Neuroscience Expert Dr. Tara Swart on Evidence We Can Communicate After Death and Her Experience Speaking to the Dead!

0:00:02 If what you’re saying is true, then, I mean, is this a revelation?
0:00:06 Yeah. And I couldn’t speak about it until now,
0:00:09 that it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away.
0:00:13 And I’m saying it from the point of view of being a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist.
0:00:18 And it’s taboo because we are afraid that people will think we’re going insane.
0:00:21 I mean, I’ve been part of teams that have locked people up
0:00:23 and had them injected with stuff against their will
0:00:26 because of things they were saying that’s not that dissimilar to things I’ve experienced.
0:00:30 So I wanted to find out as much science as I could to try to back it up.
0:00:31 And do you think you found the answer?
0:00:32 Yeah.
0:00:33 How sure are you?
0:00:36 100%. And the things I found out are going to shock you.
0:00:37 The floor is yours.
0:00:40 Okay. So I’m Dr. Tara Swart.
0:00:44 I’m a neuroscientist and a medical doctor who specialised in psychiatry.
0:00:49 And I lost my beloved husband to leukaemia almost four years ago,
0:00:51 two days before our fourth wedding anniversary.
0:00:55 And everything I believed in had gone wrong.
0:00:58 I was just totally lost and broken.
0:01:01 But then I started getting signs from my husband.
0:01:07 And in my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums, but not being impressed by them.
0:01:11 I ended up thinking, if it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away,
0:01:15 and I am all about optimising my brain, then I should be able to do it myself.
0:01:17 So I went down a rabbit hole.
0:01:22 And what I’ve uncovered in this research is going to have a really beneficial effect on a lot of people.
0:01:27 Because it means that we are capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of.
0:01:28 So listen, here’s what I’m going to do.
0:01:32 I’m going to try and ask the questions and challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you.
0:01:34 I want you to ask me those questions.
0:01:40 Just give me 30 seconds of your time.
0:01:41 Two things I wanted to say.
0:01:46 The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.
0:01:47 It means the world to all of us.
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0:02:11 I’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
0:02:13 We’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to.
0:02:17 And we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
0:02:18 Thank you.
0:02:24 Dr. Tara Swart.
0:02:25 Good to see you again.
0:02:26 You too.
0:02:27 Thank you for coming back.
0:02:32 You were our most viewed guest on the show of all time.
0:02:37 Our last conversation did just over 20 million views and downloads, which is pretty staggering.
0:02:39 But you’re back to talk about something entirely different this time,
0:02:42 which is this idea of science,
0:02:46 which kind of intertwines with all of your work on neuroscience that you’ve done throughout your career.
0:02:52 My first question to you is what is it that you think you know that the vast majority of people
0:02:56 don’t quite understand, comprehend, or have accepted yet?
0:02:59 And take me right back to the sort of first principles of that thinking.
0:03:05 I believe that we are capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of now.
0:03:10 And I believe that the brain actually filters down the capability of the mind
0:03:13 so that we can exist on this material plane.
0:03:19 And things that I found out doing research for the signs is going to shock you.
0:03:25 The abilities that we have that we’re not aware of are way beyond what you might even imagine right now.
0:03:28 In what departments and facets of my life?
0:03:30 Let’s just start with something really simple.
0:03:32 How many senses do you think we have?
0:03:33 Five.
0:03:36 I can smell, I can touch, I can hear, I can see.
0:03:39 Is it five?
0:03:40 Yeah, five. Isn’t it five?
0:03:42 Have you heard of a sixth sense?
0:03:44 Being able to see ghosts and stuff.
0:03:45 Okay.
0:03:48 So I think most people would agree that we have five senses.
0:03:51 And some people would say, isn’t there something like a sixth sense?
0:03:53 And I don’t think it’s agreed what that might be.
0:04:00 So I actually did a literature review of several pieces of research about how many senses humans have.
0:04:04 And we actually have 34, as we currently understand it.
0:04:04 34.
0:04:08 And so what does this mean?
0:04:10 Like, what is the, because you’re making an assertion here.
0:04:12 What is the assertion that you’re making?
0:04:17 And what does that mean for the material sort of consequences of my life?
0:04:31 I’m making a hypothesis based on both the analogy of the observable universe and the fact that we have this expanded suite of senses to challenge you to understand that you are capable of much more than you think you are.
0:04:42 And, you know, you’re a really good case in point for me because you love rationality and data and science and you don’t really love intuition and the, you know, the unknown, the unseen.
0:04:50 So, you know, I think if I can convince you of anything by the end of this podcast, then the impact that that could have on society, I think is huge.
0:04:52 I mean, the things I found out are going to shock you.
0:04:53 What do you mean by that?
0:04:59 I, as you know, was a, was a psychiatrist in the past.
0:05:04 So, I’m able to diagnose people and say whether they have a mental illness or not.
0:05:25 In the past four years, I’ve been keeping a secret and there were times in that four years that I had to ask myself if I was in clinical depression, if I was psychotic, if I was manic, if the way that my consciousness was expanding.
0:05:38 I mean, Steve, I’ve, I’ve been part of teams that have locked people up and put, you know, had them injected with stuff against their will because of things they were saying that’s not that dissimilar to things I’ve experienced in the last four years.
0:05:54 So, I guess we better get into the secret because I sat here with you almost two years ago now and we had a fantastic conversation, but there was something you didn’t tell my audience when we had that conversation that reached more than 20 million people.
0:05:59 There was something at that moment in time that you didn’t tell me, which was this secret you’ve been keeping.
0:06:02 What is the secret, Tara?
0:06:08 I lost my beloved husband to leukemia almost four years ago.
0:06:26 And I’ve written this book which mentions my personal story, so, and I trust you, so I really wanted to come back on the podcast and just explain a little bit to people about what’s been going on for me for the last four years.
0:06:36 So, your husband, Robin, you met him 2016 and he passed away from leukemia in?
0:06:37 2021.
0:06:38 2021.
0:06:44 Now, from 2021, when he passed away, what happened in your life?
0:06:45 What was going on in your world?
0:06:48 If I was a fly on the wall in your context, what would I have seen?
0:06:57 He’d been given two weeks to live, but he actually lived for three and a half weeks and he died two days before our fourth wedding anniversary.
0:07:02 So, I was literally reading condolence cards on my fourth wedding anniversary.
0:07:09 If it wasn’t for the people that I have around me who became like a fortress, I don’t think I would be here today.
0:07:14 You know, never having had that experience before, it was just so, so devastating.
0:07:25 And even though I’m a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist, I just, I just was like, like totally lost and broken.
0:07:34 And then I started seeing robins in the garden every single time I went to the window, both in Hampshire and London.
0:07:38 I’ve never, ever seen so many robins in my life, like not before or since.
0:07:42 I still see them sometimes, but I noticed it.
0:07:45 I thought, of course, that’s what I want to see.
0:07:49 I have no idea what it means, if anything.
0:08:02 And then about six weeks after he passed away, I was asleep and I heard a noise in the distance and we had been burgled once.
0:08:04 I went to check it wasn’t the alarm in the garages.
0:08:08 Couldn’t work out what it was, thought maybe it was birds in the distance, went back to sleep.
0:08:09 It was about 4am.
0:08:14 And then I got woken up by a massive thump to my shoulder.
0:08:19 I wouldn’t demonstrate it on you because it would be too much for me to hit you that hard.
0:08:20 It wasn’t like a tap.
0:08:34 So I opened my eyes and I could see next to my bed a very vague, hazy version of Robin as if he was pushing himself through treacle to be seen.
0:08:39 And I was just transfixed and I saw him become more and more clear.
0:08:46 I could see the outline of his hair and his face and then suddenly he just dissolved from the top down and my eyes went like this.
0:08:52 And I remember seeing his shins and his feet and I was like up on my elbow watching and I just gasped out loud.
0:08:58 In my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums.
0:09:01 And again, I had that dual conversation.
0:09:07 I said to myself, this is the kind of thing that crazy, desperate people do.
0:09:12 And within the same breath, it’s OK for me to be crazy and desperate right now.
0:09:14 I’ve lost my best friend, my life partner.
0:09:19 Like everything I thought about how the world worked has crashed around me.
0:09:24 And I ended up, you know, not being impressed by the mediums.
0:09:32 And just at some point, I can’t even remember when now, thinking, if it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away.
0:09:35 And he was my husband and my best friend.
0:09:40 And I am all about optimizing my brain and expanding my consciousness.
0:09:42 Then I should be able to do it myself.
0:09:46 That’s the start of my journey that I’ve written about in the signs.
0:09:49 And do you think you found the answer?
0:09:49 Yeah.
0:09:52 How sure are you?
0:09:52 A hundred percent.
0:10:01 I mean, if what you’re saying is true, then that’s a pretty, I mean, that’s a revelation, right?
0:10:07 So many people have lost people or have gone through different types of loss in their life.
0:10:16 And you’re telling me that through the work you’ve done over the last couple of years and the research you’ve done, you understand how to communicate with them in some capacity.
0:10:19 And you’re 100% sure.
0:10:20 A hundred percent.
0:10:21 So listen, here’s what I’m going to do.
0:10:30 I’m going to challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you, sat at home.
0:10:39 So I’m going to try and ask the questions that the viewer might ask because there’s, you know, people, this idea is quite a significant perspective shifting one.
0:10:46 So my job in this conversation, although these are sensitive matters, of course, is just to try and play devil’s advocate where I can.
0:10:49 And I just, I want to say that, you know, you know me.
0:10:49 Yeah, I know you.
0:10:53 And you know that you’ve asked me to come back on the podcast several times and I’ve come when I’m ready.
0:10:54 Yeah.
0:10:56 So I want you to ask me those questions.
0:10:56 Yeah.
0:10:58 So where does this journey begin then?
0:11:01 So this, you suffer this tragic loss in your life.
0:11:05 You go to the mediums, you’re let down by them.
0:11:06 Where does this begin?
0:11:08 Where does your research, your journey of discovery begin?
0:11:18 It starts with this decision to, you know, try to communicate with him myself.
0:11:25 There’s a realisation at some point that it’s not a one-way thing, that when people pass away, they also have to learn.
0:11:35 So it’s like two people having to learn a language to speak to each other, like two people who speak a different language, having to learn a language that they can both speak.
0:11:37 That’s how it felt.
0:11:51 Obviously, as a scientist, I then wanted to find as much science as I could to try to back it up, which really comes down to the science of whether the mind or the psyche or the soul can exist separately from the body.
0:12:06 And I will say that way before I even started thinking about this stuff, just the moment that he died, which he died in front of me, once he’d actually passed away, I remember a really strong feeling of looking at his body and just knowing that wasn’t him.
0:12:12 And that the essence of who he was, I didn’t know where it was, but it was not there lying in that bed.
0:12:24 And when did you realise that you were going to start to collect research and do research on this idea of being able to communicate in ways that most people don’t realise we can communicate through science?
0:12:33 And also, when you talk about being able to communicate through these 30 plus senses, is that just with the dead or is that with each other?
0:12:43 Like, can I communicate through, you know, is there other ways that I can tap into these senses that you discovered through your research that will help me be more effective with the living too?
0:12:46 I mean, I think it starts with yourself.
0:12:55 So I think that the fact that if you’re not even aware that you’ve got 34 senses, then you’re obviously not consciously tapping into something that you’re not aware of.
0:13:03 And some of them are non-conscious senses anyway, things like the pH of your blood or like the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood.
0:13:05 You know, you’re not going to be conscious of those.
0:13:14 You can’t necessarily exert much control over them, although obviously if you slow down your breathing or you do a certain type of breath work, it could have an impact on those things.
0:13:16 The conclusion that I came to.
0:13:19 So like I said, I went to the brink a few times.
0:13:20 I went to the brink.
0:13:22 Let me give you the first example.
0:13:33 I realized that the first anniversary was coming up on October 26th and around, you know, a couple of months before that, I was doing the best that I had been doing so far.
0:13:38 But I was very aware this anniversary was coming and I wanted to prepare myself mentally.
0:13:51 But from the 4th of October, I suddenly like was in aches and pains all over my body, which actually lasted for six or seven weeks and was accompanied by me feeling so depressed.
0:13:58 That I actually had to look in the mirror and like go through the criteria for clinical depression and work out if I was actually depressed or not.
0:14:03 And I didn’t meet all the criteria, but I was in this physical pain.
0:14:04 I could not understand why.
0:14:06 I went for a massage.
0:14:07 It was so painful.
0:14:09 I didn’t go again for a year.
0:14:17 So eventually I looked through my diary calendar on my phone and I looked back to October 4th, which was the day that it started.
0:14:20 And that was the day that I’d taken him home to die.
0:14:22 That was the day I took him home from hospital.
0:14:29 I didn’t remember that date, but clearly my body had and the trauma was just re-emerging as like physical pain.
0:14:41 And I only realized quite a lot later that I had to do some somatic work to actually get rid of the last bits of trauma that talking therapy can’t actually get to.
0:14:42 Somatic work.
0:14:51 So body work, whether that’s massage or dance or art or craniosacral therapy or tai chi, you know, like anything physical.
0:14:59 Because basically there’s an area in the brain, it’s actually inside, so I can’t really show it to you on this, but it’s kind of inside there.
0:15:06 And that part of the brain is to do with articulating speech and it basically gets shut down by trauma.
0:15:19 So those sort of phrases like I’m speechless or I’m dumbfounded or I have no words indicates the fact that there may be residual trauma that’s held in your body that you can’t actually articulate and get out and solve through talking therapy.
0:15:22 So it requires some kind of physical therapy.
0:15:27 So that was obviously to do with my sense of pain.
0:15:38 And it took me a little while to kind of put together what that might mean by really like tapping into why was my body manifesting pain to sort of remind me of something or show me something.
0:15:47 But also in the first couple of weeks after Robin’s body, Robin’s body was taken away the morning after he died.
0:15:51 And it was just under two weeks till the cremation.
0:15:59 In that time, I would wake up in the morning and I would be absolutely freezing cold, like shaking and shivering.
0:16:00 And it was October.
0:16:02 It wasn’t like midwinter.
0:16:04 And I would blast up the heating.
0:16:07 When someone else was in the house, I would realise it was like a sauna.
0:16:11 It was actually a bit embarrassing and had to like, you know, turn it down and like open some windows.
0:16:14 And Robin actually hated being cold.
0:16:18 And he would have been in the morgue in a refrigerated drawer that whole time.
0:16:27 And again, I think it was my sense of temperature that was kind of on the same wavelength as where I didn’t consciously think of where he was.
0:16:29 But I was feeling freezing cold.
0:16:34 So it was looking back, it was things like that that were coincidences, absolutely.
0:16:41 But then over time, and I’m talking a couple of years, I could ask for specific signs and get them.
0:16:44 Sometimes at first it would take a while.
0:16:46 And then it became like it would happen that day.
0:16:49 I could ask a question in my head and get an answer.
0:16:54 I mentioned having, you know, sort of, again, being at the brink of my sanity, having to question things.
0:17:01 I was experiencing something called thought insertion, which in psychiatry is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
0:17:04 It’s when you have a thought in your head that you know isn’t yours.
0:17:07 So I was experiencing that really vividly.
0:17:13 But can you imagine experiencing that and at the same time being a psychiatrist that is saying,
0:17:17 Right, Tara, you do realise you are having, like, a psychotic symptom.
0:17:22 And so in my research, one of the things I realised that maybe, you know,
0:17:25 if you’re going through grief and you don’t know the things that I know,
0:17:31 you can’t articulate to yourself that grief in many ways is like psychosis.
0:17:35 It’s changing the levels of neurotransmitters in your head.
0:17:39 It’s changing the electric and chemical, like, signalling in your head.
0:17:43 I just have so much empathy for people that have to go through that
0:17:47 and don’t have the wherewithal or the resources that I did.
0:17:50 Do you think one needs to cultivate their ability to see signs?
0:17:52 Do you think it’s like going to the gym?
0:17:53 Totally, totally.
0:17:55 It took me years.
0:17:58 And like I said, I believe it took him years as well.
0:18:02 So, yeah, I say it’s like learning a language, but you’re right.
0:18:03 It’s like going to the gym.
0:18:09 And what does one need to do in that gym to grow their sign muscle?
0:18:12 Well, it always starts with believing, right?
0:18:12 Yeah.
0:18:19 Do you think that’s one of the big issues in terms of being able to access these other dimensions or dynamics
0:18:21 is most people just don’t believe in it?
0:18:25 So I’m not even sure if I’d say most people, I’d say a lot of people don’t believe in it.
0:18:30 Or they secretly do, but they’re scared to talk about it because they think people ridicule them.
0:18:39 Yeah, because I don’t know, my brain feels like I need to have the scientific evidence of things for me to accept them.
0:18:43 Because I think sometimes I worry that if I don’t have scientific rigor around my beliefs,
0:18:46 then I’m susceptible to believe anything.
0:18:48 And I’ll believe in a spaghetti monster at the bottom of the garden.
0:18:52 And I’ll believe, you know, every religion in the world and everything.
0:18:56 And then I’m unanchored and then I blow around like a plastic bag in the wind and then I have no orientation.
0:19:00 So I think, okay, rigor is the basis of my beliefs.
0:19:02 I have to have some sort of scientific evidence.
0:19:04 I know you do.
0:19:04 Yeah.
0:19:10 It’s not to say I’m not open-minded because I’ve had my mind change so many times in my life
0:19:14 that one would be dumb now to not be open-minded and to not listen.
0:19:16 I agree with you about rigor.
0:19:17 I completely agree with you.
0:19:19 My entire career has been based on that.
0:19:22 But I just, you know, I was pushed up against a wall.
0:19:24 So I had to think differently.
0:19:28 And I think the question I pose to myself is, is what if?
0:19:29 You had to think differently.
0:19:36 So the psychologist Carl Jung talks about, when he talks about the collective unconscious,
0:19:42 he talks about those basically three main things that all humans experience, which is birth, life
0:19:43 and death.
0:19:49 And so we have this common experience, which is actually part of our inherited gene and brain
0:19:50 structure.
0:19:53 So everyone who’s ever lived will experience those things.
0:20:01 But if we look at ancient wisdom, for a start, we are made of the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen
0:20:02 and nitrogen that came from the Big Bang.
0:20:04 So we’re all made of the same thing.
0:20:07 Our ancestors lived in the cycle with nature.
0:20:13 I think us actually having broken our connection to nature is a huge part of why we’re so disconnected
0:20:13 and unhappy.
0:20:20 So if you think of the life cycle of a salmon, for example, it, you know, it goes through
0:20:26 its life cycle and eventually its bones contribute to the phosphorus on the floor of the forest.
0:20:27 So it never really goes away.
0:20:35 In many other ways, our ancestors repeatedly saw the cycles of nature and therefore always
0:20:38 kind of knew that everything gets renewed and nothing ever completely goes away.
0:20:42 And I think that’s a really important thing to return to.
0:20:47 I think, you know, when we question things, which you’re absolutely right to do, I think
0:20:52 we have to look at things that we didn’t think were true, that we now know are true, as just
0:21:00 ways of being open to the fact that things in the future might become obvious or known that
0:21:01 aren’t known now.
0:21:06 I think that is an important place of being open-minded to sit at.
0:21:12 And so, for example, I want to hear about slime mold.
0:21:15 You tell me if that’s something I want to hear about.
0:21:24 So slime mold are single-celled organisms like amoeba who go about their daily life on their
0:21:27 own, very happily, as long as their basic needs are met.
0:21:34 But if, for example, they’re facing potential starvation, they will come together and form
0:21:40 a slug because the slug can move towards your vegetable patch, you know, a new food source,
0:21:41 and they can survive.
0:21:52 Equally, if they are facing potential extinction, they will come together and form a sphoring
0:21:53 body like a mushroom.
0:22:00 So that’s got a stalk and a fruiting body that can release sphors that will go into the atmosphere
0:22:04 to all different places where these new baby organisms can grow and thrive.
0:22:12 But if you think about it, the single cells in the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the
0:22:17 greater good because there’s no chance that they’re going to get released into the atmosphere
0:22:18 as a sphor because they’re in the stalk.
0:22:24 So some of them actually cheat and climb up the stalk to get into the fruiting body and displace
0:22:25 other cells from the fruiting body.
0:22:34 So things like that, and for example, the mycorrhizal network, which is how mushrooms and mycelium
0:22:40 feed the roots of trees, even trees that have been felled can be kept alive for centuries
0:22:46 because the mycorrhizal network, which is the connection between mycelium and tree roots,
0:22:50 can bring water and sugar to that tree stump to keep it alive.
0:22:55 And trees and mycelium don’t even only do it for the same species.
0:23:01 They do it because they’re part of the entire forest and it’s symbiotic relationship and they
0:23:02 care about each other.
0:23:07 Things like this would have been like thought to be fantastical 10 years ago.
0:23:13 You know, we’re in LA at the moment and I saw the driverless car for the first time.
0:23:19 Now, when I was growing up watching sci-fi, I never thought I’d see that in my life.
0:23:25 So that’s all I’m saying that, and I’m saying it from the point of view of being a cognitive
0:23:28 scientist and I’m talking about the nature of consciousness.
0:23:32 I’m not talking about other, not asking you to believe, you know, other parts of science,
0:23:37 but based on the fact that we don’t know everything, we’ve learned loads of things that we thought
0:23:38 weren’t true before.
0:23:47 I strongly believe there’s a benefit to humanity of raising this kind of question and having
0:23:52 this conversation, which I ask you why it’s a taboo conversation.
0:23:54 What, you know, why shouldn’t we be enlightened?
0:23:56 Why shouldn’t we feel better?
0:23:57 Why shouldn’t we be more connected?
0:24:01 Whatever we’ve been doing up until now certainly hasn’t been working.
0:24:06 When was it that you made the decision that you were going to write a book about
0:24:12 this called The Signs? Was there a particular moment in this process where you realised that
0:24:15 you were going to dig deeper and that then you were ultimately going to share this with the world?
0:24:21 I wasn’t intending to write a book at all, but I’d got to the point where I had something that I
0:24:23 could share with people that I actually thought would be useful.
0:24:25 And at this point you’re communicating with Robin?
0:24:27 On a daily basis.
0:24:28 On a daily basis.
0:24:32 Give me some colour to that. What does that mean? Give me some examples if you can.
0:24:37 Well, either will be that like I’ll ask a question in my mind and the answer will come
0:24:42 in my mind, but I know it’s not my own thought. Or I’ll just get a direct like message from him
0:24:49 in my mind that I know isn’t me, but mostly it’s The Signs. So I’ve talked to you about the first
0:24:57 anniversary and how hard that was. By the time of the second anniversary, I was actually in America
0:25:06 and I’d been filming in studio for a week and then I was on the road on the Navajo Nation and that was due
0:25:10 to, I was due to fly out of the Navajo Nation on the second anniversary of Robin’s passing.
0:25:20 And on, by that point, I was feeling a bit like I’d completely burnt out and I had a choice about how to
0:25:25 re-emerge. You know, whether that was going to be in a good way or I wasn’t going to be able to make it.
0:25:30 And I had this analogy of a phoenix rising from the flames in my mind.
0:25:38 So on that trip, I said, darling, send me the sign of a phoenix.
0:25:39 You said that to who?
0:25:45 To Robin, in my head. And I chose the phoenix because it’s really unusual. So it’s not like
0:25:49 if I said, you know, a dog, I’m probably going to see a dog on the pavement every day. But I chose
0:25:56 something that is not an easy thing to see. And I was actually in Oklahoma City where, you know,
0:26:03 you wouldn’t expect necessarily to see like something unusual. Every single day between my hotel and the
0:26:07 studio, I went through Chinatown and I passed a restaurant called the Phoenix Garden with a big
0:26:15 emblazoned, like, you know, sign. And on the way there, I had had an indirect flight from Boston
0:26:20 and the flight leaving Boston was late. So I missed my connection in Chicago and I had to spend a night
0:26:26 in Chicago. And then I was, you know, late for filming and stuff. And so when I was leaving to go
0:26:36 to LA, I was leaving on a Sunday. And from the Monday onwards, I had a podcast every single weekday
0:26:41 in LA. And so the team said to me, we know that you cannot miss that flight. We are not going to put
0:26:46 you on an indirect flight. We absolutely promise you direct flight to LA so you’re fine from Monday
0:26:53 onwards. We were in the middle of nowhere for like a week. And basically my flight wasn’t booked because
0:26:58 we didn’t know which airport we were going to be at. We arrived on the eve of the anniversary of
0:27:04 Robin passing. And my flight was booked that day. And it was from Flagstaff in the Navajo Nation to LA
0:27:11 flying on the day of his anniversary. No direct flights. I had to fly through Phoenix, Arizona on
0:27:17 the day of his anniversary. You’ve probably heard of that old analogy of when you buy a car, you end up
0:27:21 seeing the car everywhere on the road. Like I buy a new car and then I go everywhere and it seems like
0:27:26 everybody’s got my car because of, do they call it confirmation bias in science, in psychology? Where
0:27:30 once you’ve got something in your head, you’re more likely to see that thing. I think they’ve done
0:27:34 studies on this where if you are exposed to something or you’re told to think about something,
0:27:38 then you’ll see it more in the world. How do you separate what you’re saying from that
0:27:40 proven psychological phenomenon?
0:27:43 I don’t. I say use it to your advantage.
0:27:47 But how do you know that wasn’t what was happening in your life? Because if you thought about the word
0:27:52 Phoenix and then over the course of a couple of days, you’re looking at everything, but you’re
0:27:58 only going to register the things that are emotionally resonant. You know, I might have seen Phoenix a lot
0:27:59 of time over the last seven days.
0:28:00 And it means nothing to you.
0:28:02 Yeah, I didn’t register it.
0:28:10 Again, I would say the number of times this has happened, the sort of like how narrow I make the
0:28:16 criteria. So, you know, sometimes I say I need to see a button or a symbol of a button or the word
0:28:24 button, but it’s got to happen three times by 11pm tomorrow. And one of my friends says that,
0:28:29 you know, we share something, which is if you see a pair of lions and we send each other pictures of
0:28:34 it. But she says it has to be if you went out of your way and you walked a different way and then
0:28:38 you saw them. If it’s like, you know, the normal way that you go or somewhere that you know that they
0:28:43 exist, that doesn’t count. It has to be if you went out of your way. So I had a previous thing
0:28:49 with Robin, which was about the figure of eight or the infinity symbol. And there’s a story in the book
0:28:55 of how that was cropping up for me when I actually met him. But there was a day recently where I had
0:28:59 some space, I had three spaced out meetings in the day. So I thought I’ll take the opportunity to walk
0:29:07 for an hour between them all. And for the last meeting of the day, I ended up walking past
0:29:15 UCH, which is University College Hospital, where he was having treatment. And that had been a really
0:29:21 traumatic time for me when he was in hospital there. And I have, I will have to say, I kind of avoided that
0:29:26 area since then. I’ll tell you about a particular story that was like really traumatizing for me.
0:29:34 So on this walk to where I was going for the evening for a book launch event, I ended up walking
0:29:40 past the hospital. And I actually said in my head, like, why would you make that happen to me? Like,
0:29:45 why, why do I have to walk past that building? I never want to see that building again in my life.
0:29:52 And again, I said, you have to send me a sign. And by the time I got to Euston Station, so you know,
0:29:57 you can, people who don’t know can Google this, it’s not very far. There was an elastic band in the
0:30:05 figure of H lying on the pavement. And that means something to me. So the thing about this,
0:30:09 this confirmation bias thing is it’s dependent on the reticular activating system,
0:30:15 which is the system of your brain that filters out what’s not crucial to your survival and
0:30:24 filters in what it wants you to notice. And so actually, one of the things I’ve written about
0:30:29 in the book is the art of noticing. Because really, we live in this world where the light,
0:30:34 you know, life is passing you by at 100 miles per hour, you’re not noticing things that could
0:30:41 actually be crucial to you thriving rather than you just surviving. And in this model called shared
0:30:48 trait vulnerability, which falls under the field of research called neuroaesthetics. So basically,
0:30:55 creativity is a positive personality trait, right? But there is a high correlation between creativity
0:31:01 and psychopathology, which is mental illness, particularly depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism.
0:31:08 And there are quite a few high profile examples of creative people who had mental illnesses like
0:31:17 Alexander McQueen, Kurt Cobain, Van Gogh. So what that shows is that there’s an area of overlap
0:31:26 of three particular ways of thinking that are underpinned by neurology that are the reasons that people with
0:31:37 mental illness are so creative. And they are basically hyperconnectivity. So that’s two things.
0:31:41 That’s joining the dots in the material world of things that aren’t obvious to other people.
0:31:46 But it’s also hyperconnectivity inside the brain. So if you think about all these lobes,
0:31:54 if you think about all these lobes, the more lobes that are firing at the same time,
0:31:59 and there’s also a cortex that’s known as the association cortex. So that one, you know,
0:32:03 these lobes can be firing, but they’re not necessarily connecting up with each other. The more
0:32:10 interconnected all this firing is in the brain, the more the brain opens up to new ideas. And so that
0:32:15 underpins creativity. And also this usually really involves the visual cortex, which is in the
0:32:21 occipital lobes. And that’s why sometimes people, whether it’s through psychedelics or, you know,
0:32:26 sort of altered states of consciousness through creativity, can see things that they didn’t see
0:32:32 before. There’s also something called novelty salience, which is noticing new things, or just
0:32:38 noticing things of importance that you would otherwise have filtered out. And there’s something
0:32:44 called attenuated latent inhibition or low latent inhibition, which is to do with that filter.
0:32:50 And it means that the filter allows more things in than it normally does. So you can see we’ve got
0:32:56 hyperconnection, we’ve got noticing more things, and we’ve got the filter like loosening and allowing
0:33:03 more things in. Now, if you’ve got a high IQ, high working memory, and you’ve got cognitive
0:33:09 flexibility, which is you can think, you know, out of the box, that’s a really good thing. If
0:33:14 you’ve got a low IQ, you’ve got deficits in your working memory, and you’ve got what’s called
0:33:19 perseveration, which is you just go over the same thought process over and over again, that
0:33:26 can lead to you having a psychological crisis. So I took that model and thought, if grief is like
0:33:32 psychosis, and I’m currently in a very vulnerable state, is creativity a conduit for me to get not only
0:33:39 back to the state that I was in before, but into a state of expanded awareness where I can loosen the
0:33:45 filter as I choose, as I choose fit, I can notice things that I would have passed by before. And I
0:33:52 can think differently about how my mind works, how the world works, possibly what happens after someone
0:33:58 passes away. And then I went and, you know, looked into near death experiences and terminal lucidity and
0:34:01 dark retreats. Like I said, I went down a rabbit hole.
0:34:03 And what did you find in that rabbit hole?
0:34:12 At the border of life and death, usually, within one to 24 hours of death, someone who has,
0:34:17 whose brain hasn’t been functioning, who can’t remember the names of their own children,
0:34:22 suddenly becomes completely lucid and says, Stephen, darling, come over here, let me, you know,
0:34:29 let’s have a nice like mother son chat. And then that gives a lot of people hope. But usually that
0:34:34 means it’s an hour or 23 hours till the person’s going to die. We can’t explain that. How can a brain
0:34:39 that’s irreversibly damaged, suddenly function completely normally? There is no explanation for
0:34:45 that. With the near death experiences, I was particularly compelled by three stories.
0:34:52 Dr. Mary Neal, an orthopaedic surgeon, she’s in that Netflix documentary, Surviving Death.
0:34:58 She was submerged underwater for 15 or 20 minutes. She should never have been able to be resuscitated.
0:35:04 She describes her whole journey of going to another realm, seeing, you know, a being of light,
0:35:10 being told that her life isn’t over, she has to turn back and return to the physical world,
0:35:15 even though she could see her bloated body and her friends trying to reach her to resuscitate her,
0:35:24 Dr. Eben Alexander, who wrote Proof of Heaven. He is a doctor. He was an atheist. He was in a coma
0:35:29 with bacterial meningitis and was pronounced clinically dead. And then basically came back
0:35:35 and said that he saw heaven. And he now believes in a God that is benign, that cares about the future
0:35:41 of humanity. So for me as a doctor, hearing these stories from other doctors was really,
0:35:47 really convincing. And then there’s one story that Dr. Bruce Grayson told me. He’s a professor
0:35:53 of psychiatry at University of Virginia, who has done 50 years of research into near-death experiences.
0:36:02 And he told me the story of a patient in ICU who kept going into cardiac arrest. And he had a primary
0:36:10 nurse who was a young 20-year-old nurse, and they had a really close bond. And one weekend she was,
0:36:16 she had time off for the weekend and he had a different nurse looking after him. And he went into cardiac
0:36:23 arrest and he had a near-death experience. And in that near-death experience, he saw his primary nurse,
0:36:29 Tim, your life isn’t over. You have to go back and get better. And please tell my parents I’m sorry
0:36:36 about the red MG. So he wakes up in ICU. He’s got this replacement nurse looking after him.
0:36:46 And he says, the strangest thing just happened. I had this experience of being in this other world. I saw
0:36:52 my primary nurse and she said I had to come back. And she also said, tell my parents sorry about the
0:36:58 red MG. So the temporary nurse starts, bursts into tears, runs out of the room. He has no idea why.
0:37:05 Someone comes in and says, what’s just happened? He explains. And they tell him that his primary nurse
0:37:12 was given a red MG for her 21st birthday, took it out for a test run, crashed it into a tree and died.
0:37:19 Now he didn’t know she was dead, but he saw her on the other side and she told him to come back.
0:37:25 And the guy that told you this story was who relevant to the patient? Who said that?
0:37:33 Dr. Bruce Grayson. He has done 50 years of research on near-death experiences. He’s got over 5,000
0:37:39 recorded cases of patients of his own that he’s looked after that have had near-death experiences. And
0:37:45 he also shared with me the numbers of cases that other people have on databases. So,
0:37:50 you know, we’re looking at over 10,000 cases globally recorded at the moment.
0:37:55 What is it that you believe based on those near-death experiences, like the Red MG story,
0:38:00 and based on this phenomenon of terminal lucidity?
0:38:07 So, Professor Alexander Blathianni, who wrote Threshold about terminal lucidity, put it really
0:38:14 nicely when he said, maybe at the border of life and death, we see something that is true all along,
0:38:20 but we don’t, for whatever reason, see it or acknowledge it whilst we’re alive and well,
0:38:25 which is that the mind and body can operate independently of each other.
0:38:34 It is quite shocking. There’s this case from 2009. An 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease,
0:38:38 who was non-verbal and non-responsive and had no apparent recognition of her surroundings or
0:38:43 families for years. And then one day before her death, she suddenly sat up in hospital,
0:38:47 looked around and recognised her daughter by name, spoke clearly, reminisced about the past,
0:38:52 thanked her family for caring for her. Her speech was coherent, her memory was intact,
0:38:58 and her personality recognisable, as though she had never been ill. She fell asleep that evening
0:39:04 and died peacefully during the night. And what do you think is happening there? What do you think
0:39:10 is happening there? It’s possibly, you know, partially explained by a surge in neurochemicals,
0:39:14 but it’s not explained by how can those neurochemicals act if the physical
0:39:19 neurons and synapses are damaged. There is no explanation. The only explanation
0:39:28 is that the mind is not emergent from material matter. The mind, the thoughts, the emotions,
0:39:36 the psyche cannot be solely emerging from physical matter. That’s the only explanation from what we
0:39:42 understand. And so what is it that you now believe? You believe that our souls and our bodies are two
0:39:49 separate things. And where does our soul live if it’s not living inside of me? So where is Robin?
0:39:57 So I believe that, you know, whether you want to call it the universe, consciousness, collective
0:40:06 consciousness, godhead, cosmic soup, the word for it isn’t important. There’s somewhere that that energy
0:40:12 goes and it still exists in some form. And if you believe in reincarnation, then you may believe that it
0:40:21 then enters another body as a vessel and, you know, has a different life. But it doesn’t go away.
0:40:23 How do you know?
0:40:31 I’m going to say something that you’re, I know you’re not going to like, but I know because I feel
0:40:35 it personally. I feel it from, I feel it like with the person I’ve been closest to in my entire life,
0:40:44 who I know would never leave me if they didn’t absolutely have to. But I can back that up to the
0:40:49 extent of I can, I can say you can’t prove that this isn’t true. I can back that up with everything
0:40:55 that I put in the book and I’m not the only one. Dr. David Eagleman at Stanford says, you know,
0:41:01 this idea of the brain being like radio and receiving signals from outside, we can’t prove it,
0:41:07 but we categorically cannot say it’s not true. Professor Donald Hoffman suggests that space-time
0:41:12 is not the basis of how the universe works, suggests that consciousness is the basis of how the universe
0:41:17 works. We can’t prove that’s not true. And I find that really exciting. I mean, as a scientist,
0:41:22 you’re supposed to challenge the status quo. You’re supposed to be curious. You can’t,
0:41:27 as a scientist, believe that everything we know now is all there is. There’s no point to being a
0:41:31 scientist if that’s what you believe. I asked you this question about the gym earlier on, about is it
0:41:35 kind of like training in the gym? Are there things you think people could do to heighten their ability
0:41:41 to speak to loved ones that might have passed or to heighten their ability to tap into science?
0:41:46 So I go through this in the book and I chose the order quite carefully. So
0:41:54 I talk about neuroaesthetics, which is noticing beauty, basically, if not like actually engaging in
0:41:59 the arts. There’s a lot of evidence for engaging in the arts in terms of like increasing your novelty
0:42:03 salience, which is noticing new things, which is part of the journey of opening up that filter.
0:42:10 And then there’s a whole chapter on nature, because I think a lot of signs come from nature,
0:42:20 like butterflies, robins, sort of, you know, spiral formations, cloud formations. So noticing nature
0:42:25 more can help you, you know, also to receive these signs. And then community is a huge part of it,
0:42:29 because, you know, if I had this conversation with you and you totally shut me down and said,
0:42:33 it’s not provable, this is ridiculous, I’m not airing this episode, that would have a very
0:42:40 different effect on me to you even being open to like asking me challenging questions that I welcome,
0:42:46 but also engaging in this conversation and sort of, you know, maybe feels a little bit like maybe
0:42:52 questioning, you know, some things that you might do differently. So those are three very important
0:42:57 parts of like sort of part two of the book. Part one is more about what are signs? What are you
0:43:00 missing? You know, have you been receiving signs already?
0:43:05 One of the things that I, when I was going through my sort of transition from like being religious to
0:43:10 being agnostic, I’d say, because I wouldn’t call myself an atheist, is I was watching all these
0:43:15 atheist minds debate and talk and stuff. And one of the things one of them said is that if
0:43:19 coincidence didn’t happen in our lives, then that would be a miracle, like statistically, mathematically.
0:43:23 If at some times you don’t think of Dave, and then the phone rings and it’s Dave,
0:43:28 that would actually be more mathematically improbable than it happening sometimes.
0:43:32 If you think about, you know, if you had this on a, like a distribution cup or something,
0:43:39 it is likely, mathematically, that really unlikely things will happen sometimes.
0:43:40 Okay.
0:43:44 Right. So I’ve always had that in my head as a way to sort of rationalize coincidence.
0:43:47 So when coincidence happens, I think, well, probabilistically,
0:43:53 really unlikely things have to happen. And if they never happen, then that’s a miracle.
0:43:53 Okay.
0:43:54 Does that make sense?
0:43:55 Yeah, it makes sense.
0:44:01 Like mathematically, you would say like, likely things happen often. Unlikely things happen less
0:44:01 often.
0:44:01 Yeah.
0:44:04 Extremely unlikely things happen way less often.
0:44:05 Yeah.
0:44:07 That’s like the nature of like maths, right?
0:44:07 Yeah.
0:44:13 So when extremely unlikely things happen, I say, actually, that makes sense because
0:44:16 probabilistically those things happen infrequently. They’re not happening every single day. Like
0:44:20 right now I’m thinking of, I can name 10 people. I guarantee when I go to my phone, none of those
0:44:24 10 people have texted me. But if I do that every day, one day I’m going to say, hey, Steve,
0:44:28 checking in, which makes sense because of the laws of probability.
0:44:33 But I don’t want you to do that. I want you to just like be open to naturally thinking of someone
0:44:38 and seeing if that does happen or, you know, kind of, or asking for a sign and seeing if it comes
0:44:46 into your life. That, that’s, that’s all I’m asking. Like what, you know, just try it. It’s not
0:44:49 going to hurt you. And I’m not just saying that to you. I’m saying it to everyone.
0:44:52 And how do you think that would benefit me?
0:44:56 I think it makes you believe in something bigger than yourself.
0:44:59 Yeah. And why is that so important?
0:45:04 Because I think a life where all you’re trying to do is get through and meet your needs is
0:45:13 life can be better than that. I think a life where you feel more connected to yourself,
0:45:20 to others, to something greater, gives you purpose. There’s a lot of research that shows that having
0:45:24 a purpose that transcends just yourself is actually really healthy and important.
0:45:29 And what is that for you now, that transcendent layer in your life? How do you define it? Is it a
0:45:30 religion? Is it something else?
0:45:38 It’s definitely not religion. I guess it’s spirituality and, you know, a form which will mean different
0:45:42 things to different people. It’s definitely about caring for humanity.
0:45:45 Is it a God? A creator?
0:45:53 For me, no. But 85% of people globally believe in religion under God. So it’s important.
0:46:03 I think for me, it’s about giving like a voice of relevance and helping people to feel seen and
0:46:08 heard. Because I think that’s very lacking. And, you know, I’m in the enormously privileged position
0:46:13 that you have given me of being able to do that. And I want to use that in a really like positive way.
0:46:21 How does this overlap with or set alongside what people call intuition? Because you talk about that
0:46:22 as well in the book.
0:46:27 Yeah. I know there’s so much, like there’s still like so much else that I want to say.
0:46:28 Just keep going.
0:46:34 So intuition is, I mean, intuition is what it is. It’s accessing inner wisdom, right? But I’ve included
0:46:39 it as a really important part of the book because I believe that it’s a way to receive and interpret
0:46:46 your signs. But I just want to go back to something I said earlier, which is about how
0:46:53 trauma can be stored in your body. And, you know, to some extent, it can’t be retrieved through talking
0:46:57 therapy because there aren’t words for it, because it’s actually embedded into the tissues of your body.
0:47:03 There’s a really exciting new hypothesis for how that might work called the serotonin hypothesis.
0:47:10 So previously, I think it would make sense that if, you know, for example, when, when Robin was in
0:47:17 hospital, I would like sit in a very hunched over position and my fists would be clenched because I
0:47:22 felt like I was fighting for his life all the time. And if I relaxed for a millisecond, he could die.
0:47:29 So it makes sense to me that that, those postural issues would show up for me later. And, you know,
0:47:35 in terms of like aches and pains and, you know, perhaps sort of, well, not perhaps my, as my Pilates
0:47:40 and yoga teachers keep telling me like issues with, you know, certain parts of my spine and stuff.
0:47:47 But the serotonin hypothesis is very exciting as a neuroscientist because a lot of people have heard
0:47:52 of Bessel van der Kolk’s work and the book, The Body Keeps the Score. And it makes sense kind of
0:47:57 intuitively that the body does keep the score. And like I’ve said, there’s an amount of trauma that you
0:48:03 can’t express, you can’t articulate verbally. So we believe, we understand that there are imprints
0:48:11 of that in the body. But we haven’t, we’ve never really understood how that works. And we, you know,
0:48:17 I’ve talked before, I think with you about intuition through a process called Hebbian learning, which is
0:48:23 neurons that fire together, wire together, gets pushed deeper and deeper into neurons from the outer
0:48:27 cortex, the limbic system, the brainstem into gut neurons. And that’s why intuition is called gut
0:48:35 instinct. And we understand that through stress postures, you could have bracing patterns in your
0:48:41 muscles for like the trauma that you’ve experienced. Fascia is the connective tissue that holds your
0:48:47 entire body together, all your organs, all your muscles. And until fairly recently, fascia was thought
0:48:53 of as a vestigial organ. It was cut away in surgery without thinking of any, that it would have any effect on
0:48:59 the rest of your body. Now it’s understood more to actually be an organ of its own and an important
0:49:09 one. And the serotonin hypothesis goes some way to explain how the level of constriction of capillaries
0:49:16 and the amount of nutrients that’s released to skin, fascia and muscle is a mechanism for how trauma is held
0:49:22 in the body. And with that in mind, what do we do to get rid of that trauma held in the body?
0:49:33 Physical activities. So dancing, singing, drumming, humming, chanting, massage, yoga, craniosacral therapy.
0:49:40 And you’ll notice that the ones I started with are, you know, very related to ancient wisdom. So our ancestors knew
0:49:48 this, um, for example, in ancient Greek, um, uh, ancient Greek burials, they would wail and beat
0:49:54 their chests. So they were getting rid of grief by like screaming, but also by beating their muscles
0:49:56 and letting like trauma exit their body.
0:50:03 I’m very well aware that there’s probably a lot of people who have sent this conversation to a friend
0:50:09 who is struggling right now. And that that friend who has lost a loved one, potentially a husband,
0:50:14 potentially a wife, potentially, you know, God forbid, a child or a grandparent or something
0:50:18 is listening to this because they are in search of answers for their own healing.
0:50:24 You’ve been there. You may still be there in some degree.
0:50:34 If you were to advise them on their own healing journey, what advice would you give them?
0:50:42 The first thing would be to not repress or deny how they’re feeling and, you know, really
0:50:48 feel the emotions that, that have to come along with grief. Um,
0:50:54 um, I’ve, you know, I had amazing talking therapy, which definitely helped me a lot. So if people have
0:50:59 access to that, um, professionally, then great. If not, then, you know, if you’ve got close friends
0:51:06 that you can talk to, then talking it out does help. But I’ve really learned that there’s a limit to how
0:51:12 much that helps and that some sort of physical therapy, um, is really helpful as part of it.
0:51:18 Those would be the basics. I would say time and nature has been so healing for me. Um,
0:51:24 some form of creative outlet, whether it’s making or beholding. So you don’t have to be good at art.
0:51:30 If, if you draw, you know, a picture of how you’re feeling emotionally or a sketch of your loved one,
0:51:35 it doesn’t have to be good. You get benefits from doing that. It’s an out creative outlet for your
0:51:41 grief. That’s probably the second level. And, you know, the third level to me is if you’ve got any
0:51:48 inclination to receive signs, um, or just be open to, you know, white feather landing at your doorstep,
0:51:55 um, or a bird coming to visit you or something that means something to you, then that can bring
0:52:00 a lot of comfort and guidance and joy. And you also assert that things like being in nature,
0:52:05 creativity, honing into our intuition, increase the probability of us receiving these signs.
0:52:11 Well, receiving and being able to interpret in a way that’s meaningful for you.
0:52:18 Gut instinct. Um, in the book, you talk about how strengthening one’s gut health
0:52:22 can have a, an impact on gut instinct. Explain that to me.
0:52:31 So the, the body is basically the physical foundation for, um, you know, all of your senses
0:52:37 to be able to, to flourish to your higher mental faculties to be able to flourish. And ultimately for,
0:52:44 you know, whatever spiritual experience you have of life to, to be able to be at its fullest and best
0:52:51 as well. So taking care of the physical foundations is really important. And, um, you know, we could talk
0:52:58 about all the usual things like sleep and diet and exercise, mindfulness, stress management, but I want
0:53:05 to really focus strongly on the gut brain axis because a lot of new research has come up since I wrote
0:53:11 the source. So it’s actually, you know, we know a lot about this bi-directional communication between
0:53:17 the brain and the gut. It’s actually a three-way system, which is the brain, the gut itself, the gut
0:53:24 neurons and the gut microbiome, which has trillions of bacteria and fungi and, you know, organisms that,
0:53:31 um, are basically determining the health of our entire system because they’re connected to our immune
0:53:42 system, to our skin, to our oral microbiome and, and the brain. So the way that you, the, the most direct
0:53:47 access you have to your brain is through your gut. The gut is the most direct way that you can influence
0:53:56 your brain. And you can do that through exercise, obviously diet, um, supplementation, even like, um,
0:54:02 meditation and art and music therapy have a beneficial effect on your gut microbiome as well,
0:54:07 which has a knock-on effect on the neurons and the, the brain. And they communicate with each other
0:54:09 many ways, mostly through the vagus nerve.
0:54:11 What’s the vagus nerve?
0:54:17 The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve. So it comes from your skull. It’s Latin for wandering because it’s
0:54:21 the longest nerve that goes through your body. So it goes, there’s two, the right and the left,
0:54:23 and they go all the way from your cranium.
0:54:24 What’s my cranium?
0:54:26 Your cranium is the bone around your brain.
0:54:26 Yeah.
0:54:33 Um, so inside that, um, down your neck, they go through your diaphragm and to your intestine.
0:54:36 I’ll put a photo up on screen for everybody who wants to see where their vagus nerve is.
0:54:42 Also other nerves. So the nerves that innervate the gut organs, um, they’re called afferent
0:54:47 intestinal nerves. They’re also involved in this communication. Then there’s hormones
0:54:54 and there’s cytokine messages, which are chemical messages that aren’t hormonal. Your immune system
0:54:59 actually also produces neurotransmitters and there are immune cells in your brain as well.
0:55:03 So those are all the ways that we know currently that the brain and the gut communicate with each
0:55:04 other.
0:55:10 And so what does this mean in terms of my gut health and ways to influence my, my brain? Does
0:55:15 it mean that I, I need to be really big on my prebiotics, my probiotics to make sure my,
0:55:18 my gut’s intact. And if I do that, then my intuition will be sharper.
0:55:24 So that’s true, but I always like people to understand what’s behind that, not just
0:55:30 mindlessly take prebiotics and probiotics. So what we’re trying to do is reduce inflammation
0:55:39 throughout the system. And so basically because the brain is a small organ in our entire system,
0:55:49 but it uses up at least 20% of our energy. So it’s very vulnerable to, um, what, what we call oxidative
0:55:55 stress or free radicals. So every time like there’s any turnover of cells in our brain or our body,
0:56:02 basically, as we live the wear and tear of daily life, we release free radicals, which are molecules
0:56:08 that can damage cells, particularly nerve cells. And because the brain is, has such high turnover of
0:56:17 energy, it’s particularly vulnerable to free radical attack. So reducing inflammation and putting things
0:56:23 that are neuroprotective around it, like certain vitamins and minerals is really important. And the
0:56:29 hippocampus part of the brain, which, um, it has high cell turnover because it’s to do with memory,
0:56:33 laying down memories and obviously well into adulthood, we’re still doing that. That’s also
0:56:39 very vulnerable to free radical damage. And that’s why we can get memory and cognitive impairments and
0:56:45 dementias as we get older. So the, the modern Western diet causes something called dysbiosis,
0:56:52 which is that your gut isn’t in a good state. And that creates a cascade of inflammation and releases
0:56:57 molecules, molecules, some of which can cross the blood brain barrier and therefore cause
0:57:02 inflammation in the brain. So we want to minimize that as much as possible and put in as many
0:57:08 protective and beneficial factors as possible. If we’re doing that, the systems in what we call
0:57:13 homeostasis, which is good balance, it’s kind of starting to take care of itself. It’s got all the
0:57:19 nutrients that it needs. It’s hydrated, it’s oxygenated. That’s when you’ve got extra resources
0:57:29 to do the higher mental functions. And up until today, pretty much, I’ve described those as being
0:57:34 able to solve complex problems, being able to think flexibly, creatively, override your biases.
0:57:42 But now I’m proposing that there’s more than that, that we can do. There’s accessing levels of intuition
0:57:48 that we didn’t know that we didn’t know we had. Very much through the same mechanism of how I described
0:57:54 trauma being stored in the body. Hidden wisdom is also stored in the body. It’s not just in your brain.
0:58:03 And therefore, the same therapies like beholding and making art, humming, drumming, storytelling,
0:58:12 dancing, yoga, just movement can help us to access that intuition that isn’t just in our brain and
0:58:19 our mind and take us to a next level of intuition that’s not just cerebral, it’s physical.
0:58:27 I’ve just invested millions into this and become a co-owner of the company. It’s a company called
0:58:32 Ketone IQ. And the story is quite interesting. I started talking about ketosis on this podcast and
0:58:36 the fact that I’m very low carb, very, very low sugar, and my body produces ketones, which have
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0:58:45 me more capable at doing what I do here. And because I was talking about it on the podcast,
0:58:52 a couple of weeks later, these showed up on my desk in my HQ in London, these little shots. And oh my
0:58:59 God, the impact this had on my ability to articulate myself, on my focus, on my workouts, on my mood,
0:59:05 on stopping me crashing throughout the day, was so profound that I reached out to the founders of the
0:59:10 company. And now I’m a co-owner of this business. I highly, highly recommend you look into this. I
0:59:13 highly recommend you look at the science behind the product. If you want to try it for yourself,
0:59:19 visit ketone.com slash Stephen for 30% off your subscription order. And you’ll also get a free gift
0:59:26 with your second shipment. That’s ketone.com slash Stephen. And I’m so honored that once again,
0:59:31 a company I own can sponsor my podcast. Use the word dark retreats. I’ve never heard that phrase
0:59:40 before. So dark retreats come from a Tibetan religion or philosophy, but it’s, it’s seen
0:59:46 throughout the ancient civilization. So the ancient Greeks and Romans used to bury people actually for
0:59:53 days, and then they would come out and be like the seers and the mystics of that community. But there’s
0:59:57 most research available in dark retreats because it’s still happening today.
0:59:58 What is a dark retreat?
1:00:02 A dark retreat is, have you heard of silent retreat, silent meditation?
1:00:02 Yeah.
1:00:02 Yeah.
1:00:03 Yeah. My girlfriend went on one.
1:00:08 Yeah. So that’s the kind of thing she would do. So basically you can go away for a few days to a
1:00:11 few weeks and you’re just in silence and you’re meditating and doing breath work most of the time.
1:00:20 In a dark retreat, you are in like pitch black for, I mean, you can go and do it for a few hours or a
1:00:27 weekend, but it’s meant to be in sevens. So seven to 49 days, the monks do 49 days. If as a, you know,
1:00:32 a person who’s interested spiritually, you wanted to do it quite seriously, you would go for seven days
1:00:40 and you would be in a room or a cave that’s got double walls. So it’s completely dark. And
1:00:48 the reason for doing this is that not all of us can have a near-death experience, right? So this is a way
1:00:55 of emulate, it’s the closest way of emulating that for anyone like you or I to get access to the benefits
1:01:02 of a near-death experience, which I’ve outlined them all in the book. So in a dark retreat, at first you
1:01:09 sleep a lot because it’s dark, you’re releasing a lot of melatonin from your pineal gland. So you fall asleep
1:01:15 in darkness, you awake in darkness and basically that kind of makes you feel more sleepy. So you sleep
1:01:20 a lot. After a couple of days, you start to see
1:01:28 like pulsations of light. It might be like little shooting stars or kind of just like
1:01:36 little sparks here and there. And then eventually it feels like the walls are dimly alight.
1:01:45 So in complete darkness, you start to see light. Obviously, there’s an element of like hallucinating
1:01:54 at this point. And so after three, four, five days, you will actually start to see animals,
1:02:02 real or sort of fantastical. And eventually people see like deities or beings like people do in near-death
1:02:10 experiences. And when people come out of these retreats, they experience many of the same benefits,
1:02:18 like, you know, a real sort of like joy for life, less fear of death, more compassion for other people,
1:02:26 less fear of failing. So, you know, taking more healthy risks. So it’s a way basically of emulating
1:02:31 a near-death experience. And it therefore convinces you that there’s more than you can see in your
1:02:36 day-to-day life. And therefore that expands your mind in a way that’s beneficial.
1:02:42 Yeah. It’s another example of an altered state of consciousness. You can also get altered states
1:02:47 of consciousness through conscious connected or holotropic breath work and through the use of
1:02:50 psychedelic plants as well.
1:02:57 How do we know that it’s not just a changing of our neurological state or the chemicals in our
1:03:02 brain that are causing us to interpret things differently with our senses? Because, you know,
1:03:08 we’ve all, I said we all, many of us have experienced having some kind of stimulant or psychedelic or some
1:03:14 compound in a rave or a festival that’s made us see the world differently for a moment. And science would
1:03:20 say that’s just the neurochemicals in our brain doing different things, which are changing our
1:03:24 perception. They wouldn’t say necessarily that it’s a different realm or a different dimension.
1:03:31 Yeah. And I think you’re right. I think it is that. So as a neuropharmacologist, I, you know,
1:03:36 understand as much as the research says about the, it’s mostly, like I said, in the body, in the brain
1:03:44 with psychedelics, it’s mostly 5-HT or serotonin 2A receptors. And there’s a level of hyperconnectivity
1:03:50 within the brain, particularly, as I said, in the visual cortex here, which allows people to see
1:03:59 things that they don’t normally see. And I think the way to apply that in your life is that it’s a
1:04:07 glimpse into what’s possible. Once you’ve experienced that, it could either be that you find other natural
1:04:13 ways of experiencing that. So there’s a paper I can forward to you that shows that certain forms
1:04:18 of conscious connected breath work produce the same effect as a moderate dose of psilocybin.
1:04:19 Which is magic mushrooms.
1:04:26 Yes. And this research came out after psilocybin was banned. And practitioners thought, well,
1:04:30 what are other ways that we can help people to achieve these altered states of consciousness?
1:04:39 Um, and personally, I believe that, you know, having like a completely like awe-inspiring experience in
1:04:45 nature, or for me, like the ballet, particularly when I’ve been so lucky sometimes to sit in the
1:04:50 wings and you just completely feel like you’re part of it. I mean, I’ve literally had a spiritual
1:04:54 experience sitting in the wings watching, actually it was one of my friends, the principal dancer
1:05:01 dancing, just so overwhelming. It’s completely an altered state of consciousness. Um, so there are,
1:05:07 there are other ways of accessing that. Um, but I think it depends like why you want to and what it
1:05:13 means to you. But at minimum, these sorts of things that I’m talking about are ways of understanding that
1:05:16 there’s more to life than what we know.
1:05:19 And how does that meaningfully change
1:05:27 like the concept of what happiness is and contentment is and like living a good life is?
1:05:33 So what I think is really interesting is that we don’t actually have to experience certain things ourselves.
1:05:40 So there’s a lot of research that shows that students from various different, um, areas of expertise
1:05:46 who simply learn about near-death experiences, actually get some of the same benefits and that
1:05:53 these can last for over a year later. So understanding that when someone sees that there’s something
1:06:00 greater than us, when someone sees the interconnectedness of, of everything, when someone understands how
1:06:06 small some of their problems are in the greater, you know, picture of things, helps people to be
1:06:15 more compassionate, more grateful, kinder to others, um, less materialistic, is, is really interesting.
1:06:22 And I think anything that we can do to help us, you know, free us from some of those chains that I think
1:06:29 hold us down in the material world, particularly in the Western world, is, it’s healthy for us physically,
1:06:36 mentally, emotionally, but it also brings in this element of spirituality that I think is just so lacking.
1:06:43 in the world at the moment and, and could be so helpful because if we look back at the way that our
1:06:48 ancestors used their senses and their intuition to interpret the land, like a cloud formation could
1:06:53 mean that rain’s coming, but it could also mean that your ancestors were talking to you. It just seems like
1:06:59 such a beautiful way to live. And when we lived in, you know, in Paleolithic times, we didn’t have
1:07:06 spare resources for having fun, but we adorned ourselves, we danced, we told stories, we made,
1:07:14 you know, cave art. So I think that just really reminds us that those things that are often seen as
1:07:18 luxuries or frivolous, they’re not at all, they’re fundamentally important.
1:07:24 Believing in these things itself is good for us. Is that what you believe? You believe that
1:07:29 believing in something transcendent, whether it’s spiritual or religious, is actually just good
1:07:31 for us. So that’s reason enough to believe it.
1:07:35 It’s reason enough to believe it, but I think it will naturally change what you do
1:07:39 once you believe it. You’re not going to live in the same way if you, if you, you know,
1:07:41 believe some fundamentally different things.
1:07:47 And the ways in which it changes what you believe are beneficial to you. So are you saying
1:07:50 that that is reason enough to believe it, like to want to believe it?
1:07:51 I think it’s reason enough to try it.
1:07:58 Yeah. I mean, sometimes it causes people through human history to do awful things, right? To kill
1:08:04 themselves, to, to strap bombs to themselves and do horrific things because they believe in
1:08:11 something transcendent. It can also lead to like destructive behaviour.
1:08:16 I mean, I don’t think there’s any evidence from near-death experiences that that’s the case.
1:08:23 I think, I know that what you’re referring to is something that’s, you know, more fundamentally
1:08:26 like religious and…
1:08:31 Because I was watching that, I’ve been watching, Jack told me to watch this Capturing Bin Laden
1:08:35 documentary. So I was watching it last night and these people flew themselves into buildings
1:08:41 because they believe in, you know, they were obviously radicalised in various ways, but they,
1:08:48 they believed in going to a afterlife that would be better than this one and that they were sacrificing
1:08:53 themselves for the greater good. So it’s just, it’s, I guess it’s a side point that just, but the
1:08:58 belief in transcendence itself in some regard isn’t necessarily always going to guarantee our behaviours
1:09:01 on this planet are productive.
1:09:04 Yeah. And I was going to say like, perhaps it’s something more dogmatic, but I think you’re absolutely
1:09:09 right to raise that point. And I’m not trying to sit here and say, I found like the perfect
1:09:13 solution and everyone should do this and it’s all good. Like that’s just, I know that’s not true.
1:09:19 I’m not trying to say that at all. I think we should absolutely be questioning everything that I’m
1:09:24 saying and I will keep questioning the way that I’m living my life and keep trying to learn and grow.
1:09:28 I guess the point is just the belief in something transcendent. Does that make our lives necessarily
1:09:30 better? I guess the answer is I can’t, it can.
1:09:31 Yeah.
1:09:35 I’m really obsessed at the moment actually with this idea of purpose and meaning because obviously we’re
1:09:40 living in a society that’s more and more individualistic and independence is kind of vogue.
1:09:46 because of a variety of things that have happened over the last 50, 60, 70 years, we have more
1:09:50 independence. Women in particular have a lot more independence, which I think everyone is very,
1:09:56 most people are very supportive of. We have more choice than ever before. And with choice comes
1:10:01 independence. I can choose now when I have a family and maybe I couldn’t choose before.
1:10:10 Um, and with choice and with freedom, I think some of our more short term hedonistic desires and
1:10:16 temptations take hold and we end up sacrificing the tribe and shared responsibility and dependence.
1:10:22 And a lot of our meaning came from like those things. So I feel to some degree that when we think about
1:10:28 how we ladder up from like me to like my family, to my city, to my nation, and then maybe to my God,
1:10:35 those layers have fallen away. And now for many of us, it’s just me. And that’s causing a crisis of
1:10:41 meaning and purpose in life because we’re kind of unanchored. Yeah. What’s your perspective on this?
1:10:47 And, um, do you think it’s true that we’re like, we’re more unanchored than we’ve ever been? And how do
1:10:51 you think we get back to that if we can relate to feeling a little bit lost and unanchored and
1:10:56 the sort of prevalence in my view of people having more and more midlife crises and turning to religion
1:11:02 or spirituality or something? Yeah, well, I, I actually called this in March, 2020, and it’s
1:11:09 on record because I was on a podcast and I, I said, I foresee a huge mental health crisis,
1:11:16 but we could choose for it to be a spiritual revolution. And so then obviously the, you know,
1:11:20 the rest of the pandemic happened. And then there was sort of a return to society, which I think people
1:11:27 found really hard mentally as well. And at the same time, there was the cost of living crisis,
1:11:34 the wealth gap, a new war, the crime rates, you know, certainly in London, like just for my life
1:11:40 experience, they had, you know, significantly grown, um, for reasons that we’re all contributors
1:11:47 too. But, you know, it changes how safe you feel in society. And I’m a big fan of technology. Obviously,
1:11:55 I’m a scientist, but it is ironic that we seem to be more disconnected than ever when in, in one way,
1:12:01 we’re, we’re more connected than we’ve ever been before. And I, you know, I, I’ve said this before,
1:12:07 but I’ll say it again. I think the way out of that is, is a return to ancient wisdom, to true
1:12:14 connection, which I believe can coexist with being technologically connected and advanced. Um,
1:12:20 but yeah, I just, I just think we’ve lost what it means to be human, which means, you know,
1:12:27 really being in touch with yourself and being part of a community and, and caring about something more
1:12:31 than just your own life and, and your immediate, you know, inner circle.
1:12:36 And what is true connection in your definition of the word? Cause I guess there’s false connection
1:12:40 if there’s true connection. So what’s true connection and what is false connection?
1:12:43 Well, I’ll just go over, you know, what I’ve said before, cause it’s about connection to yourself,
1:12:49 to others and, you know, sort of the world or something greater. And I, you know, it’s, it’s about
1:12:54 something that’s, that’s deep and not transactional. It’s about something that’s meaningful.
1:13:00 It’s about something that’s altruistic. I think it’s about contributing.
1:13:04 That day when you walked past the hospital, what did you experience?
1:13:14 Um, it triggers me seeing that building and I just, I, you know, I had obviously looked on Google
1:13:19 maps, but not really realized that I would walk past it. And if I had realized I would have walked
1:13:25 a different way and I remember just thinking it’s unfair that I had to see this building. It was
1:13:31 unnecessary, unnecessarily a trigger for me. And, and obviously, obviously saying to Robin, you need
1:13:34 to send me a sign, but there’s a reason for that, which is, you know, I mean, I went to that hospital
1:13:40 every day for a month for his first day. And I think about three weeks for the second one. Um,
1:13:50 but he had two admissions to ICU and one of them I’d been, you know, to visit him for the day.
1:14:00 He’d been bedridden for quite a few weeks by then. And I came home, I was just sort of deescalating and,
1:14:04 you know, sitting on the sofa and getting ready for the evening. And then suddenly I saw the emergency
1:14:13 line was calling and I could hear them saying his heart rate went up to 200, like ICU were here now,
1:14:18 you know, we did a crash call and they’re just like talking, talking, talking. And I suddenly just said,
1:14:24 should I come back to the hospital? And she said, yes. In a tone of voice, it was like,
1:14:31 you need to get here as quickly as possible. Got in the Uber. It’s a 30 minute Uber ride from my house.
1:14:39 I messaged my best friend and said, I’ve got to rush back to the hospital. He was on the 15th floor.
1:14:45 So I was like waiting for the lift, got up there, saw the matron coming to unlock the door. And I just
1:14:50 said, is he in his room? And she said, yes, he’s in his room. But she, her face looked like not good.
1:14:58 Ran round and saw all the machinery from ICU in the corridor with like a hundred wires coming out of the
1:15:07 room. Ran into the room and just saw Robin sat up in bed, huge smile when he saw me. And he just said
1:15:14 to me, when I thought this was the end, I just kept thinking, please let me see her face one more time.
1:15:25 And, you know, after that, he did get a bit better. But then, um, well, in that first admission,
1:15:29 eventually I said to him, you know, you’ve got to start sitting out. Well, the doctor said,
1:15:36 you’ve got to sit out of bed. And the therapist had come round. He said, I don’t want therapy. I’ve got
1:15:41 you. So like I took the therapy, the reflexology lady came round. He pretended he was asleep. And
1:15:46 eventually I said, darling, you’ve got to play the game. I cannot do this by myself. And you, and you
1:15:52 can’t just keep lying in bed. You’ve got to sit up. So he got helped into the chair. And that day when I
1:15:58 went to say goodbye to him, I hugged him like face to face. And I didn’t quite realise that the whole
1:16:03 time I’d been kissing him from the side of the bed because he’d been in bed. And when we hugged face to
1:16:07 face, I just burst into tears and I had never shown him anything but a smiling face the whole time.
1:16:14 And I left and I just got this barrage of text messages saying, I’m not spending one more night
1:16:19 away from you. I’m wasting away in this hospital when I could be with you. When you come in tomorrow,
1:16:26 we’re going to tell the doctors I’m leaving. So I thought, okay, came in the next day,
1:16:30 it’s ward round. And I was pretty much like part of the ward round, like the consultant would
1:16:36 say everything and then say, is that okay, Tara? Kind of thing. And he said, I want to leave. I’m leaving
1:16:41 today. I want to be at home with my wife tonight. And she was very clever. She looked at me and said,
1:16:47 what do you think, Tara? Because she knew I’ve never put him in danger. But also I’m standing in
1:16:55 front of the man that I love. And I’m either going to tell him that I don’t trust him. I don’t trust his
1:17:02 decision-making. The person who always, always had my back, or I’m going to have to show him that I
1:17:10 have his back just like he always had mine. And I said to her, I understand why you wouldn’t be in
1:17:16 favour of this, but I think I can manage it. And within two days, he was discharged from hospital.
1:17:28 Yeah, off IVs, still on oxygen. We still had to go in to have like the bone marrow tests and get
1:17:34 blood transfusions and platelets and things. But he slowly started to recover. It was a slow recovery.
1:17:39 So normally within a week, you would get the second round of treatment. He wasn’t strong enough for
1:17:46 that. But we got to the point where she actually said that we could go to Hampshire. And then he
1:17:51 stopped using the walking stick. He stopped using the oxygen. We came back to London for the second
1:17:55 round of treatment. She said, I could not have imagined you would bring him back in as good a
1:18:02 state as he’s in. But the second round of treatment was totally brutal. And it didn’t work.
1:18:10 Um, so he was in hospital again for a few weeks. And then, like I said, on October 4th, I took him
1:18:18 home. Even then, the female consultant said to me, the last time you took him to Hampshire, he got so
1:18:25 much better. If anything changes, bring him back to London. And the male consultant gave me two syringes
1:18:31 of bone marrow stimulating drugs and said, you cannot use this without our permission. But if anything
1:18:38 changes, inject him with this and bring him back to London. So I still had like a glimmer of hope,
1:18:45 which I shouldn’t really have had. Um, and like I said, he, he lived for three and a half weeks instead
1:18:54 of two. Um, yeah. And like right towards the end, cause he was in a hospital bed on an air mattress.
1:19:01 He said like, maybe you could like come and lie on the bed with me. And when you couldn’t move,
1:19:06 he couldn’t raise a glass of water to his lips or anything, but he somehow like moved his arms. I
1:19:13 always used to sleep like on his chest. Um, and then after a few seconds, he said, I’m just really
1:19:17 claustrophobic. And you know, I’d like had to put the rails up to stay in the bed cause it was so small
1:19:22 and I was going to fall out. And I said, it’s okay, darling. And I think that, I think that was his way of
1:19:24 saying goodbye to me. Cause he died two days after that.
1:19:30 What’s on your mind?
1:19:36 Um, just like very sad.
1:19:45 Um, I don’t want him to get forgotten.
1:20:01 I’ve dedicated like my book to him, but I, I also know because we’ve had this conversation that
1:20:10 there’s something, there’s something there’s, there’s still like something that I have to do
1:20:12 in this life, which was the reason that I had to stay.
1:20:25 Um, yeah, I, I think there’s like a purpose to fulfill that, that Robin wants me to, so that’s
1:20:26 what I’m going to do.
1:20:33 How do you think about falling in love again? Cause I played out the horrific thought myself
1:20:38 in my own life of losing my partner and, and how difficult it would, it appears to be from
1:20:43 this vantage point to fall in love again and meet people and to, to think about those things
1:20:46 again. Like how, how, how do you think about that?
1:20:57 Um, so I actually experienced unconditional love, which I didn’t believe in. So the first time Robin
1:21:03 said to me, I love you unconditionally because I had some baggage from previous relationship. I said,
1:21:12 don’t say that because I don’t think that exists. And he never said it again, but every day for the rest
1:21:18 of his life, he showed me that it was true. So at some point I just knew it was true. I would say,
1:21:24 you know, obviously people say things like he would want you to be happy. And, you know, I was still
1:21:29 wearing my wedding rings for over two years. And, you know, even some of his friends said, you don’t
1:21:34 need to wear them anymore, but I said, I want to, and I wore them for as, you know, as long as I still
1:21:43 needed to. I, I’m open to receiving love, but I’m not going to go and look for it. Let’s put it that
1:22:00 way. Why? Um, I don’t know. I mean, it’s not really my style anyway, but I think I’ve been so
1:22:09 lucky with what I’ve had that I don’t, I don’t, I’d be okay if I didn’t like have something like that
1:22:16 again. Obviously I’m too young to like not want to have that again, but I’m, I also feel quite
1:22:25 vulnerable. So I’ll just like see how things go. I’ve watched so many entrepreneurs treat sales like
1:22:29 a performance problem when it’s often down to visibility, because when you can’t see what’s
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1:23:30 One of the things that I thought a lot about when I started The Diary of a CEO was who would be the
1:23:35 sponsors of this show. I wanted my sponsors to be companies that I believed in so much that I invested
1:23:40 my own money into those companies. The reason I do that is because if I’m willing to put my money where
1:23:45 my mouth is, I must love the product. And this is one such product that I’ve just invested many millions
1:23:52 of pounds into. I was in the late stages of creating my own hydration electrolyte product. I was looking for
1:23:57 a certain thing. I was looking for a certain product that wasn’t too sweet, that was science backed. And I told
1:24:02 my friend George Heaton about this. And he said to me that he was working on one with a guy called Ross
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1:24:30 And if I told you I’d been through what you’ve been through, and I asked you the question,
1:24:37 should I go and look for love again? What advice would you give to me? If I’d lost my partner and
1:24:41 I was, what, four years now? Away from that?
1:24:41 Nearly.
1:24:44 Yeah. What advice would you give me about love?
1:24:49 I think it’s very personal. I think, you know, if you want to be in a relationship,
1:24:56 that’s absolutely fine. If you’re not sure, that’s fine too. I think there’s different levels of
1:25:02 how long it would take people. I do know that when, you know, the majority of voices were around,
1:25:08 around me were sort of saying like, it’s okay for you to do that again, that one of my friends who’s
1:25:14 engaged to someone who was a widower, he said to me at the time, I’m telling you right now,
1:25:20 two years is not, it’s not long enough. And that felt like a relief. So obviously it’s almost
1:25:26 another two years now. I, you know, I think I believe that if love is meant for me, then it
1:25:31 will come to me. So I’m not, I’m not, I’m just calm about it.
1:25:37 How are you different? Like, what are the very material or like very obvious ways that you’re
1:25:43 a different person on the other side of this? What would your friends say if I said, how
1:25:44 is Tara different?
1:25:49 Well, I think they would say that I’m a lot more like fragile and vulnerable
1:25:53 because, because they’re like very, very protective of me still.
1:25:59 I know they would, I know what they would say because some of them have said it and I didn’t
1:26:04 really like to hear this at first, but they said, you’re going to be able to help so many people.
1:26:09 And, you know, the first time someone said that I was like, I’ve been a doctor, I’ve been
1:26:14 a coach. I, you know, my whole like personality is about helping people. I didn’t need my husband
1:26:20 to suffer horrifically and die so that I can help people. But now I do actually feel that I
1:26:21 can and I want to.
1:26:25 And what do you want to help them with? And who do you want to help? People that are grieving?
1:26:32 Not just people that are grieving. I think, you know, people are struggling and suffering in
1:26:37 different ways and people really, really want to feel seen. And I think that’s like an important
1:26:42 place where I would love to do something.
1:26:49 I think I’ve got more and more curious about the idea that I might be wrong about subjective
1:26:55 reality and how I see things. And so I wondered if, if there’s a clearer definition of the subjective
1:27:00 reality that you see, like, do you, do you think we are these spirits that inhabit? And then like,
1:27:06 why is there, is there a reason why I’ve come into this body? Is there some bigger
1:27:12 karmic purpose as to why I’ve, I live? This ultimate question of like, what is the meaning
1:27:18 of life? In the worldview that you have, like, what is the point? What is the point? Why did
1:27:19 I need to live?
1:27:24 I don’t know if I can answer that, but I’m going to, I’m just going to say like what’s coming
1:27:34 to my mind, which is, so like you and I might never have met in our lives, right? And for
1:27:44 some reason we did and we had never met before I did the podcast with you last time, but people
1:27:48 cannot stop talking about like the level of chemistry as if we’d known each other our whole
1:27:54 lives. And I’ve always said, I felt like I was talking to my little brother. And then that
1:27:59 episode goes on to have like the number of views that it does. I don’t believe that that’s random
1:28:06 or a coincidence. I think there’s a reason for that. And for me, in a way you were the
1:28:09 worst person for me to come and do and tell this story to you for the first time, because
1:28:13 you were the most skeptical person of all the podcast hosts that I can think of that I’m going
1:28:20 to go on. So there’s obviously some importance to that. I can’t explain it. I’m not, I didn’t
1:28:27 come here with all the answers. I’m just lucky enough to be someone with credible qualifications
1:28:33 that’s had a, you know, an experience that most people don’t talk about that I can open
1:28:38 up for people. That’s, I would say like all that it is. But I want to add something else
1:28:44 that I’m feeling is relevant as well, which is because of my friendship group and the kind
1:28:50 of conversations that we have. I wasn’t allowed by my publisher to include personal stories
1:28:56 from my friends. I had to source stories from people I had either never met or only met once
1:29:01 or were friends of friends. So every personal story that you read in the signs, which has the
1:29:09 person’s real name and it is written by them and gifted to me for this book are people that
1:29:16 I don’t know. And they’re all saying the same thing. They see, you know, light disturbances
1:29:21 when they think of their lost loved one or they get unmistakable signs or robins visit them.
1:29:28 Yeah, I haven’t made that stuff up. Like there’s something to it. I don’t know exactly what it
1:29:33 is. I hope I find out before I die, but maybe I’ll only find out after I die. I don’t know.
1:29:38 And is there any meaning to all this stuff? It’s kind of going back to the question I asked
1:29:44 second ago because you said you think we met for a reason and one could hazard a number of reasons
1:29:47 as to why that was. Maybe it was because you’re going to go on to help so many people and reach
1:29:51 so many people with an important message, whatever. But I don’t know. This is my curiosity trying to
1:29:58 reach a conclusion, which is for what, for why? Like why are humans here? Why, why doesn’t my dog
1:30:04 Pablo have, or does he have the same capabilities of seeing signs and communicating with?
1:30:07 Oh, he’s got more capabilities than you in many respects.
1:30:10 I mean, you talk about that in the book, right? You talk about pets and animals.
1:30:18 Okay, let me talk about that a little bit. So dogs and cats can smell certain diseases and
1:30:25 they can smell imminent death. So there’s something called hyperosmia, which is in humans,
1:30:31 it’s the ability to smell more than the normal range. So there’s a very famous nurse called Joy,
1:30:38 Illna, who smelt her husband’s Parkinson’s disease years before he was diagnosed. And her ability to
1:30:44 smell that disease has caused a new swab test to be created that takes chemicals from the skin of
1:30:50 people to predict if they’re going to get Parkinson’s disease. So there are some outliers in humans that
1:30:55 have, you know, they’re called super smellers, for example. We’re not all capable of that, but some
1:31:04 people are blind people. Blind people rewire the visual cortex of the brain and the occipital lobes here for
1:31:12 echolocation. Humans aren’t built for echolocation. Bats and dolphins are. But people who are blind can use up
1:31:22 the unused visual cortex to learn how to recognise how close objects are to them by how long it takes sound to bounce back
1:31:31 from surfaces. So basically, animals have senses that we don’t have. Some very rare people can have some of those
1:31:39 senses that animals have that most humans don’t. We’re also capable of rewiring some of our neurons for senses
1:31:46 that replace ones that we don’t have. And I’m just going to bring us full circle, you know, kind of where we started
1:31:52 with, can you suspend your disbelief by understanding that there are lots of things that we can’t prove at
1:32:00 the moment, but, you know, we sort of, science is on the quest to push boundaries, which is that Russell
1:32:07 Foster suggested that not, that the only cells on our retinas are not just rods and cones, which are for
1:32:13 vision, but there was a different type of cell that senses the passing of time through the light-dark
1:32:20 cycle. And, you know, that’s how we create our circadian rhythms. He was ridiculed by scientists
1:32:25 who said, we’ve been studying the eye for 150 years, and you think there’s a new type of cell that we’ve
1:32:32 missed out in all that time, and you found it. And sure enough, now there are identified cells called
1:32:42 melanopsin cells, which blind rodents can still keep to the circadian rhythm because they can sense the
1:32:48 changing light and dark cycle. But if you put opaque contact lenses on them, they drift off the circadian
1:32:57 rhythm. So I’m not going to be able to give you an answer at the end of this podcast, but maybe that’s the
1:33:01 beauty of everything, that we’re not at the end of knowing everything that we need to know. But
1:33:04 there’s a lot of really interesting big question marks.
1:33:12 Do you think we’ll ever figure out these answers? Do you think science will ever get there? Do you
1:33:18 think there’ll come a day when we make discoveries that prove that many of the things that you write
1:33:26 about in the signs are, in fact, true? Like scientifically justifiable, repeatable?
1:33:30 Yeah, I think so. But I don’t think we’ll be here at that point.
1:33:36 I’m always just fascinated because you know so much about neuroscience and the connection of not just
1:33:44 neuroscience, but spirituality and then also human psychology in general. The thing I’m always so
1:33:47 fascinated about with you is that you’re able to tell me things that I didn’t know, like you said to
1:33:52 me last time about looking into someone’s left eye and the fact that sweat leaks through the skin and
1:33:56 that menstrual cycle sync up. And these are all things that are like really actionable that have
1:34:00 helped me to look at life differently. But also now I don’t think I’ve looked in someone’s right eye
1:34:05 in the last two years, especially when they’re like annoyed or something. So is there anything else like
1:34:12 that that you’ve become curious about or discovered or talked about since we last saw each other that
1:34:13 might be pertinent to my words?
1:34:17 I think we’ve discussed it, which is like noticing beauty. That’s been a real game changer for me. That’s
1:34:19 like gratitude to the next level.
1:34:23 And that’s an active practice of going through life, looking for something beautiful.
1:34:26 Well, it was, but then it becomes a habit.
1:34:27 Yeah. Okay.
1:34:31 And it’s producing oxytocin just like gratitude practice does. So obviously it’s kind of self
1:34:36 rewarding. So then you naturally want to do it more and more. But I noticed I point it out to people
1:34:41 more as well now, which is that I’m obviously trying to like create a bit of a like crowd effect,
1:34:46 not consciously, but I just can’t help myself. Like if I see something really pretty,
1:34:49 then I’ll say, Oh, like, you know, did you see that?
1:34:54 Certain people do that often. They do seem to be the happiest people. My girlfriend does
1:34:59 that all the time. She’ll like stop the car because there’s a flower that we need to go
1:35:03 spend 45 seconds looking at across the other side of the road. And to a lot of people, it’s
1:35:07 just a flower and we’ve kind of almost become used to seeing flowers.
1:35:08 Well, that’s habituation.
1:35:09 Yeah.
1:35:14 So even if you walk past like an amazing tree or an amazing building every day, eventually
1:35:19 you’ll, you’ll just not notice it because you’re habituated to it. So saliency is, you
1:35:21 know, keeping yourself primed, like what I call the art of noticing.
1:35:26 And where are you right now in terms of your journey of grief?
1:35:32 I mean, much better is the first thing I need to say, because obviously it’s been a long and
1:35:42 dark time. Um, I know that, I know I’m not there yet because there is a part of me that is
1:35:48 like afraid to let my light really shine.
1:35:50 Explain that.
1:35:56 I think I sort of touched on it before that if I, I feel like if I, you know, if I like
1:36:01 throw myself back into my career now, cause I’ve had quite a few years out and it becomes
1:36:07 really successful that there’s a level of guilt associated with that. But, you know, at least
1:36:13 I’m aware of that. Um, I’ve had a few conversations with close friends about it. I have quite a timeline
1:36:19 ahead of me because of publication and book promo and then like, you know, next things that we might
1:36:28 do. Um, so I think I just need to like keep working on that as things unfold. Um, I know
1:36:31 it’s wrong, but it’s how I feel at the moment.
1:36:35 We, we meet up again in 10 years time. Obviously we’re going to see each other before then, but
1:36:39 say we, we get together in 10 years time and this next season of your life has been a great
1:36:50 success. What, what happened? Wow. Um, I got over myself and like put myself out there and
1:36:55 like really shone and it actually did really help loads of people. Um, look at the smile
1:37:03 on your face as you say that. Yeah. I really want to say thank you to you as well for everything.
1:37:12 The feeling is mutual. You know, it really is. You, you were transformative for the show
1:37:16 and, um, everywhere I go still today, people come up to me and tell me about how that conversation
1:37:20 helped them. It inspired them in some way, but also it helped them understand, as you said
1:37:25 earlier in this conversation, that all that we know isn’t all that there is to know. And
1:37:28 just that, you know, I’ve tried to play a bit of a skeptic throughout this conversation.
1:37:33 I am naturally skeptical, but the other thing that’s that from being a podcaster, the other
1:37:38 thing that happens to you is you become more open-minded. It’s almost this paradox. If you
1:37:41 think you’re going to learn more, but actually through the, through the conversations I’ve
1:37:46 had, I’ve realized that there’s so much that I don’t know. And actually that’s forced me
1:37:51 more into an agnostic position than I was before. And what I mean by that is it’s forced me into
1:37:55 a state where I can’t fall into the trap of thinking I know things. Yeah. So this is also
1:38:00 why I find it hard to commit to any belief, like a religious belief or atheism, because
1:38:05 there’s, I continually sit here over and over again and someone will say something to me and
1:38:09 I’ll be skeptical and then I’ll reflect and then I’ll look at the research or the science
1:38:12 or whatever, and I’ll change my mind. And if you change your mind that many times, you realize
1:38:17 that your mind should probably not be fixed to any position.
1:38:22 I love that. I’m so proud of you for hearing that. That’s like an incredible thing for people
1:38:26 to hear. But it’s true. And I hope that of my audience, you know, I’ve sat with my team a while
1:38:30 ago and I was saying, do you know what DOAC stands for? It stands for diversity. I get it.
1:38:36 But it also stands for people that have, that are dreamers, that are open-minded, which is the O,
1:38:42 that are in search of increasing their awareness. And that could be in any definition that you want
1:38:46 to describe it, whether it’s awareness of health, psychology, who they are. And the C is about
1:38:51 connection. So that’s really like hearing your stories makes me feel like me too.
1:38:56 And I feel that too. I’m struggling in that way too. So that’s the framework that I think about
1:39:02 the show. And that’s also why I try and remain open-minded to all things that I hear and let
1:39:08 people speak. I’ve never actually said that before, but there it is, guys. And that’s why I’m so compelled
1:39:12 by this conversation today. Of course, like I’m skeptical. Like I think skepticism is healthy.
1:39:12 Yeah.
1:39:16 But I’m also open-minded. And that means that I’m willing to take what you’ve said to me today
1:39:24 and to investigate it and run the experiments in my own life. And if I am open-minded, maybe I’ll
1:39:25 receive some evidence for myself.
1:39:25 Yeah.
1:39:31 So thank you. Thank you for doing what you’re doing. And also, you know, as you said earlier,
1:39:35 it’s much easier and safer in life just to sit in a box of the known. Like you’re not going to get any
1:39:36 arrows.
1:39:36 Yeah.
1:39:44 But it’s when people through history have dared to say that maybe the earth revolves around the sun
1:39:49 or that maybe the earth isn’t flat. They’ve taken the arrows, but that’s pushed us forward as a
1:39:59 society into a better way of being. So I always applaud those that have the guts to ask questions.
1:40:06 You know? So I hope that’s the audience that I’ve cultivated. I hope they’re not too narrow-minded
1:40:10 or too fixed, but I’m sure they will debate and share their anecdotes in the comment section.
1:40:16 I’m actually really looking forward to reading the comment section on this particular conversation,
1:40:20 because I know it’s going to be full of stories and anecdotes and experiences, which I think is
1:40:25 going to be really enriching. But I do ask everybody in the comment section to be open-minded
1:40:34 and empathetic and kind actively, which means replying to people and being kind because, you know,
1:40:42 grief, no matter what your opinion is on it, is a very delicate thing. And we’re all trying to
1:40:50 find ways to be more happier and more connected and, uh, to deal with the reality of, of our
1:40:53 experience. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question
1:40:57 for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you
1:41:06 is, what is the best thing that someone has done for you?
1:41:10 God, are you sure you don’t make these things up?
1:41:13 No, it’s what it says here. If anyone wants to read it, it’s what it says in the book.
1:41:20 It’s got to be Robin showing me that unconditional love really does exist.
1:41:30 Tara, thank you. Your new book, The Signs. Beautiful book, by the way.
1:41:31 Thank you.
1:41:37 Beautiful book. The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts will be out in September. So if
1:41:41 you’re listening to this in September, then it’s out. And I’ll link it below for anyone that wants
1:41:47 to have a read of this book. The really, truly unique thing about you is that you blend all of
1:41:53 these different perspectives into your own perspective and your own writing and your own
1:41:59 research. And so in reading this book, it pulls everybody in. It pulls in, I think, the skeptics,
1:42:03 it pulls in the believers, and it pulls them all into the same room to confront a new possible
1:42:08 answer to the nature of reality that might just serve to help so many of us. So I highly recommend
1:42:13 everybody gives it a read because if you’re someone that likes to expand your mind and think beyond
1:42:17 the known, then this is the book and this is the moment in time, because of all the reasons you’ve
1:42:22 said about loneliness and individualism and all these things, that people need to read books like
1:42:26 this. So I highly, I’m so excited for it to be in the world and I’m so excited to hear what everybody
1:42:29 thinks and how they receive it. So thank you for writing such a wonderful book and thank you for
1:42:35 coming back. And thank you again for many years ago now, blessing our show in a profound way that
1:42:40 pulled in a huge new audience, which has set us on an incredible journey. So yeah, thank you, Tara.
1:42:41 Thanks. Thank you.
1:42:48 Make sure you keep what I’m about to say to yourself. I’m inviting 10,000 of you to come
1:42:54 even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private
1:42:59 community that I’m launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are
1:43:04 never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I’m recording the conversation. We have
1:43:07 clips we’ve never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the
1:43:14 episodes that we’ve never, ever released and so much more. In the circle, you’ll have direct access
1:43:19 to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview and the types of
1:43:24 conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now, we’re only inviting the first 10,000 people
1:43:29 that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in
1:43:34 description below or go to doaccircle.com. I will speak to you there.
1:43:59 you