Most personalities are survival strategies pretending to be identities. — Bizzy Gold

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Bizzie Gold unpacks resilience, reinvention, and the method behind lasting personal change.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Busy Gold, serial entrepreneur, disruptor, and just a fabulous girl on fire. But before we get into today's podcast, uh, full disclosure, I have known Busy since she was in middle school. And when she was in middle school, I know that there was something fantastic and spectacular about her. What I didn't know was that she would, at the age of 25, disrupt an oversaturated market and realize tremendous financial success, that she would invent a diagnostic tool for the mental health industry, and that she would write a number one best-selling book in the neuropsychology space. Uh, and there's a whole lot more, both in her personal and professional life. But let's let the woman herself tell us what the story is. Busy Gold, welcome to Soft and Savage.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

What an honor. I thought one day this day might come. And now I get to sit here across from Mama Levin, one of my favorite YouTubers on Planet Earth.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Thank you for coming. It's an honor to interview you. So you have realized tremendous success, and I didn't talk about what those different things were, but when you were 25 years old, you disrupted the yoga industry. I mean, there can't be anything more saturated than the yoga industry, and yet you realize tremendous success and tremendous financial success.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

So that industry was incredibly saturated. And one of the true signs of a disruptor is that if you look back over the course of time, so just to market, I'm 40 now, so that was about 15 years ago. At the time, the industry was extremely saturated, but it hadn't yet evolved the way that it has now. And I really firmly believe that the advent of booty at that time is partly what actually transformed the entire industry for the next 15 years. Because back then, I was kind of regarded as the yoga antichrist, essentially. People hated me, they did not want me to exist. All the traditional yoga outlets like Yoga Journal, they didn't like what we were doing. They didn't like that we were pushing the envelope. And yet now, if you look back, roughly three years after the advent of booty, suddenly everything had fusion in it. Everything had a little bit of plymetrics. It was now okay to start to dance and move off your mat in diagonal. So the sign of a true disruptor is somebody that actually pushes the trend forward for everybody. And that is very much what we see in the yoga and fitness space at large right now is that nothing is really a single format. Everything is fusion.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

So, but where did you come up with the idea? Were you studying yoga at the time?

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Or so early on in my life, so you met me when I was 10. So when I was about 19, I had a double knee injury. And up to that point, I had been pursuing skiing. It was kind of my primary goal in life was to go to the Olympics. And at that point, I had been skiing for the University of Colorado. That was my sole focus. Of course, I maintained my grades-ish, but academics was not my area of focus at the time. When I tore both my ACLs, I realized very quickly that I was going to have to start caring about something else pretty quickly. And it just so happened that I found yoga because I was trying to rehab my knees. I don't really think that my personality as a whole really would have gone to yoga had it not been for an injury. I'm, you know me, I was a very competitive, fast-paced go-getter, really like to push after goals. And to me, the rest and relaxation of yoga was not something that naturally appealed to me. So I pursued yoga only so that I could try to rehab my knees and eventually go back to skiing. But it just so happens, and I think you know this, I'm a very spiritual person, and I think each one of us has a very clear destined path. And while we all have free will and can certainly self-sabotage and derail ourselves, there is a lot of grace in the world for spirit kind of trying to seek you out and course correct you. And I believe this was one of those moments in my life. The very first yoga class I ever went to was in Boulder, Colorado. And I had previously been a gymnast. So yoga as a whole didn't feel challenging to me. The hardest part was actually lying down quiet in Shivasana. And that was where my big transformative moment happened. It was my very first time in Shivasana where you're supposed to be quiet and still and let all the movement that you just did integrate into your body. And this beautiful yoga instructor named Misty came over to me because she could tell that I had gone so deep in my Shavasana meditation that I was having trouble coming out of it. Because I think I had never really let myself rest to that level before because I was just such inherently a go-getter. And as soon as I heard her voice trying to get us out of it, I remember this feeling of trying to follow her voice, but it almost was, it felt like sleep paralysis. I couldn't quite get out. It was like I was too good at meditation too quickly without the skill set to have any business going there. So then trying to follow her voice, I think she could tell that I my body was physically agitated. So she put her hands on my shoulders. Eventually I came out of it and she came to me at the end of class and she was just like, I don't know what it is, but I just I feel like you're going to become a famous yoga instructor. And in that moment, I was like, oh, huh, that's interesting. Never would have thought of that before in my whole life. And then she was like, Your practice is just so beautiful. How long have you been practicing? And I was like, This is my first class. She's like, Your first class here? And I was like, No, no, no, it's my first class ever. And she was kind of blown away and she was just like, now I'm positive that what I saw is correct. You are going to be a famous yoga instructor. Because I think right from the very beginning, it was a very challenging class. And I was able to do arm balances and all these things because I just I followed what she told me to do. So I wasn't really thinking about it. I wasn't in my head, which I'm sure will circle back around. I do think that's one of the things that's made me successful is I am very passion-driven. I commit right away and I figure out the rest of the details later on. I don't stop myself and feel like I have to have everything perfect or have to know all of the unknowns just in order for me to take that first step. And because of that, I think anything that I've thrown myself into, any arena, I've found success because I have a high level of self-trust and I am a damn hard worker. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna listen to what's expected of me and I'm just gonna execute. So this moment really did change the rest of my life because I started to go back and practice every single day. Yoga did end up very much transforming my life. And I did go on to have a career at that time in public relations, but always maintained teaching yoga on the side. But for me, it was something that I did more for my mental health. It wasn't ever something that I put front and center as a career path. But again, that's where your destiny has an idea for you that maybe is very much against your own ideas for yourself. And that was the case for me here. I ended up working myself to the bone in public relations. And at this time, I was in West Hollywood. And at this time, I personally was never a drinker, I was never a partier. But in public relations, especially when you're in the entertainment and fashion space, which is where I was, every single night you're out wining and dining clients. And I had taken a job working for a high-profile company based out of London. And I was pretty much up until 2:30, three o'clock in the morning every single night. And then I had to be back in the office at 9 a.m. And little by little, my health started to deteriorate. And at a certain point, I had a series of unfortunate events at my job that actually led to my direct boss being killed by a bear, which was a crazy story. But it was one of those moments where it's like, I knew that I should go. But then this series of events that took place rapid fire over two weeks, I'm like, now I'm certain that God wants me out of this job. Like I'm out of here. And I picked up and I moved to Hawaii without planning, without thinking about it. I literally just was like, I need to change my life. I'm physically unwell. I am working myself to the bone. I'm only 23 years old. I can't keep this up. I won't live to be 30 if I keep doing what I'm doing. And when I moved to Hawaii, my idea was, you know, rest and reset, have a little fun, maybe actually try to, I don't know, be a 20-year-old for a change because I was never really good at acting my age. So I figured, let's go have some fun, act my age. I'll go teach yoga. It'll be great. And that's where I ended up having my daughter, Sarai, who you have. Have you gotten to meet Sarai in person before? Nope.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

I met your son, but I haven't met your daughter.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

You got to meet Zev. Sarai is amazing. And Sarai's birth is what truly catapulted me into the next phase of my entrepreneurial journey. Because unfortunately, I had a home birth where everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. And she ended up dying for about 20 minutes. At the time, her biological dad, G, refused to stop giving her CPR, even though everyone told her she's gone, focus on your wife, because I was in the process of going too. And he just refused to stop doing CPR. And after 20 minutes, my dog started barking and Sarai turned pink and she came back to us. It was a very intense moment. And I think you'll appreciate this. And I feel like it very much it goes, everything that you described about your podcast is very much about the juxtaposition in life that it takes to actually get things done, right? The balance of the balance of opposites. And at this moment, when surely most people would have marked that in their brain as the most traumatic moment that they've ever experienced in their life, I actually had a really different perspective of it. I remember lying down, kind of staring up at the sky and having almost a sarcastic Larry David-esque inner monologue of like, wow, I like this is mind blowing. I really didn't think I was gonna die today. Like I never saw this coming. This is so shocking. So I almost had this out-of-body experience where I wasn't even focused on the detail of what was happening. I more just was so surprised that I somehow didn't see this coming and that I never considered that today wouldn't be the best day of my life, but it would in fact be a very marked tragedy in my life. So by the time they passed me Sarai, and they're like, she's alive, she's alive. At this point, I was so detached from reality that I don't think I really even accepted that. I kind of had her on my chest and just thought, okay, well, based on everything that just took place, I can't get too attached right now. She's probably not gonna make it. If she does make it, she's probably going to have pretty profound mental or physical challenges growing up. So even in that moment when you would think you'd just be so emotional, I've very much skewed extremely logical in that moment. And I don't thank God, honestly, because I think I don't have PTSD because of that fork in the road. I think when people feel so emotionally charged in the moment, that's when that can create echoes and linger with the person longer. But I, it's almost as if I went up above myself and watched the whole thing rather than physically experienced it myself. And what ensued after that, you would think, like, oh, well, she survived. The story's gonna get good. But unfortunately, it didn't get better for a few years. It actually had its ups and downs, as everything does. But Sarai's biological dad did not respond the same way that I did. And because he was giving her CPR, it really threw him for a loop mentally, and he'd already been struggling with bipolar disorder. So he very much listened to everything the doctors told us about Sarai's life and outcome. And I very much took an opposing opinion, which I tend to do. I'm very contrarian. It just every time the doctors would tell me what to expect, I there's just a part of me intuitively that knew that that was not my daughter's destiny. So I'd sit there and nod my head and be like, okay, I understand. And they're like, Yeah, but do you understand? I'm like, well, I understand what you're telling me. I understand, like, I'm pretty good at running statistical probabilities. I get it. I thought the same thing when they put my lifeless daughter on my chest. But spiritually, I just don't think that's actually what's going to happen. But her dad very much bought into that narrative and went into a very dark, depressive state, and eventually took his own life when she was two years old. And that's a it's another one of those interesting juxtaposing events because you would think that could have been a chance for me to just say, F it, throw it all away, life is too tragic, everything's futile, poor me. But instead, that moment actually really set Sarai and my life on a completely different trajectory that I'm very grateful for. And while, of course, suicide is a challenging topic for anybody to talk about, when somebody is that stuck on wanting to make that transaction and they've spent two years talking about it and thinking about it and kind of like oppressing your entire experience around that narrative of suicidal ideation, eventually he was 42 when he did it. It's not a choice I would have made for him. It's certainly not a choice that we wanted as a family. We wanted him to heal and be a part of the family unit. But I also very much respected he's an adult and he made that decision. So I felt reasonably at peace with it, which I think a lot of people had a hard time reconciling from the outside looking in. And for anyone that's ever dealt with that, it can be, it's like socially unacceptable to say these things, which is why I'm saying it boldly. Of course, there's a piece of you that's devastated and crushed. But at the same time, I think he really believed, and I think he was right, that he was ruining Soraiza my life and holding both of us back. And he absolutely was because he couldn't, he couldn't manage to get himself out of that despite ongoing support from me, from family, etc. So that was where my life took a very sharp turn, and honestly, everything started to turn around for us. When I had that birth experience with Sarai, one of the things that I did to try to, you know, air quotes heal my traumatic wound at the behest of my mother-in-law was I did a sweat lodge and peyote medicine ceremony, which is something that was very much outside of the scope of things that I would do. I was much more a panic attack leaning, you know, New York Jewish, anxious person, hypochondriac. So the idea, and by the way, extreme claustrophobia my whole life. So the idea that I was going to willingly go put myself in a sweat lodge was pattern opposition alone. But this moment actually profoundly changed my life in a variety of ways that ended up also pouring into the work that I've done in mental health. So I'll share it briefly. It was my first moment of realizing how we hold ourselves back and that we we fully buy into the narrative and the voice that projects as us, right? I think up until this exact moment, I didn't realize that it wasn't just self. It was something else that actually had ulterior motives for my life that was very antagonistic to the goals that I had. As I'm walking toward this sweat lodge, I remember hearing this voice going, You should make sure that you're the last one in so that you're closest to the door, so that, you know, if you want to get out, you can get out. And I remember like hearing that and being like, No, I'm here to conquer this. I don't, I want to conquer claustrophobia. If I put myself right at the edge of the door, it's too easy for me to get out. So this was the first moment where I very viscerally put my feet in the ground and said, no, I'm gonna be the first and I want to be the furthest away from the door. So this was my very first decision to radically oppose my pattern and go against what I was hearing as a way to protect myself. So I go all the way to the very back. I'm next to my mother-in-law, who is like the toughest Japanese lady ever, spent like two years hazing me, trying to get me to leave the family because I was white. They were all Japanese. So, of course, in my mind, I'm like all the way in the back. I've got this like tough, tiny Japanese woman. She actually started freaking out. I'm like, okay, so I'm holding it together for us. This is something new. I thought you were gonna be my lifeline, but you're panicking. So, and in it, have you ever done a sweat lodge, Liz? Yeah, okay. So it gets really hot in there, and depending on what you're in, some of the structures are very small. The structure was very small, and there were probably like 15 to 17 people in there, and there was this older gentleman to my side that just kept taking all of his clothes off and was like weeping the whole time. So there's it it's sensory overload, and then you have the guy that's like passing around the sweet grass, there's smoke everywhere. Like, oh shit, what did I commit to? This is a this is a terrible experience. And then you do multiple rounds, right? And you don't, there's no there's no control because you can't say, like, well, how long is this round gonna be? Which is of course what I started to think in my head, and then of course, like the answer is it's spirit time. I'm like, oh, it's spirit time. Well, I guess then I'll just sit back and relax. Um, but honestly, this experience broke me in the best ways possible because I ended up staying for all of the rounds. But one of the things that happened very clearly in the very first round was I could hear all that negative self-talk and like, you need to get out of here. Even Mayumi can't handle it, like coming up with all the excuses. Like, Mayumi's next to you, and she's tough and she's panicking. So you, of course, have an excuse to panic now. And I was like, no, we're not doing this right now. So I remember sneaking my fingers underneath, like onto the cold dirt underneath where kind of like the tarps and the blankets were, so I could feel cold dirt on the outside with my fingertips. And the way that I was able to get through it was to tell myself, busy gold, if you wanted to stand up right now and rip this entire thing off like the Hulk, you totally could do that. Like you're strong enough functionally, you could break this whole shit open right now. But you're choosing not to because you're choosing to conquer this fear. So just keep feeling the cold dirt, but you are choosing to submit right now. You do not have to be the Hulk, you're choosing to submit, and you're gonna grow from it. And I did this for all of the rounds, and I finally got out, and everyone that knew me was like, I if I was betting in Vegas, I would have bet you would have been out of there in five minutes. I cannot believe you did all the rounds. And then comes the peyote ceremony, and I'm like, oh, great. So then we all go inside to this drum circle where now it's time for the peyote. So I survived that one thing, which definitely changed my life because I realized I have the agency to tell that inner monologue, not only to shove it, but I started to strategically understand how to pick apart the arguments. And then eventually, when I pushed back with the right argument, it stopped. I was like, okay, wow, that feels like peace. I don't think I've ever really had that. So it was this new experience. Then we go into the peyote ceremony. And in the ceremony, there's all these things that are way out of my comfort zone, like spontaneous singing and chanting. And I'm, you know, I think at one point it came around to me and I couldn't think of anything to spontaneously sing or chant because I was so in my head. So I think I started saying the ABCs, at which point the person leading the ceremony kind of gave me this very awful look. And I was like, I think I need to be out of this room right now. So I actually went and just sat by myself in my house on peyote, which was apparently not recommended. But at this point, I was like, I can't be with this group right now. But that moment again, going back to this destiny, like at the time I felt like I was doing something wrong, but that was where I had this very spiritual encounter where I dropped in and I saw all of the ways that we were moving the body in a way that it was never intended to move. I and I could see everything in spirals, I could see all the fascia lines. It was literally like seeing multidimensionally what was happening in the body when we were moving through a yoga practice. And it was like I was able to highlight everything that wasn't working mechanically and spiritually correctly. And it was literally like I just got dropped in with a blueprint. And the next morning I had to go teach a 26 posture hot beakrim class, right? So it was like as static and regimented as you can think of. And I just felt this little voice inside me go, just do it. Just do what you got the blueprint for. And I look at my class and I'm like, you know what, guys, I had this crazy experience yesterday. We're just gonna do things a little bit differently, so just go with it. It's a great playlist, have fun. I don't even know what's gonna happen. So I teach what I now know to be my very first booty class. And at the end, I had this one consistent student named Ken who was a very stoic old. Asian man. And at the end, he comes over to me and he's like, I don't know what that was, but you shouldn't teach anything else ever again. And I was like, okay, so you liked it. He was like, No, I hated it. I'm never coming back. But that is what you should be doing. He was like, the the he was like, you were shining. That is exactly what you should be doing. And that was the birth of booty. And I think what helps kind of tie a tie a little bow around this whole thing is that sometimes the most profound creations that can move forward and help heal tens of thousands, millions, are a byproduct of these repetitive traumas and all the times that you don't bend a knee, you don't break, you keep pursuing and keep letting spirit kind of guide you through these processes. Cause there's so many twists and turns that ended up materializing in the practice of booty. I could never, as a human, I could never have done that. I couldn't have sat in my office and like, you know, thought, hmm, like what can I create today? We all have these unique experiences that are, you know, this blend of soft and savage, hard and, you know, hard and easy, traumatic and beautiful. And when you're present to those juxtapositions and you keep moving forward with passion, you can bring these beautiful things into the world that really you can't create any other way. They have to be created organically. They can't be something that you sit around a boardroom and try to design. And I think that's ultimately what we as a society have lost touch with.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Right? We keep like, you have to to be an expert in something, you have to go to this school and get this degree stamped. And then really what we're doing at that point, everything is just being funneled. You're getting stuck in paradigmatic entrenchment. You can't see what you can't see. And if you do see it, then you fear being ostracized by your peers. I think the people that will continue to truly transform the world will often come outside of those paradigms and outside of those systems because innovation, real innovation, has much more to do with spirituality than many people are comfortable believing.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

So you credit all of this to spirituality rather than to your DNA and rather to nature or nurture or something as pedestrian as all of that.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

I think they, I think they all work in tandem somewhat, but I'll give you an example. So I think my nurture is part of what made me a go-getter. It's what made me have drive, it's what made me have a lot of self-confidence. My parents did a lot of things wrong, but the things that they very much did right are that they put me in pressure cooker environments. They didn't rescue me. They didn't, you know, coddle me or enable me. They told me the truth. If I thought I was going to deliver an A-Paper, I was about to have a rough go for the next two hours because my dad would tear it to shreds. Um, those are the types of things that some parents don't do because they, you know, either don't want to repeat what their parents did to them, which I get 100% as a parent. Um, but sometimes it's out of laziness or just not wanting to sort of put that effort in. My dad in particular did put that effort in and he was very intentional about it. And while there are plenty of times that I surely hated him for it, it's one of the things that made me me. It's one of the things that made me be able to have terrible bosses and still climb the ranks despite that terrible boss, and in some cases, in spite of the terrible boss. Um and that, those are all nurture for sure. But I think spirituality, there's, I think we each have a unique blueprint that each one of us came to kind of live out in the world. And I think that gets that gets expressed in a variety of ways, many of which are the synchronicities and just kind of continuing to put yourself out there. I often will use the example of when you're really letting, you know, intuition and spirit move your life, we basically have to throw ourselves into the water slide, not really knowing where the water slide is going to go. But if we are in momentum, it's going to be able to carry us to all the places that we need to go. But imagine that you put yourself into one of those sort of like tube water slides. If you panic and you try to like go like this, you could stop yourself on the water slide. And you could have a terrible, you know, hour, day, I don't know, many people, years where they just kind of go into this panic mode and they they don't, because they don't know where it's gonna go, they'd rather stop. I'm much more the opposite. I as long as I'm in momentum, I trust that I'm somehow going to get spit out where I need to be. And even if things get hard temporarily or I bump up against a new skill that I need to learn to keep going, then I'm gonna figure it out. And I think to some extent, that's really where I think who we are more in our our nature starts to be expressed. Because I do think that there's a genetic component to that too. And I think I'm just I'm I'm more wired to pursue and desire to be in momentum and want to be spontaneous and flexible than the average person.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

But the thing that's so interesting to me, because I know a lot of the kids, I still call you kids your age, who are who are entrepreneurs. I know that there's there's the visionaries on one side and there's the get-it dunners on the other side. And it's very unusual to see in one human being the visionary and the get-it dunner.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

So I saw that you did the brain pattern map, which I'm gonna do your session myself.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Oh, good.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

When I walk you through that, you'll get to see exactly there's one section on the left side of the brain pattern spectrum where those two collide, and that's where I am. So there's this sweet spot where actually the majority of entrepreneurs are that have both the vision and the flexibility and adaptability, but also the drive and motivation to just go after things and then kind of figure it out as they go along. In other words, they're not risk averse. They know that there's a certain amount of risk, but that they have a strong level of self-efficacy that they're gonna figure it out as they go along. And so, Fest, so so next, what was your next so after so Booty, Booty actually, it blew up beyond my wildest dreams. Although I did get a very clear vision that booty would become massive very early on. And I remember telling my dad that I'm like, I think I have the next Zumba. And he's like, Yeah, sure, whatever. And I'm like, seriously, I'm pretty sure I do. And by the time I first moved to Los Angeles, because having Sarai definitely lit a fire under my butt because I needed to now make a lot more money to be able to provide for her financial needs. So what I had been doing in Hawaii was not gonna cut it for the long term. So thankfully I had that background in PR, which I don't think was by accident. So I was able to kind of package and bring booty into LA the right way. And really within probably two to three weeks, I started training Julia Roberts six days a week. I trained her for a very long time, and that was really my entryway into all of the other things that eventually made booty grow very, very quickly. Very soon I was on most magazines, I was on Dr. Oz, I was getting all these like TV placements all the time. So things just exploded rapid fire, which was amazing. But what's funny is booty grow, it grew very quickly. And I think I had shared with you that really to me, like the yoga career, despite what that woman had said to me in my first yoga class, that was never something that I aspired to be. I never wanted to be a famous yoga instructor, never saw myself in that way because I'm actually a much more nerdy academic intelligence leaning person. I'm like, Right. So the idea that I became known as a celebrity trainer was it was honestly funny to me. I thought it was really hilarious. But the hardest part was because I had kind of built up that persona publicly, when I eventually really found my life's calling, I had to go through this two-year metamorphosis process to try to convince people that I really that actually that wasn't really me, but this is really me. Because people couldn't accept the two at the same time. They couldn't have an intelligent innovator in mental health that also wore risque clothes and was labeled as a celebrity trainer. So I had to go through this very intentional two-year-long rebrand process that did work. Although, even now, as a 40-year-old, if you Google me, there's still a bunch of pictures of me as a 25-year-old that will come people be like, oh, so you went from that to this, and it's always a funny conversation starter. But then I really shifted gears into the work that I do with Brake. So Brake was really born in 2014 and very similar sort of story. I needed the medicine that I was able to get spiritually at that time. And I one day was in an argument with somebody, and we were having this argument about she basically come back from a like feminine leadership mastermind or something. And we got into an argument about whether the nature of emotion was feminine or masculine. And as I'm arguing about this with her, I just started to see diagrams in my head. So I'm sitting there, I grab a napkin, I'm like drawing these diagrams and trying to explain to her why she's incorrect. And at that point, I then go home and I look at my husband at the time and was like, I don't know what's happening to me, but ever since I got into this argument, I keep seeing diagrams. So if you can just take the baby, because at this point I had Zev, my second kid, and I was like, I'm just gonna go onto my computer and just see what's going on here because I was both hearing narration and seeing diagrams in my head. So I did that for about two, three days. And I had ended up writing approximately 80 pages of just kind of brain dumping, trying to capture visually what I was seeing and put it into writing so that there was some sort of concrete representation. And because at that time I was leading some of the biggest yoga teacher trainings in the world, I had this kind of open format where people would come from all over to just hear me lecture. And at that point, I kind of similarly to, oh, you want me to teach a B crim class? I'm gonna do this other thing instead. I had this platform where I was like, hey guys, we're gonna do something a little bit differently today. So I started teaching what I was getting at that moment in time in 2014. And right after that point, people would text me afterwards, like, that was so cool. Here's your best quotes. You're like really on to something here. This is so unique. I've never heard this perspective. And from that point, then I started to do seminars. The seminars would sell out every single time. And then by 2017 in January, we built the first online program for it. And the very first launch we did, we did a quarter of a million dollars in sales. And it just since then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so that was in 2017, it's 2025 now. Thankfully, I knew every time we would run these cohorts that I had to be very on top of tracking the data and tracking the efficacy and actually looking at what was coming through and constantly refining it and making the system better and better. Eventually, by 2021, I believe in probably April, that was where we started to get all these big contracts with therapeutic residential schools. I was working with teens, we were doing the work in the prison. So we had really kind of crossed that threshold from like a weirdo that teaches seminars to now a well-regarded methodology. And I had a client that came in, I did his brain pattern map. He is an orthodox Jew, which I think is actually relevant to the overall picture of the story. So he comes in, I do his brain pattern mapping session, and basically I get through the whole first session. The next day I'm skiing with my kids and I get this these frantic calls from my assistant. You have to call me back, you have to call me back. So I called Josie back and I'm like, hey, what's going on? And she's like, Well, you know, that client that you had yesterday, he's really mad. He's asking for a refund. He's like screaming at me, what do I do? And I was like, Oh, okay, pull up, pull up his records right now. What does it say right here? And she kind of reads through. And I'm like, So what is happening right now? He's just in his cycle that he just moved from this to this. He was confronted with this information. Now he doesn't like it. And you're gonna tell him exactly X, Y, and Z, and then let me know what happens. So she pushes back. The next morning I get an email from him that's like, I'm very sorry, you're right. You were actually you were 100% spot on. I'm just in such a position of power everywhere in my life that no one ever pushes back. So you had Josie push back exactly the right way. And I see where I'm an error, and this might actually be genius. I'm still mad at you, but you might be a genius at the same time. So if you'll have me, will you still keep me as a client? And I was like, Yeah, we're adults, it's fine. So we get on to our next session and we start, and he's like, Hey, um, if it's okay if I jump in here for a second, he was like, in an effort to prove that you were a fraud, I actually proved that you might actually be a genius that solved our mental health crisis. So is it okay if I share my screen for a moment? And I'm like, okay. So, anyways, he ends up sharing. Long story short, he is now my investor and my business partner. Wow. He runs a data analytics and tech consulting firm. And in trying to prove me a fraud, he actually ran the numbers and proved that what I had created was accurate and he really believes that it is the future of mental health. And this is the coolest part because this shows that spiritual component again, because he's a very spiritual person. He said that in prayer, he knew that he was supposed to gift me the first part. And only after he gifted me the first part was it up to me if I wanted him to be my partner. He was like, There's no strings attached. I'm I prayed about and I'm supposed to give this to you. You deserve this. So for one year, his whole team worked like all the time, 12-person team all the time, building this all out for me.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Oh my god. That would be the way this blessed existence. But let me ask you because you said that once you once you designed this, excuse me, once you designed this, that you were doing it in the prisons and you were doing it in the schools, and you're doing it, so you didn't get any pushback with this brand new, with this brand new mode, modality?

SPEAKER_00 36:39

I think because we had grown, we had grown direct to consumer for about three and a half years up to that point before we started getting access to those opportunities. But I think what naturally happens when you have access to the volume of people that I had, naturally you start to get people in the program that are themselves gatekeepers. So then they walk you in and they're like, hey, this person's the real deal. So within those first few years, we just happen to have people that are gatekeepers and change makers in their own industries that walked us right in. So like we were walked right into the person, we were walked right into the school. So then you kind of bypass any of those initial pieces of red tape, which is great. And again, kind of goes back to more of a spiritual overtone, which is you know, God qual only God really can qualify you for something. And if you're trying to focus on the qualifications of the world, you're often going to potentially miss what's actually being asked of you. So, in that, in my case, very specifically, I've been able to have access to rooms and people that, you know, of the world's credentials shouldn't have allowed me access to. And yet I'm there and I've been consistently there. And I even got invited into a program at Johns Hopkins University last year. I believe there were 15 candidates. I was the only one that was not either a PhD or a medical doctor. And that was a unique experience in and of itself for five days because they very much knew that I was an outsider. They didn't like that I was an outsider, but I ended up catching the eye of a director level person at the NIH that came over to me and he's like, hey, these people hate you. You're triggering the hell out of them. Right. Not stop. He's like, you're the only one in this room that actually has a novel product. Everybody else is just trying to find some sort of big pharma solution. He was like, You actually could change the world and you're gonna piss people off doing it, but you can't stop. I was like, okay, yes, sir, I won't stop.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

I'm telling you, you lead a charmed life. And so from this came the book. From this tell them the name of the book. I love the name of the book.

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Here, I'll grab it for you. The book is your brain is a filthy liar. It is, it's a large book. It's not a quick read. It's uh, I think 703 pages, so it's not a quickie. Um, but a lot of my students will they call it the break DSM. It's like the diagnostic manual for break patterns. The book is a culmination of years of doing this work, and I think more than anything else, some people, and I get why, they refuse to actually spend four months committing to something and working on something. I just want the book. I just want like, give me the audiobook. To me, the issues that impact all of humanity are far too serious for us to just like want to read a quick book about it. This is something that could change your life for the rest of your life by just putting in four consistent months and then you'd never have to do it again. But for those of you that still want the workaround, I get it. This book is built to help people understand the foundation of the method, why the method is what it is, what causes self-deception, and then very specifically how to do your brain pattern map so that you can customize the rest of the book so that you're highly focused on the patterns you have to personally break and areas where you have to oppose your pattern. So we talked a little bit about how in the sweat lodge I started to become very acutely aware of where I had to oppose my pattern and what sort of language my brain was using to make it seem reasonable and rational that I actually had to learn to break apart. All of that is represented in the book in a chapter called Rebellion Zones. So, based on each person's brain pattern type, I identify areas of active rebellion that you have to participate in, but also how to equip yourself to go into those rebellion zones with and how do you deal with epigenetics?

SPEAKER_01 40:42

Because I've been a trauma therapist for years, and I know that there are things that trigger people, and they're not even aware of the fact that they're being triggered, but it was passed down from their grandmother because it was never identified or resolved to their mother, to the this, to the that, and it goes on. So, how do you break those epigenetic patterns?

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Well, one of the things that I think we see through epigenetics is that things can turn either on and off based on what environment you're you're in, right? So an example would be you might be genetically predisposed to something that's in your genetic line, but if your family parents in a very opposed way, that may never actually be expressed. But kind of the reverse could also be true. Something could be lingering there, your immediate family did not trigger that to be expressed, and then all of a sudden, maybe you have some sort of traumatic event at age 20, and then suddenly now epigenetically that's being expressed. I think the way that I look at this in a break method perspective is something that I call the neurocognitive funnel. Ultimately, we are most impacted by our perception of reality, because even the way we're experiencing something that's being expressed epigenetically with a behavior, it's still ultimately filtered through how we're perceiving our world. So the way that we address it in break method is to address the distortion in the perception of reality. And then with that, the language that the brain generates that actually triggers both the emotional experience and the behavior experience. Because if you hit that very top level of the funnel, what you're going to end up doing is get that person to engage with their physical reality in a way that is actually very statistically likely to turn those things back off that may have been turned on in their environment. Because epigenetics, it it's it's like a circuit breaker. Things can go on, things can go off. But typically there needs to be something in your experience of reality somehow, whether it's sensory, somatic, et cetera, that's going to turn on or off. We have found that when you work with that level of perception of reality and then the language the brain generates to kind of keep reinforcing that perception, a lot of the things that may previously have been expressed epigenetically now turn back off again. So you get to kind of go back through this process of restoration. We work with a lot of clients that have suicidal ideation, PTSD, CPTSD. I work actually quite a bit with dissociative identity disorder, which is always an interesting one to work with. I think dissociative identity disorder is a really great example of this because sometimes what you see, so I'll share from the brain pattern perspective, uh typically these tend to be right side brain pattern spectrum patterns, where typically, if you look at their historical data, for example, they could have experienced sexual trauma, but you can see in all of their historical records that they have trouble essentially not even splitting on how they're identifying the trauma. So they'll both kind of praise their abuser and then they'll simultaneously try to express the abuse. So you kind of see this fork where even in their answer patterns, they're unable to be consistent because it's as if their brain can't look at a negative without again trying to skew a positive. And that essentially Eventually, is the mechanism that gives way to the DID, which you can see in those very early childhood ranges. So let's say that you have that situation happening. Now let's add in the spiritual component. I've found for quite a few clients with DID, they have a very acute awareness of the moment that a spirit, or even in some cases, they'll report a demon actually coming to them to introduce themselves to them and saying basically, hey, I'm going to take away your pain. This is very common. So if you think about it, going back to that neurocognitive funnel, between zero and five is really where our brain starts to create these formulas that actually shape the way we perceive reality and with it what we prioritize or deprioritize. So, as an example, on the left side of the brain pattern spectrum, people tend to be highly situationally aware, but can be very relationally unaware. So they're always thinking about the big picture. Maybe they're able to really keep themselves and their loved ones safe. But then in an intimate relationship setting, they're like, how could you be so dumb? Like, why are you always so stoiced? Aren't you realizing what's right in front of you? And they're not, because their attention is elsewhere. If you go to the right side of the brain pattern spectrum, the opposite is true. They can be blissfully situationally unaware in a way that drives the left side spectrum people nuts, but they are fixated on very small micro expressions and constantly trying to project, well, what do what do I think you're thinking about me? And in that case, the further you go to the right side of the spectrum, your own insecurities or wounds are very likely to be projected onto the other person because now we're talking about something that's very subjective. It's not like, were there three people in the room or were there four people in the room? It's like, well, did your eyebrow mean that you hate me, or does your eyebrow mean that you approve of what I'm doing right now? Right. So the the stakes are higher because it's much more gray and subjective and not concrete. So typically the dissociative identity patterns tend to be on that right hand side. So examples would be it's pretty common that when you see people like this, they have multiple encounters of sexual abuse. One could argue, not that they are attracting it to them, but they may be very much missing the ability to notice what's happening in their environment. And they, as a result of that, may put themselves in harm's way repeatedly, not recognizing the red flags because they don't have any situational awareness to speak of. Does it make sense so far what I'm saying? Absolutely. Yeah. So in a case like that, I've also seen it's very common that the protective mechanism that ends up showing up like a DID diagnosis is that they try to understand everything in their head rather than take any sort of physical actions. So to kind of put that into more the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop terminology, in general, they tend to go to either freeze, flop, or fawn, but usually not a fawn.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

I never heard fun. What's fun?

SPEAKER_00 46:55

So fawn is more the people-pleasing, placating, like just don't hurt me, where freeze would be either the over-analysis, but I've also seen where that essentially that same freeze mechanism can be what creates the DID split. So they're either going to essentially go into that sort of freeze sort of mechanism. Flop would be more kind of the low-affect dropout, or the fawn would be the people pleasing. And there's usually for people in this sort of cluster, there's usually some elements of all three, but it's predominantly freeze, freeze-flop, right? There's some level to which they stop trying to protect themselves at all because their only protective mechanism is either to go up into their head and try to understand it, or to just escape it entirely and effectively dissociate. So when you see something like that, now if you take that into a spiritual conversation, which, you know, obviously is not traditionally mental health, and you start to really understand how multidimensionality works, and you understand the inner workings of spirits and hormones, which is certainly a part of my work that I don't pretend isn't there, then you start to understand why people like this also are reporting having these encounters with demons and spirits. Because that's essentially when they, when they dissociate or when they go into those states, they're not physically in their body. They're to some extent, they're not physically here. And they have more access to those higher dimensional realms in that moment, but they're not able to discern the line. They don't know the line anymore between physical reality and that which is beyond the naked eye. And I think in a lot of cases, even with people with schizophrenia, I've interviewed people before that have worked in mental wards that do see in the spirit. A lot of times people with schizophrenia, they're talking to things that are there. They're just not there to the naked eye. And the biggest issue is that they can't discern the difference between the third dimension, the fourth dimension, and the fifth dimension. But it's not necessarily like they're just completely fabricating and that that's not happening on some level.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

So I know that there's a significant pro problem with the pharmaceutical industry because the medication that they are providing people in many cases further exacerbates the situation. And it is for the and they are for the most part palliative as opposed to curative. And they're a life sentence, people that are taking these medications or on these medications for life.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

Well, and then if you think about the generational impact of it, then it's impacting fertility, it's impacting their next generation of kids. It's it's a it's a huge issue. I do think more psychiatrists are starting to ask the right questions. I know I've been collaborating with quite a few of them lately. And I think I've seen a shift toward thinking of the DSM like the Bible to now doctors kind of very boldly saying that it's essentially an insurance code book. Absolutely. So even just that shift shows us that we're likely moving in the right direction. And we do in Break Method, we train therapists and psychiatrists all the time. And I am seeing more people come to us once they've actually gone through the data and what we do. More people realize that there is inherently a flaw in a system where the diagnosis is entirely dependent on a client's ability to accurately self-report, which is essentially an oxymoron. That's actually not possible. And the therapist's ability to completely remove any of their own personal filters and distortions and perceptions of reality in order to accurately categorize. So you've got kind of like two main pieces working against you, which is precisely the problem that break method solves. We take away all of that and we focus on only the aggregate historical data points to predict the pattern, therefore, getting rid of the client self-deception piece and actually helping them essentially have a key to learn how to see their blind spots, and then also equip the therapist to not be blinded themselves by their own experience and trying to really fully see the client because some clients are really good at pulling one over on you, and that just cannot happen and break. You would see it very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 51:16

So, what is the process like? You said it takes what, four months?

SPEAKER_00 51:20

Yeah. So brain pattern mapping itself takes about 20 minutes. I think you did the initial diagnostic assessment. So typically you would start with that diagnostic assessment, which takes about 20 minutes, unless you're an incredible overthinker, in which you've probably been throwing F-bombs at me the whole time that you're looking at the computer screen. And that's actually to be expected. We do that on purpose. When you're done with that, you would book an appointment to have somebody on our team actually review your brain pattern map with you, break down all of the nine markers. Brain pattern mapping tracks nine markers. So two end up showing you how you perceive reality in a way that is uniquely distorted. It shows you a three-part emotional addiction cycle that you experience that's unique to you. And then it shows you how your behavior transitions from early stage transitional and late stage behavior and then repeats again, all as a byproduct of that distorted perception of reality. So once you're understanding those nine markers, typically at that point, most people end up doing our program, which takes about four months to get through. People typically spend anywhere from two to five hours a week on their work. And that really depends. It's something I always consider break to be like a slinky. Some people really draw it out for nine months to 12 months because that's what works for them and works for their schedule, and that's fine. And then other people want to get in, take it really seriously, and be done in four months. You can really do it in either way. The most important part of break is that it's a set structure and sequence that you can't circumvent or try to get out of anything. So that's why I call it a slinky. Like you can create more separation between the pieces, but you can't actually get out of a piece. Because as soon as the client can dictate the flow of a therapeutic container based on their preference, essentially the pursuit of healing has effectively stopped or slowed significantly. Because often what you like and what drives your preferences are the exact patterns that you need to disrupt for you to actually free yourself.

SPEAKER_01 53:16

Yeah, exactly. So what do you think about psychedelics? I think I've worked with psychedelics with trauma patients. And I think that when the stigma is removed, that if you've got the right medicine, quote unquote, in the right hands with someone who really knows what you're doing, that this is this is also on the forefront of mental health. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00 53:36

I think it would entirely depend on where they are on the brain pattern spectrum. And I actually am collaborating. Have you ever met Dr. Rabin? He founded the Apollo Neurodevice. He's fabulous. I'll introduce you to him. He's he's a gem. So he was just on my podcast, or I was just on his podcast. He's coming on my podcast and he runs a podcast called the Psychedelic Report, and we were talking about this pretty in depth. I think the same type of client, for example, that would be in the it's essentially the middle of the right side of the brain pattern spectrum, which is where typically you see all the personality disorders cluster and DID, for example. To me, they would not be candidates that I would ever recommend toward doing any sort of psychedelics because they already struggle with discerning the line between objective and subjective reality. And when you make that even more intentionally blurry, I have found those clients to get worse rather than better. But those are the same clients that I would also not recommend meditation or journaling for the very same reasons. They need to actually make things in their life much more concrete and much more actionable and tangible. There are some people on the left-hand side, for example, that function a bit more like a cold hard computer that are very situationally aware. For those clients, they could have really profound impact from psychedelics. So to me, it's not necessarily a one size fits all. And I do think that it needs to be well timed with doing some preliminary work too, because psychedelics can also manifest a lot of your underlying patterns and distortions. So if you know those first and you do some kind of ground level foundational work, then I think psychedelics could be a really profound experience. And certainly in different ways they have been for me because I did that preliminary work first.

SPEAKER_01 55:21

And so where do you go from here? What's next?

SPEAKER_00 55:24

What new world are you conquering next?

SPEAKER_01 55:27

Personally and professionally.

SPEAKER_00 55:30

I think I'm gonna I'm gonna stay here for a while. I do think that in some sort of political governmental policy sense, that's an area that I would like to press into more over the next 10 years. Because I I think that similarly to what is starting a little bit to happen with the with our kind of now finally asking some better questions about big pharma, et cetera, I think that that's like the tip of the iceberg and is still relatively corrupt. I think there's much more work to be done there. Because one of the one of my main areas of concern is that the work that we do in break, instead of it being something that is, you know, like a mental health program that adults self-opt into, I would love to see this be something that's actually integrated into all middle school curriculum. Because I'm much more of the mindset if, and because I work with kids all the time, my youngest client right now is eight, and I provide behavior strategy for two, three, and four-year-olds with parents. If we can get this into a school curriculum in a middle school environment where it's just required, our entire world will change overnight. And then we're preventing long-term problems rather than trying to clean up dumpster fires. So, in the long run, I would like to move more into a role where I can start to push that agenda forward and start to make it something that's more available on a kind of department of education curriculum level, because it shouldn't really be mental health at all. It should be just required, I think, for all human beings. And I think it would prevent a lot of the problems that we experience all around us in every area of life, from marriages to raising kids to even, you know, who runs our government and who decides to take roles as doctors and lawyers. It would change the fabric of the world if we could get it into younger kids before they and how do you think AI will affect that?

SPEAKER_01 57:25

How do you think what would be the intersection of AI and this kind of a program introduced to young kids?

SPEAKER_00 57:32

So I have very mixed views about AI in general. And obviously, with brain pattern mapping, we do use some types of AI to do what we do. But one of the things I've always been very clear about is that we have to keep it in a closed system and that we can't ever let our data actually be in kind of the broader network of quantum computing and AI. In particular for me, because the data that I have would teach AI how to mimic being human to such a degree that we would not be able to tell anymore. So I can't ever let my data set get onto the broader internet. So that's something I've been acutely aware of since the beginning. I think that AI will overall, and it already has, it's diminishing a lot of our natural instincts toward learning and curiosity. I think overall it will make us less intelligent. And I understand the desire to automate repetitive tasks and things like that. But I think right now we should likely be working harder to separate the parts of AI that are kind of taking away our creative and curiosity capacity and only try to focus on automating things that truly don't involve creativity. Because I think if we lose touch with our innate curiosity and creativity, it's basically a wrap. And that's when I think the singularity would happen. So I I personally think that at the end of all of it, there is some sort of battle between spiritual intelligence and artificial intelligence. And I think at some point, probably pretty soon, it will become very crystal clear that it's one or the other. I don't think that both can survive the level that we're experiencing right now. I think spiritual intelligence, our actual human technology, will need to stop that at some point soon before it's too late. And, you know, maybe it is already too late. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 59:39

Stop what? Stop the AI, the progression of AI.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

Yeah, stop, stop the permeating of AI through all areas of our life. I remember going to a conference back in maybe like 2015. It was with a bunch of, you know, huge influencers. And this guy basically was on stage and was like, you know, by 2028, like we're all the rich elites in here, and like our kids are gonna have a brain chip and they're gonna know this and that. And I was like, F that. My kids are not gonna have a brain chip. Like, sorry, I don't, I was like, I don't care, that's not happening in my world. So I think this is where intelligent people, if not immediately today, sometime in the next year to two years, we'll have a choice to make. Do we want our lives to be easier at the expense of completely destroying humanity? Or do we want to make things a little bit harder, have more grip, but maintain our humanity, our sovereignty, and our creativity? Because it is making people less intelligent and we'll continue to do so. Because having access to you know all of the information, that's not the same thing as knowing and cognitive processing and critical thinking and intuition. Those things to me are completely antagonistic to each other. So I think smart people have a choice to make, and that choice is probably coming faster than you think.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:53

But I wonder if you can't program these. They are sentient beings. They're not machines, they're actually sentient beings. And I wonder if now you can't program spirituality.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

From where? Who where are these sentient beings? Where did they come from?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:11

I I think that I think that we were designed that our our our civilization was designed by people from outer space, people that were more intelligent. And I think we are now creating the next iteration, and I think that it will be, you know, we will be wiped out and that and that AI will take over, and that will be the new consciousness and the new sentient beings on the planet Earth. But I wonder if you can't program a spirituality into these machines, you know, because it's whatever it is that's going in, and I understand that they can compute at these, you know, unbelievable rates, but whatever it is that you're programming in is what it is that you're gonna get out. So I wonder.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:47

But I think that's what makes it so dangerous, is that how do you really know? And I mean, I'm inherently conspiratorial at my core, but how do how do you know what's being programmed into it? And then who's doing the programming and what are their biases? So I think that's that's where it crosses this threshold into very dangerous territory because technically, yes, you could teach it anything, and then it would basically take that and be able to reasonably pivot, copy, and invert, but no matter what, AI is not capable of true creativity the way a human being is. Yes, yeah. Yet I I hope we destroy it before we get there. I I think that there's something much more sinister operating through AI in particular. I don't think that you're wrong that there is a sentience there. I just think that's a darker sentience that's antagonistic to humanity. And I think big picture the most dangerous decision that eventually we will all have to make, and I certainly know where I sit with this one, is I think, you know, kind of all the whether no matter where you look at it through whatever sort of spiritual paradigm, there will come a time where we will be given a choice to kind of like upload ourselves onto some sort of cloud so that we can live forever. I am at least myself very clear that that's something that I would never do because I think that that's essentially soul and spirit trafficking. And I know where I came from, and I would never let my soul be trafficked to a place where I can no longer get back to God. So that's where I sit with it personally. But I think that is kind of the end goal of transhumanism as a whole is can we basically traffic soul spirits to a place where they can't go home? And I'm I'm not down with that personally.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:43

Wow, I have never heard that expressed before.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:46

I mean, you and I could do a whole five-hour podcast on that. You and I can have we'll we'll we'll pull up a zoom and have a glass of wine, and I'll break that one down for you another day.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:56

Amazing. So I always end these, and thank you very much, but I always end these by saying that the motto of Soft and Savage is that there are those who seek challenges and there are those who faced with challenges. Soft and savage is the universe where both excel. You are the poster child, the poster woman for Soft and Savage. But how how do you think that you are a candidate to be a soft and savage candidate?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:20

My whole my whole life is the blending of opposing forces. I'm soft and feminine, but everyone calls me a hot dude. I I'm a really hard worker and I can push myself to the outer limits, but the thing that I want most in life is peace and rest. So I think that it is it is at my core who I am, and I think that's made a lot of people not understand me and maybe even misinterpret my intention or motive for things. But I think that's one of the beautiful things about this life is that we are multifaceted, and I've always been drawn to quirky people that don't seem like on the surface they quite make sense, and that's always what piques my curiosity. And um, I think that's exactly what your podcast theme speaks to, and that's who I am.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:09

And that's who you are. Busy Gold. Thank you very, very much. Thanks, Mama Levin. Okay.