get glimpses of and we get, you know, access to occasionally that we then build a foundation on. And maybe we don't have the computational awareness to comprehend it all. But I really believe that there is a loving, and I use the word loving because I define, as Heraclitus did, that love is a synthesis synchronicity of all complementary opposites. If the net energy of the universe is zero and the net charges is zero in the universe that we have done, then maybe there is an inherent system that transcends the polarities of awareness and why the dialectic is trying to get there. I believe that that's there. And even if it's not, and I only approximate it, I'd rather spend my life in the pursuit of that than to not.

[B]

Fair point. I'm sure you've read a ton of books on religion and all that. Do you subscribe to anything in particular like simulation theory or anything?

[A]

I can't prove or disprove simulation theory. I think it's fun to read. I certainly can't prove it's not or prove it is, but I have studied about 3,000 different religions from tribal systems all the way up to larger organizations and I've attempted to try to find common threads to it. The perennial philosophy that would stand. I'm not interested in anthropomorphic, geomorphic in group out group biases and moral hypocritical systems. That does not appeal to me. But the idea of. And as Einstein, who played on Spinoza a bit, it's enough for me on a daily basis to explore and to investigate the mysteries and the intelligence that permeates the universe. I'm all for that. Many of my meditational requests as a goal in life has been to see if I could probe as many mysteries as I can in my life, in many fields as I can, because I. I have a lot of fulfillment when I get one of those things permeated and penetrated. So I don't think there's an end to it. But I do believe that there is intelligence. Not in the form of a punishing, rewarding deity of any form. There's 16,000 deities that have been extinct. Give me a break. One mole is not going to make that different. But I do believe that the laws of the universe, the universal laws,

[B]

even

[A]

though we haven't found a complete generalized universal summary of that, I really do believe that that's worth pursuing. And I believe that those are less viable than human inventions. Human laws are viable, but universal laws. I try to base all my work in human behavior on that field and the work in physiology, psychology, sociology, even theology. I want it based on that. And I truly don't believe that true religion and true science don't fight. I really believe that there's a cornerstone there, a foundation, an edifice that they're built on. That's true. That stands the test of time. And I've tried to, when I'm studying religion, trying to find a way of wording it in a scientific and a theological language to try to bring those. And bridge that boundaries.

[B]

Yeah. Is there one religion in particular that you feel like is the most accurate, or do you feel like they're all kind of in the same boat?

[A]

I've had to extract bits and pieces. I went and spent time with the Bompa Lama in Nepal and the Dalai Lama. I've been all over the place. And I met with rabbis and I met. And I like to think of this as there's a giant mirror of truth. And at one point in the universe, it got splintered and fragmented and everybody's got a little piece of it. But. But the pursuit of all human knowledge was to find gnosis and to find a way of putting your hand over the cracks and smoothing out the cracks and being able to see the full mirror without the fractions. And so will I obtain that? No. Will I pursue that? Yes. Will I make new discoveries and have moments of inspiration and awe along the way when I put new little puzzle pieces together? Yes. Will I be able to maybe build a little bit of an edifice that somebody else can stand on and go farther on? Thank. I'm thankful for the opportunity to do that. So. Yeah. But when I stop and think about it, you know, we have a. I met a guru one time. He thought he was enlightened and he was sitting in a lotus position. Right. Being all present, supposedly. And then I thought, you know, he's going around on an Earth that's 24,000 miles roughly around and 8,000 miles in diameter. And he's spinning around at 86,400 seconds a day. And he's saying, I'm enlightened. And he sees this small little speck of awareness. And then from the Sun, 93 million miles away, one astronomical unit. It's not even discernible without a telescope. So all of his knowledge is not even visible from the Milky Way, 26, 7000 light years away. You know, light years, a lot of distance. And to the center of the Milky Way, it's Sagittarius, a black hole. We don't even see the sun. We don't see the planet. So that. Well, the degree of enlightenment and that religion about that particular group of that language and that location at that time is not even insignificant. It's not even an infinitesimal Right. When I think about that, I'd rather study the farthest reaches of the observable Hubble telescopes and keep my eyes open on the frontiers and try to put together a philosophical and a scientific understanding of the laws of the universe and then see how that overlaps with some of the foundational religions that we do. Religion unquestionably originates from brain development, from the amygdala. It starts out with absolutes, and it rises up morally into relatives, and it gets to situational and highly refined situational ethics as it emerges. So when you stop, it's nothing more to brain development, and it's how we filtered and how we responded to our environment and how we interpreted the environment at the time and our attempt to solve the mysteries of the time. And when I put it in that context, I love studying philosophies and religions and mythologies, but to narrow it down and say that's it, and the rest of mart to me is like the height of folly.

[B]

Wow. So you even find some truth in mythologies.

[A]

I've studied mythologies. I wrote a textbook on Greek mythologies, and I took people to Greece and laid it out and showed that it had an astronomical and optical origin. And I always say that theology is a personification of astronomy and optics. And you can see this in the Hindu Vedas, and you can see this in the New Testament and Old Testament. You can see this in the Egyptians. There's a lot of optical light. And I mean, deity means day, dia, day light. And so it's optical. And the sources were astronomical. There was geomorphic and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic and anthropomorphic and astronomorphic forms of deities throughout the times. And if you put them all together, you realize it's just a development of the brain. It is purely a development of the brain through history. And we're becoming more abstract and more mathematical and math is more universal language than any of the languages of the 7,000 languages we have. And I'd rather do that. And I think that there's a core of that. That's why I love studying cell physiology and the origins of genes and things because I think we can look through the ubiquitousness of the enzymes and proteins and transcriptions and the genes through time and we can get it together of the mathematics of that and get a better understanding of what's going on sometimes in some of the abstract parroting that we see in theology.

[B]

Right, so you've been to Egypt, you've probably been to a ton of ancient sites. In history class they teach us we're the most advanced form of human right now. But do you buy that narrative?

[A]

No. I also wrote books on anthropologies and I feel quite led into the idea that we haven't even begun to find some of our origins. It just keeps going back. I mean, in 1973 man was 500,000 years old. It went to a million two and a million four and a million six and it just kept going back. Now they're looking at, you know, millions of years where the junction between primates and humans being. And it just keeps being pushed back, every species being pushed back. And now, you know, Jericho is once 6 to 7,000 years old, now it's 12 to 14, it's doubled.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

So everything gets pushed back over time. And I'm constantly getting research on anthropology and archaeology and everything's being pushed back. I have to update that book. Constantly. Books. And so no, I think the humans are much been around longer than we thought. The hundred thousand year old transition is now pushed to 300,000. We found the, the idea of the tree of life has now been kind of thrown out. It's now the bush of life and, and who knows where it's going to go. So I just keep my eyes open and keep as we go. I don't think we can conclude it completely yet.

[B]

Interesting. But do you feel like they, there were civilizations that were super advanced with the way they built some of their structures and all that?

[A]

Super advanced. You know, like, like some people want to say alien origins. No, I think we're just older than we've been and I think that we have had knowledge that has been discarded. I mean Even the Copernican revolution in the 15th, you know, 16th, 15th century or whatever. With Copernicus, he studied Philolas, which is a Pythagorean student, and he studied Aristarchus in the third century bc and he studied Ptolemy and he saw that there was a heliocentric system all the way back and they had a central fire which they considered the Milky Way at the time. And so I think there was more knowledge. And I think what's happened is sometimes people are aware, but sometimes it just fades and then new people come and emerge and evolve. So I think that there's been portions of civilizations that were intelligent. Today you have, you know, like anything else, you have a handful of people that are maybe at the top, the Nobel Prize winners that are out the edge or the great thinkers, but the majority of people go about day to day life and that's not their thinking. So we may find a civilization that looks like they were just primitive, but there may have been some very advanced people sitting in there with very great thoughts. And you know, even in the great. When you go to the Ephesus Library there in Turkey, used to be some of the greatest minds were hanging out in that building. Now it's just ruins. But that was only a handful of people out of all the thousands of people that were living there. So I really believe that there are more. We're going to discover more things. We're going to find them in the oceans, we're going to find them in layers of sediment. We're going to keep finding. I feel certain in the last 54 years since I've been studying this, that it's been pushed back drastically. And another 50 years, 100 years, that's going to be pushed back further.

[B]

Yeah, who knows? We found the Dead Sea Scrolls in our lifetime, right?

[A]

Exactly. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, they revealed things that weren't revealed in the New Testament, because the New Testament was a compilation of a selection of a group of men's decisions. But there were a whole lot of other scrolls. I have 900 of them in my possession. And one of my friends is the largest collection of rare manuscripts in the world. $6 billion worth of them. He's got scrolls and tractates and vellums that are astonishing, that I've been blessed to read. So I'm a firm believer that, you know, we're going to go finding more. More. Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize winner in his book Principles of Quantum Mechanics in 1947, said that it's not that we don't know so much that it's. We know so much that itself. We do not probe past the boundaries, the computational boundaries that the paradigm of our time, the zeitgeist of our time, like to portray.

[B]

I love that. So have you pretty much traveled everywhere you've wanted to at this point?

[A]

No, I've spoken in 174 countries. I still got 23 to go.

[B]

Wow, that's the most I've heard. 174. Well done.

[A]

Still got more to go. Some of them are not easy to go into the Congo and places and in some parts of Asia are not easy to get into and maybe even dangerous in some places in Africa. But I'm going to keep my eyes open and I've got one more this year that I'm going to get and just nice. Keep plugging away. I had a goal and dream to go to every country on the face of the earth when I was 17. And so I've been working on it and I haven't. Haven't finished them all, but still working, doing well.

[B]

What's the most dangerous out of those?

[A]

Oh, I think that I was. I don't want to say something that's disrespectful to a country. There are some cities that have been a bit challenging and that, you know, let's put it that way.

[B]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[A]

Where I sail sometimes we have special soldiers come on to help us go in those areas where there's pirates and there's.

[B]

Wow, actual pirates, huh?

[A]

Yeah, we've had to deal with that. But there's some areas that are a little bit edgy. And just like in some areas of town, of any town, you might find a rough area that maybe the people there are not able to see the opportunities that they have. And they're basically in their amygdala functioning from their amygdala more than their executive function.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Any city. I mean, I'm in Vegas. There's parts of Vegas where you can't walk.

[A]

Places in almost every city that probably not the wisest thing to just go picnic.

[B]

Right. And you hear in some of those communities the word generational trauma. Right. I'm sure you've studied that a lot. What do you think about that? How generations back it can affect a person?

[A]

Oh, you know, there's multi generational epigenetics and anything that we have perceived as ecstatic or traumatic is epigenetically coded. And it goes on through the germline down through the ages. But any one of those tags, epigenetic tags, can be altered. So I've worked at developing a method, I call it the demartini method, on how to dissolve those tags and take whatever's happened and turn it on the way instead of in the way. So if the person's had some sort of a quote, trauma, that's a perception. That's a choice of perception. Because I've had the opportunity to take the most outrageous stuff that people have gone through serial. I mean, you name it, we're able to help them find out the other side of the equation. Because every event has the power to be used as a glass half full or empty. It's up to you. And I don't think I would say that there's nothing the mortal body can experience that the mortal soul can't love. So it's a matter of asking quality questions and equilibrating your mind from the things you label traumatic. Because traumatic is an assumption that you see more drawbacks than benefits in an event if you find the benefits of it. I use this analogy. This was a ridiculous analogy, though, but I'll use it. Imagine if I was to put your hand out on your table there, and I took a hammer and I slammed it, and you go, whoa. And you got really angry and you go, what the heck? And you got up from the table and you said, what the hell was that about? And I said, well, I slammed your thumb. And that you would probably think, well, that's a bit traumatic. And that was uncalled for, and you'd have a whole bunch of associations with it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But if I told you I'd like to give you a billion dollars cash, and it's on pallets, and here it is, and I'm going to get you a house without any taxes, and you'll have a house of your dreams and the girlfriend of your dreams, and if I stack up enough advantages with that that happen to match your values. Now, you may not be interested in money or may not be interested in those things, but if I found out what you were interested in, put those out there in sufficient quantities, you would say, please smack my thumb.

[B]

Yeah, for sure.

[A]

The event of smacking your thumb can be traumatic or ecstatic, depending on the associations you've given it and what you've assigned to it. And so the expectations you have, the associations you have and the perceptions you create out of that is going to determine whether something's ecstatic or traumatic. So I'm a firm believer in not labeling it. I'm interested in asking questions to transform it, to see it on the way, not in the way.

[B]

Very interesting. Yeah. Because a lot of people view certain actions as negative or positive. Right.

[A]

I think that there's a stress out there. There isn't a stress out there. There's an event out there that we label stressful because we haven't seen the other side to it. Stress always comes in two forms. The perception of loss of something we seek or the perception of gain of something we try to avoid. So as long as we polarize our perceptions and have a label on it that says skewed and generalized and distorted, we're going to be more vulnerable to the labels of ecstatic or traumatic and get caught in the manic and panic illusions that most people are distracting themselves by. Because you can't sleep at night when you're under manic or panic. You can't sleep when you're infatuated or resentful. But you can sleep when you see the hidden order in the apparent chaos.

[B]

So when you hear that famous quote, everything happens for you, not to you. Do you buy that?

[A]

Well, that's a perception. It's way more resourceful. Yeah, I. You know, you can believe or not believe in it, but the question is, is that a resourceful way of looking at life? And I'd say absolutely, yeah.

[B]

Yeah, I agree. Well, Dr. Demartini, this was incredible. Where could people keep up with you? Potentially become a customer and all that?

[A]

If they want to find out about me, if they just got to go to Dr. John Demart. Well, DrDemartini.com. that's it. D R D E M A R T I n I dot com. Dr. Demartini dot com. There's a website there that will keep them busy for at least a life.

[B]

Wow. Okay, check them out, guys. We'll link it below. Thanks for your time. Thanks for watching. All the way to the end, guys. It means a lot. That was fun, man. Here, if you want to watch.

[A]

Great. Well, well, well. It shows that you've been doing this a while.