Peak Performance and Flow | Brandon Epstein of Jump Rope Dudes | Better Man Podcast Ep. 014

Dean Pohlman: Hey, guys, what’s up? It’s Dean. Welcome to the Man Flow Yoga podcast. Today, I’m joined by an old friend of mine, Brandon Epstein, of so many different fitness companies that I don’t know how to title him. So, Brandon, welcome to the show.

Brandon Epstein: Thanks for having me, brother. Yeah, there’s definitely been iterations and iterations over the years.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And I like to start these shows talking about how we met. So, we met, I think a mutual friend. Was it Wade? I think it was Wade.

Brandon Epstein: Might have been Wade. Yeah, I think so.

Dean Pohlman: So, our real estate agent who is our friend introduced us back in 20– was it 2013 or 2014?

Brandon Epstein: 2013, I think.

Dean Pohlman: Okay, 2013, and he introduced you as someone who was– I think the general vibe was a serial entrepreneur in fitness, just lots of different things. You had done some successful e-book launches on Amazon. You had a meditation app. At the time, you were launching Entrepreneur Fitness. I remember we think we went out one night, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m not drinking. I got a photo shoot on Monday, so I got to stay cut for my photo shoot.” Yeah, and then you actually came on to the Man Flow Yoga YouTube channel, and we did a series of five videos or so. You remember that?

Brandon Epstein: Dude, I actually don’t even remember that. Is that still on YouTube, like you check out?

Dean Pohlman: It’s still on YouTube, yeah. I even made you wear a Man Flow Yoga tank top.

Brandon Epstein: Oh, okay. Now, I remember. I do remember. Yeah, ‘cause I still had that tank.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And that was back when I was recording in whatever apartment gym I had access to at the time. So, yeah, that was fun. You just hope that no one would walk in the shot and hope that people would just respect the camera. And people did, so.

Brandon Epstein: Oh, yeah, I’m still doing it, shooting anywhere I can.

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah, that’s great, man. I have a lot of, I don’t know, I think the next generation will feel like zero apprehension whatsoever to filming themselves in public, but I still have like, why am I filming myself in public? Kind of, but anyways.

Brandon Epstein: I remember we have this one YouTube video or my business partner, I jumped rope this dam who’s jumping rope in Austin, and then someone yelled at him, “Get a job.” So, those things can definitely happen. I think people are getting annoyed with the whole social media influencer wave at the time. And so, yeah, it still exists.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, it’s still here, and now they have even more annoying videos to deal with, so yeah.

Brandon Epstein: Every kid wants to be an influencer now. This is the number one sought-after job, bro.

Dean Pohlman: Is it?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, for young kids, like yeah, you asked them before, they wanted to be an athlete or an artist or a firefighter. And now, they just want to be influencers.

Dean Pohlman: I want to be famous for being famous.

Brandon Epstein: Okay, and just putting out content, getting everything paid for. It’s been wild, man. There’s a documentary on HBO, it’s called Fake Famous.

Dean Pohlman: Yes, heard of this.

Brandon Epstein: You’ve seen that?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Like where they try to fake being famous and see how much money it costs and how many likes they have to buy to sell the…

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, but that one girl, it kind of worked because then she ended up getting stuff for free all the time. And so, these kids who are seeing this are like, “Wait a minute, this whole being the influencer, I think, is pretty cool. You just get free stuff all the time. People that you see at hotels, you get all these cool products.” I mean, from the outside looking in, it’s pretty legit, but it’s also a lot of work. I think people don’t see that.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, you have to be really creative. Not everyone is creative. Not everyone has that mind. And honestly, with the increasing reliance we have on phones, this is something that I think about a lot and something that I talk about a lot. But the increasing reliance that we have on phones and technology, it just kills our ability to be creative.

We need to be bored. You got to be bored to be creative. You can’t just lunge for your phone whenever you reach that second of boredom, but anyways. So, one thing I remember also about you, which was, I think this is just a cool story, we were working with a mutual client. Do you keep up with Tom? Do you remember Tom?

Brandon Epstein: He was in our Jump Rope Dudes community, or it was called Zen Dude Fitness back then.

Dean Pohlman: Yes, Zen Dude Fitness.

Brandon Epstein: I haven’t seen him in a while, but it’s hard to know. He could still be in the community floating around out there.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, but I started, he was one of my first people that I worked with. When I started Man Flow Yoga, I was doing remote, like one-on-one webcam yoga classes. And Tom was one of my first clients. And I remember, I don’t know how I referred him to you, but you helped him lose a ridiculous amount of weight in two months or one month or something ridiculous like that. I remember looking at a photo of him. I was like, “Wait, dude, you lost like 60 pounds. What happened?” So, how did that happen, by the way? What was part of that process?

Brandon Epstein: It’s part of the same thing that we still tell people. I’ve been saying it like a broken record for decades now. Eat in a slight calorie deficit, move your body consistently. That’s basically it. And people, I never heard that because everyone’s trying the next best diet, right? They’re like, alright, like people tell me all the time, oh, well, I’m doing intermittent fasting or I’m cutting out carbs or I’m doing keto or I’m vegan, and all those things can be good. But if you’re not in this slight calorie deficit and just the science doesn’t make sense, you can’t lose weight.

Dean Pohlman: Right, yeah.

Brandon Epstein: I think we figure that out and is helpful.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. What am I going to say about that? Yeah, I mean, part of it, like the people just want to be excited about something, but also, what’s interesting to me is all the people that I follow are, like, my Instagram feed when I’m actually on it or my Facebook feed is people who are so outside of the main cluster of this limited knowledge of dieting, and I don’t mean to say dieting, I’ll just say healthy eating, but these healthy lifestyle principles that sometimes I forget just how little people know about losing weight, about just being healthy.

And so, I mean, it’s shocking that some people are so advanced that they’re doing these crazy rituals on a daily basis. And other people, we still have to teach them, hey, actually, fats are good for you. Salt is good for you. You just have to not have the bad types and you have to have less of it, so.

Brandon Epstein: I think the name of the game is artificial complexity. Like people have to keep coming up with content so they keep creating more artificial complexity, which seems to continue to confuse people because people end up thinking they have to do 20 different things to lose weight when they don’t. But they just heard, hey, this person transformed doing this, this person transformed doing this. And yeah, I don’t know, they overcomplicate things.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, those success stories are inspiring, that they’re far and few between. Most of it is just these simple, little, boring changes that people make on little tweaks on a daily basis. So, you were doing that. You’re still coaching, it sounds like. Another big change for you, you became a father about a year ago. Right before we started this convo, we were talking about that.

And this was a big surprise to me because you were always like this very single, untethered, free soul of a man just doing whatever came up and all these things that I was like, “Wait, you’re doing what?” And I’d love to know what happened, what shifted, what journey did you go on to meeting this magical woman whose name is Sarah? You fell in love with her, and then you eventually created a family with her. So, walk me through the five-year Cliff Notes of what happened there.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, the last time we saw each other, I was living in Austin, Texas, and my businesses all kind of failed. And so, I had to escape the city and start digging my way out of credit card debt and start rebuilding what was going to be next. So, I moved down to Medellin, Colombia, and that was back in early 2015.

And yeah, at that time, I didn’t have any stability financially. I was 24 years old when I moved down there and really still stepping into myself and deciding who I wanted to be. And so, going down to Colombia was an opportunity to continue to discover and also kind of get my feet back on the ground again. And so, when I went down there, I was dating different women for the first couple of years or so.

And then I met Sarah, and our relationship was super organic. Well, it’s funny. There was one night I was going into a nightclub and I had a stomachache and I was like, “Ah, I don’t want to go out tonight.” And again, I wasn’t really drinking. And so, I just went in there with my buddy Dan, my business partner, who was also living with me at the time down there.

And apparently, she saw me walk in the door and she told her friends, “That’s going to be the father of my children,” like from the second she saw me. And so, we were just dancing, having a good time, bringing the good energy. And then she came over and gave us a whole, “Oh, are you having fun in Medellin?” Like, treating us like we were gringos who didn’t know anything and speaking English to us.

And we just started talking, and then she actually was just inviting me from a whim with like 15 of her friends to the Colombian coast. And so, I was like, “Yeah, like, yeah, let’s go.” And so, I went on that adventure with her, and everything after that has been super slow and organic. And from getting married to having a child, everything is felt very organic without urgency.

And I feel like too often, people try to future pace the relationships and be like, “Alright, when is this going to happen? And just make sure you give me that security right now to know that we’re going to be together.” And she wasn’t like that. She was just very go with the flow. And I think being with someone like that made me feel comfortable in committing because she was bringing the same energy to the party.

And so, it was very organic that after another year of being down in Colombia, I needed a visa. So, we got a free union, which is like a step below getting married. And then a couple of years later, we moved to Los Angeles, and then she needed a visa to stay there. So, we actually went and got married, and it was super casual, like I was too casual about it. I think we came home that night and I was playing NBA2K video games, and she was like, “This is our wedding night. This is what’s happening.”

But we just went to the courthouse and did it, and so, I wasn’t really thinking that much of it and we never had a ceremony or anything. And then, yeah, a couple of years ago, we were just like, “Hey, you want to start a family?” And so, yeah, we had our daughter. And we just keep flowing, man. So, I guess that’s how it worked out.

Dean Pohlman: Is that like, do you come from a family that is like that was the norm? Or is this like, are you both kind of– I’m just curious, like, I can’t even imagine, like calling my mom saying, I’m getting married. We’re not doing a ceremony. Big reason for this is because she needs to stay here.” And it also sounds like she was so secure in herself that she didn’t need that extra reassurance, like, hey, where are we going? And I’m assuming you had to have that. You had to have that security with yourself in order for her to feel comfortable, so.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, absolutely, man. I got really clear on the type of partner I wanted to attract into my life. And I knew I wanted someone who kind of did her own thing. And so, my wife is an entrepreneur. She owns a swimsuit company. And I just knew I wanted someone who was self-sustaining, who, being an entrepreneur, I didn’t want her to feel like she was competing with my business for attention. I wanted us both to have our own things that we’re engaged in.

And so, yeah, she was like very similar to me in that way. Like culturally, of course, growing up in Colombia, she’s very different in many different cultural ways. But we lined up on the most important things, just like our general worldviews and how we were approaching life and what we believed to be the way we wanted to live. And she was and still is very confident and sure of herself. And yeah, I guess I am as well. And so, we kind of met each other at the same energetic frequency, and fireworks erupted.

Dean Pohlman: Wow. Well, great. Congratulations. Yeah, that sounds awesome. And your daughter’s name is Mar. And that’s actually really interesting to me because my wife’s name is Marisa. My name is Dean, obviously. Our son’s name is Declan, which is Dean with just a C and an L in the middle. So, if we have a girl, God willing, then we’re just going to take out the R, A, or the S. What are we taking out? Anyway, we’re taking out the I, S, and we’re going to name her Mara, possibly.

Brandon Epstein: Oh, cool.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, that’s what we’re telling everybody, at least. But I got Declan. She gets Mara. So, very close to Mar is the point. And you just dropped her off at daycare.

Brandon Epstein: First day, yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Today. What are you feeling?

Brandon Epstein: Good. I don’t hear her in the background of this podcast. Yeah, it’s about time, man. She’s so active that I think it’s time that she needs to be around other children and learning more actively. I study the mind so much. That’s always been my main area of expertise and knowing that 0 to 7 years old is basically hypnosis for children. I just want to make sure that she’s able to use that time to soak in all that information and that knowledge.

And I work from home. My wife works from home. My wife is a superwoman and does most of the childcare. I kind of take over at 5 o’clock at night and put her to bed after that – dinner, bed, all that routine. But yeah, I mean, when you both work from home, you can’t set up so many structured activities. And so, I feel like she’s going to get a lot more nourishment intellectually being in that class setting.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That just brought up a couple of things. But first off is you have some really well-known brands that you’ve created, Jump Rope Dudes, the predecessor of which was Zen Dude Fitness, but your real passion to me seems like based on your– not that Jump Rope isn’t a passion of yours, but what I think really drives you based on my interactions with you, based on what I’ve seen on your social media, based on the various ventures that you’ve created is mental fitness and some other. It’s not just mental fitness. And when I say mental fitness, at least my assumption there is that it’s just something that isn’t physical, it’s all of the other aspects, so.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, it’s umbrella for a lot.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, I’d love for you to walk me through as someone who doesn’t have the same knowledge that you do and the same exposure to mental fitness. Can you just talk me through what are some aspects of mental fitness? Like, what does it include? What is that? What goes under that umbrella?

Brandon Epstein: Definitely, man. So, really, the mind, body, spirit, I kind of wrap it all up together within itself. And mental fitness is just a way for me to give people a way to train the mind. And that, of course, seeps into the spirit, it’s all kind of interconnecting, and the body. And so, really, it’s very simple. I’m helping people get better at controlling their focus and their choices because I kind of view, I’ve kind of broken down the conscious waking experience of life to be.

There is this emanating power that’s moving through all of us. We don’t really know what it is. Some people call it God. Some people call it the universe. Some people call it fate. But we all know that there’s something driving this whole thing, and it just keeps going and going and going.

And so, what I’ve learned throughout my life and through the help of my sensei as well, is that as this energy emanates through us, there are only two things we can possibly control, which is our focus, which is in the present moment, you can’t do it in the past, you can’t do in the future, you can only control your focus in the present. And it’s where is your focus projected? So, are you focusing on what you want? Are you focusing on what you don’t want? And then there is that conscious focus. And then we can also work on the subconscious focus, which is everything happening basically beneath the surface at the subconscious level.

But before I dive into that, I’ll just share the second thing, which is your choices, which vary. I think people understand that pretty well. Like, what are you eating? What are you consuming? How are you? What are you doing every day? And so, we basically take emanating energy that moves through us, and through our focus and our choices, that’s how we create the lives that we live.

If you do yoga every day, if you make that choice, then you end up more flexible, you have better balance, coordination, strength. If you don’t make those choices, you don’t create those results. And same thing goes, mental fitness gives us this umbrella to look at, really honing in even more on focus to say, okay, well, if I’m constantly focused on what I don’t want, it makes sense. I’m going to be living an experience that I don’t really want because we create our conscious waking reality. We’re just projecting into the future through the present moment what we want through our focus.

Because whenever you say, if you have a car and if you drive a Toyota Corolla, you notice that all the Toyota Corolla is on the road. You’re like, oh, you have the same cars. And that’s just your focus. Like we’re heat-seeking missiles to find the things that align with what our current present focus is.

Dean Pohlman: Got it. Now, I’m thinking like, so what’s the best way to practice? Focus. I mean, immediately, I’m thinking of a meditation, but you say meditation, and people are like, oh, sitting and not thinking like, oh, gosh. So, what are some ways that you in your programs, in your coaching, you help people train their focus?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. So, everything starts with awareness. And so, an exercise that I give people in my training is to always start by just starting to become aware of your focus and where it’s being directed in any given moment. And so, way you can start to uncover that is you can set an alarm in your phone to go off every 3 hours, and the alarm can just ask you, how are you feeling? And what were you focusing on before you started feeling that way?

And so, from there, you’re starting to bring awareness. Oh, well, I’m feeling anxious, or what are you focused on? Well, I was scrolling through the news on my phone. Okay. So, maybe we see how when you put your focus into that, it creates those feelings, and that’s going to start to continue to perpetuate the reality you’re living.

Dean Pohlman: So, you’re starting to track and basically create data on yourself so you can look back and say, oh, I’m anxious 65% of the day or 65% of these checks. And during these times, I’m doing activity one or activity two.

Brandon Epstein: Exactly. And you can even see how your mind did. It might be an activity or it might just be a pattern in your mind. So, you might just notice, oh, I’m feeling regret. Why am I feeling regret? Well, because I’m thinking about how I should have done all these things in the past, and I wish I made better decisions.

And so, you just notice, oh, I’m creating feelings of regret by continuing to live this cycle of things that I wish I could have done better in the past. So, it’s like activities. It’s just patterns in our mind. And yet, that first elementary foundation for everything is just awareness, is just to watch and view and become aware of how we create our own reality because a lot of people believe that it’s the events outside of themselves that make them feel good or bad. And once you start to do this exercise, you start to see how your own thoughts, the things that you’re personally doing actually have the most effect over how you feel.

Dean Pohlman: Got it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, the next question that I have kind of leading off of that is, okay, so the first step is let’s spend– and is there a typical amount of time that you recommend people do this for? Like do you say, hey, for a week, I want you to do this or a month? Or what it is?

Brandon Epstein: A week or two.

Dean Pohlman: Okay.

Brandon Epstein: Depending on how well they can stick with it, how dedicated they are to the practice. If you do it every day, five or six times a day, you can probably get it done in a week. If you’re being inconsistent, maybe stretch out to a couple of weeks.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And then so, what’s the next step? So, what’s the next step after that?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. So, the next step after that, once you start to bring the salt to the surface, you actually start to set the alarms again for another week, but this time, you start to just rewire your brain to start to participate in different habits and like, I’ll get into it. So, yeah, keep leading me down this path thing because there is like step, step, step. We can keep going with this. And this is basically step 2 with your focus, you’ll notice. Okay, so I’m actually just in this pattern, and we know the subconscious learns through repetition. And that’s why habits. It takes 60 days or whatever. You have to have repetitions to build habits.

And so, the same thing goes for our focus and what we think about, like we’re funny creatures as humans. Like we have mostly the same thoughts every single day. So, once after that awareness, you set the alarms again, and then you just observe. When you’re focusing on what you want, you’re going to feel good. So, that alarm goes off. Oh, I’m feeling grateful. What was I focusing on? How grateful I am to be a father. Cool. There’s nothing to change. Like, that’s a good habit to be in and to have that repetition continue.

But maybe alarm goes off again, and you notice, oh, I’m focusing on, I’m worried I don’t have enough money. Oh, that makes me feel bad. I’m feeling anxious. Okay, well, we use the opportunity to literally just swap our focus, and we’d be like, what would be the opposite of this? Well, the opposite would be, I am working diligently to make more money, essentially. Like what could we have control over?

So, every time we’re just splitting, we’re almost like just swapping it, it’s the opposite. And so, by doing that consistently, your mind, it starts to go from a conscious process to an unconscious process. In the same way that your mind used to look for things that are going to make you anxious or feel bad, it will start to just automatically swoop, just flip it itself.

That’s what you do for next week is you go from awareness to focusing on what you want because sure, people can resonate with this. When you focus on what you want, that’s what you get. When you focus on what you don’t want, it’s also what you get because when you’re focused on what you want, you’re going to make choices that align with what you want. When your head is in the shift and you’re focusing on what you don’t want, you’re only really going to see the things that you don’t want. So, that’s level 2.

Dean Pohlman: How true has that level of attraction proved in your experience?

Brandon Epstein: Very true, yeah. But we’re still at the conscious level here. So, you want to continue to walk this path. And so, really what we’re doing those first two levels, number one, it’s awareness. Number two, we’re kind of training your mind to get used to swapping these and being able to actually notice and make the connection between feeling good or bad and what your focus is, and then actually kind of training your mind that when you focus on what you want, you can feel good.

So, level 3 is just getting clarity on the major buckets of your life and what you want. So, you’re like, “Well, alright, why am I doing this?” Well, because I want to be more fit, or I want to have more money, or I want a better relationship, or whatever it is. Insert the bucket of your life that you care about. So, then you get clarity, like, I would like these outcomes, and then we sit into those outcomes and we allow ourselves, and this is where I would say like the more spiritual work comes in because spiritual call or energetic, call it whatever you want, call it subconscious work, but essentially we’re transcending that conscious barrier into the subconscious because a conscious mind only processes about 40 bits of information per second. The subconscious can process over 40 million bits of information per second.

So, the conscious mind, when people are just rationally trying to think things through, they think that they’re doing so much, but really, everything’s happening beneath the surface. We’re living through a very divisive time around COVID right now. So, if you tell someone a piece of information that is directly opposing their beliefs around like a vaccine, for example, and what one side or the other, it doesn’t matter.

As long as the information doesn’t align with their beliefs, they will delete, distort, or generalize the information so it lines up with their beliefs. So, that’s why once we have clarity over what we want, we have to go right into our beliefs which all live in the subconscious level. So, I recommend people kind of go into a meditative state, and they think about outcome. Okay, outcome, I would like to lose 10 pounds. Alright, I’m going to just meditate on this and feel in to the resistance that comes up.

And by resistance, it’s kind of like an ah, like an itching feeling in the body or an uncomfortable feeling that comes up. And if you can find them in the body, then you can go into that. And of course, there’s a process to this. You can go into it and you can uncover, okay, what am I believing to be true. Ah, I believe I don’t have enough time to work out. Ooh, okay. As long as you believe you don’t have enough time to work out, you’re not going to make time to work out because, again, your beliefs will delete, distort, or generalize any information and make it true.

The subconscious is programmed to keep you alive, not necessarily to make you thrive. It wants you to survive and wants you to stay stable and wants you to be in that state of homeostasis. It doesn’t want you to change because you have to uncover that and you have to be okay. And then you go one by one, alright, well, what else is uncomfortable? I believe that eating healthy is boring. Ooh, okay. Well, as long as you believe that eating healthy is boring, you’re probably not going to follow through with being more intentional by nutrition.

So, one by one, we go, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. We go through all these beliefs that come up that would create resistance against the outcome you want, and then we transmute them. We literally just flip them. So, if you believe you don’t have enough time to work out, the opposite would be, I believe I have more than enough time to work out because our subconscious is desperately trying to be in congruence with our beliefs so it will find time for you to work out.

And so, once you get all the beliefs basically transmute each one and you know what you want to have, you do the same and basically process to put that and set that into your subconscious that you would use when you’re a child. So, right now, we’re talking, and mostly, we’re unconscious, our beta brainwaves. And so, when you are a child, you’re actually in hypnosis, like I said before, from 0 to 7, because your brainwaves from 0 to 3 are in delta brainwaves, which is the slowest state of brainwaves, and of course, they do waver. But just to make this conversation more simple, let’s say delta, then as they go from 3 to 5, it’s more theta brainwaves, and then more from 5 to 7, it’s alpha brainwaves.

And so, all these brainwaves are just slowed down. They’re more meditative states, but they’re connected to the subconscious. And so, what you can do is as adults, even though we’re no longer naturally in these states, if you are just waking up in the morning because when you’re sleeping, you go into alpha-theta. So, when you’re just waking up or when you’re just falling asleep, if you can incept these beliefs into your mind, it will start to rewrite the code.

But there is that process to it. A lot of people, they try affirmations to help themselves create a reality. I’m not saying affirmations can’t be positive, but what they’re missing is they didn’t go through the process of actually uncovering the resistance, fully accepting it, fully accepting, because most people don’t want to accept their limiting beliefs because it’s uncomfortable and it makes you feel bad about yourself for a moment because you’re basically facing your demons. You shine the flashlight on where you suck.

And then, so you have to go through acceptance, you have to go through full surrender, and then you have the opportunity to transmute the belief. And so, all of that, it goes well beyond in affirmation. And then you have to incept it into the subconscious mind, which basically you can take this belief, you can record them on audio. And what I do for my clients is I’ll put some alpha brainwave audio music behind it, and they listen to it when they first wake up and when they go to sleep at night and then as much as they want on top of that because their subconscious learns through repetition. So, if you’re going to do more meditations, you can listen to it then.

And over time, those beliefs make it through the four stages of learning. So, you go from unconscious incompetence to not knowing why you can’t lose that 10 pounds, just being clueless. He’s like, “Why can’t I stick with these habits to conscious incompetence to where you actually identify the limiting beliefs that are holding you back from losing that 10 pounds to conscious competence to now knowing the beliefs that need to change and using that repetition to change them? And the fourth and final stage is unconscious competence, where now your subconscious has fully ingrained this new belief where you don’t have to go back and do anything again because like the old beliefs, now they’re just ingrained so you just live your life.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Okay, so that’s a really good recap. So, I start by becoming aware of them. From there, I accept them. So, I say, I really do have crappy eating habits and then I flip it and then I inject or incept those new or those revised beliefs, those things that I’m trying to make part of my identity around times when I’m sleeping. So, the wake time or when I’m waking up or where I’m going to sleep, those are when I’m most in contact with my subconscious. So, I have a couple of questions that came up, so.

Brandon Epstein: I will add a note just to make sure that people fully get it because there are a few steps that I kind of missed in there, which is you said people are just becoming aware of what they’re doing. Backseat, they’re becoming aware of the belief that is holding them back from doing what they want to do. So, I think about beliefs like pieces of code for the supercomputer of our mind. So, it’s like you’re seeing that kind of broken piece of code and you accept that, and then you surrender it because there’s a great Zen proverb quote, which is what you…

Dean Pohlman: What do you mean surrender it?

Brandon Epstein: So, by surrendering, it’s just letting go into the past. And so, this is where the spiritual, energetic practice comes in because.

Dean Pohlman: And that’s the next question. Spiritual. What does spiritual mean? Because spiritual for me meant I had a lot of church connotations.

Brandon Epstein: No, it has nothing to do with religion or dogma. When I say spiritual, I say connected to the oneness. So, I feel like I’m living in this energy field and I’m a part of it. So, like I said, there’s all this energy moving through me, the energy of life, and then I’m projecting it out through my focus and choices. And that’s how I struck my reality. Like, oh, if we go down the rabbit hole of like, that’s a big thing, not to take us down another tangent, but religion has in many ways made spirituality really perverse by injecting all this guilt into it and fear and shame. And that’s the opposite of what acceptance is.

Because usually, religion teaches you, like, you shouldn’t be like that. And what I’m saying is, like, you should fully accept how f*cked up you are. Full acceptance. Full acceptance, which is– and that’s why I say spiritual practice of like, it’s hard to constantly explain it. It’s easier to walk someone through the exercise, but breathing helps it, or being able to breathe in through your nose, exhale.

Actually, you would understand this perfectly is if you’re doing a yoga pose and there’s a lot of tension, when you breathe through it, you let it go. That’s surrender. So, you go through acceptance. I accept that there is tension in the muscle and I’m going to breathe through it and you surrender it. It’s the exact same thing that you’re doing to your physical body that you’re doing with this belief.

Dean Pohlman: And that’s a practice. That’s something that we have to obviously practice repeatedly to develop that skill, okay.

Brandon Epstein: Just like yoga, just like everything. The rules of life, they apply everywhere.

Dean Pohlman: Got it, yeah. I mean, I love that. I mean, learning enough about one thing will teach you about everything.

Brandon Epstein: 100%.

Dean Pohlman: So, the other thing that came up was the meditative state. How can I get myself into a meditative state?

Brandon Epstein: My wish for everyone is they start to see meditation as a constant state of being instead of something that you just do. Now, with that being said, there is a path to get there because it’s a skill to be there. Because when I think of meditation, I’m really just thinking of awareness and I’m thinking of my ability to shift my awareness.

So, meditating for me at its foundation is just becoming aware. So, the most basic version, like you mentioned earlier, would be like, don’t think about anything. Okay, so I’m just going to be aware of the thoughts arising or the sensations in my body. I’m just aware, oh, my knee hurts. I’m hungry. I can’t believe that person cut me off in traffic. You’re just being aware of what’s going on. And then as you build that skill, you can be able to shift that awareness. You can start to apply these skills that we’re talking about of, what are those I believe in to be true that would trigger me so much around that person cutting me off in traffic that I’m still thinking about now? And then we can start to do that deeper work.

So, meditation, for me, is just an awakening of awareness. And so, you can do that through practice. Obviously, I teach a lot of guided meditation and I’m walking people through different exercises to get there. I’m very practical, though, like not many of my meditations are just like, breathe into your nose, breathe back out. And that sounds good because it gets you out of your fight or flight and into your parasympathetic relaxed state.

But I like to also be like, I want to give people an outcome on the other side of it as well. And so, I usually go into my meditations with an intention, and that intention can vary widely. But over the years, I’ve continued to practice meditation. I’ve been meditating now for about 13 years. It’s become more of a conscious state of meditation than just like a sit-down practice to get into it. Did I answer your question?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, I asked, how can we help get into a meditative state? So, you mentioned guided meditations. And I think getting into a meditative state is difficult because we live very distracting lives. So, what are some other things that people can do to put themselves into an environment that is conducive to a meditative state?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. Cold plunge.

Dean Pohlman: Okay.

Brandon Epstein: You ever do that?

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah. I have a chest freezer that I got on Craigslist that I put in my backyard. And yeah, it’s there.

Brandon Epstein: Amazing.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah.

Brandon Epstein: Well, I like the cold because it forces you into the present moment. It takes all of your awareness and forces it into your present state of awareness, which is, oh, sh*t, this is really cold. So, that can be really good because it forces you right there. Breathwork, which is becoming a lot more popular recently, that holotropic-type breathing can be good. But also, you can just go to your phone, you can pull out Spotify, you can type in deep meditation music, you can put some headphones on, and you could just sit by yourself and just listen to that and just see what comes up and just observe your thoughts. So, there are so many different containers you can create for it. I think it’s kind of like what’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? Just find what you like.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, so you were a college athlete. You played football in college. I played lacrosse in college. And as athletes, we understand the flow state because we understand being in a game and completely being immersed in it, completely being present in it. And so, for me, I don’t know how much benefit I actually get to being fully immersed other than the immediate benefits of just feeling great. I don’t know how much that translates into my ability to focus during a cold plunge or while I’m dodging and taking a shot to win the game versus sitting on my porch and just trying to focus on being objective of my thinking. It’s very easy to be focused and present in the former. It’s a lot more difficult to be present in the latter. So, I don’t know. Can you speak to that at all?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, absolutely. I was doing boxing last five years, too. And that’s another activity where you can’t be anywhere but present. It’s kind of meditation itself. So, I also recommend that people just find activities that force them into the present moment because, like you talked about flow, well, we know the science of flow is that the more flow you experience, the more flow bleeds into all of your life. So, the more you’re able to get into a flow state, let’s say on the field playing a sport, the more you’re going to be able to translate that into just a conversation or something to do with work because you’re just having more presence and you’re able to just drop in with more ease because, like we talked about before, like everything, it’s all the same, same, same, same.

And so, it’s that repetition of like the more you can experience active flow, the more you can get into them. And so, finding practices that do that for you, like now I do mountain biking because I can’t be anywhere about present or I’m going to fall. So, like boom, boom, puts you right into that present moment. So, finding activities that do that for you, whether it’s a cold plunge or playing a sport or something that forces you into the present.

And then, in addition, if you want to kind of expand on that and you want to go deeper with your practice, and yeah, you can just sit and you can allow yourself just to be and you can just see what comes up, and that’s a little bit different. It’s not as much of a flow state. I would say that’s more of that deep inner work of uncovering resistance because when I talk about all this work, I’m really just talking about doing healing work on yourself.

How can we pull out the resistance that’s holding you back from just feeling good and peaceful all the time as much as possible? Like there’s always going to be negative emotions, pain, suffering that comes up in life, but it’s like how fast can you transition from, like, alright, I’m suffering to, okay, I’m peaceful again? We’re just trying to shorten that cycle and we shorten that cycle and we make that cycle less frequent when we uncover different beliefs that are making us feel bad for no reason.

And so, I’m sure a lot of guys will resonate with this one. Like when I started doing this work, really digging into what I call and my sensei call this the inner planet, I started out uncovering all these beliefs that would just make me feel bad irrationally, like I didn’t need to hold on to them. And one of those might be like, I remember, I got a Latin wife, so in the past, she used to always kind of complain about random things like, oh, my stomach hurts or whatever, or I can’t believe– very fiery and expressive. And I believed at the time, I was responsible in some way for making her feel good.

Dean Pohlman: I feel that.

Brandon Epstein: So, you can imagine every time she would feel bad, I would feel bad.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, exactly.

Brandon Epstein: So, I’m creating my own suffering.

Dean Pohlman: I’m complaining, you’re making me feel bad. I’m a terrible husband because you have a stomachache.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Totally rational.

Brandon Epstein: And so, that’s rational, right? So, we don’t want that. That’s not necessary. And so, that is healing work. Those identify that. And to transmute it and be like, okay, I accept that I’ve been living with this and I’m creating my own hell and then I’m going to surrender that. Right now, in the present, I can create a new reality. In the past, that was true but doesn’t need to be true now. So, I transmute that to I believe my wife is responsible for making yourself feel good. Ah, I’m free.

And so, now, she stubs her toe or whatever, it’s kind of funny because she’s like, “Ah.” And I’m like, it’s not I don’t have empathy, but I’m not suffering along with her. So, this healing work is just getting more and more aware of how we make ourselves suffer irrationally, and then being able to transmute that to have less suffering and more peace in the present.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, so that brought up two questions. I hope I remember the second. The first one is, I know a lot of people who just get frustrated with trying to get into this meditative state, so what would you tell people who are getting frustrated as they try to enter a more thoughtful state to just reassure them?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. Well, I think first, starting with what is the outcome they’re looking for when they’re going into it. Like what’s the carrot that’s dangling that they’re going to get once they get in there? Am I doing it because I want less stress? Am I doing it because I want more clarity about a topic? I think so much of it is making it purposeful. It’s very black and white. It’s like, why am I going to do a yoga class? If people didn’t have a clarity around like, oh, because I want X, Y, and Z outcome from it, they may not do it unless they’ve already built a habit.

If you build a habit, then it’s just kind of like an automation, but for these people who are just starting to meditate and it’s not on automation, they need to know that there’s something they’re going to go in and get from this practice. And that getting could be just presence. It could be a number of things, but I think those people need to get more clarity around why they want to meditate because, like the morning routine thing, there’s a big wave, like when I was living in Austin around the whole morning routine of like you have to do all these things and people feel guilty if they didn’t do all this journal and drink my tea and affirmations and gratitude. And it’s like, well, is it about that routine? Or is that about what you want, the outcome of it?

And so, some people are meditating. It sounds like the people who you’re talking about are meditating is like because it’s good for me. This is something I’m supposed to do. It’s like, well, you’re making it sound like work. Like, what do you actually want from it? What outcome do you want from this? Just going through with more attention.

Dean Pohlman: So, that’s the struggle that I’m talking about is like for people who are trying to meditate and they’re– let’s say, but they’re reminding themselves, I’m doing this because of this purpose, because this is the purpose. This is what I want to get out of it. But they’re stuck on focusing on the purpose, like I’m doing it because I’m doing it for this purpose, but they can’t actually do the activity. There’s so much focus on what they’re going to get out of it that they can’t focus on doing the activity itself. Does that make sense, like understanding the intrinsics of it?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. And I would say, in that case, it’s building also this skill of surrender, of letting go. And the same thing that we do in like a yoga practice where your hips are super tight and you just have to sit into it. You have to continue to sit into it deeper, deeper, breathe through it. It’s the same thing when it comes to your meditation practice because if your mind is like, I need to get this, I need to get this, you’re still in that state of resistance, you just need to allow yourself to receive which means you have to just keep breathing, keep allowing yourself to surrender to the experience.

And it’s a skill, like in the beginning, it is going to be uncomfortable. It’s not going to be like anything. If someone does a yoga class for the first time, it’s going to be awkward as hell. They’re not even going to be able to do a quarter of the pose as many people. And so, you have to view meditation and these practices in the same way of like, I’m going to suck at this at first, and that’s okay.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Having that humility. I got two really good questions here, I think. So, taking a belief and realizing that it is, like, as you mentioned, uncovering irrational beliefs. I can uncover irrational beliefs all day. Because I have the problem, I know that millions of other people have the problem, I’m not special. So, my problem is merging my emotional being with the logical side of me that says this is irrational, we should change it, but emotional me is like can’t get behind it. And for that reason, I think that’s what’s holding me back from implementing that logical understanding is that I can’t access the emotional side of me to get that motivation and that drive behind it. Can you speak to that struggle at all?

Brandon Epstein: For sure. And for me, I think about that as this compartmentalization of the rational mind, that conscious mind that only processes 6 to 40 bits of information per second versus the subconscious, which is really what controls everything, over 40 million bits of information processing power. And so, that is the work is to be able to go into that supercomputer, the subconscious feeling into that emotion, going all the way through it.

And so, to get there, what I recommend doing, of course, with your eyes closed is something that you rationally go, “You know what? I need to change his belief because it keeps on messing me up.” Well, can you find where it actually, physically lives in your body? And this might sound like a funny thing for some people, and it may seem impossible at first when you’re getting started. But again, it’s just building this mind-body awareness of, you know what? Actually, I feel it in my stomach. I feel in the pit of my stomach.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, that’s good.

Brandon Epstein: I feel this anxiety. And if you can find them in your body and you go into it and you hold that uncomfortable position there and you’re sitting in it in the same way like a yoga because you’re sitting into it, you’re breathing into it, and you go deeper and deeper into it, that resistance will start to fade away over time, and you get to a state of acceptance where you can surrender it finally, and then you’ll be able to choose a new belief.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, that’s awesome. And something that I think most people are coming around to now is the understanding that we do have emotions in our body. I mean, there’s plenty of stories of massage therapists or people who do bodywork, who uncover a trapped emotion or they uncover some sort of trauma while they’re just like working on someone’s shoulder, and then they just start crying uncontrollably because there’s emotion, there’s trauma there.

So, I think The Body Keeps the Score is a really cool book on this. And then also, we had Aaron Alexander from the Align Podcast on the show. He does a really good talking about that too, but obviously, branding can probably speak to this very well, as well. So, you should definitely check him out, but…

Brandon Epstein: It’s like, can we get out of our head? That’s the biggest thing. It’s like, can we get out of here and can we go into the body because that’s where all the solutions are?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Okay, so one more big question I have for you, and then I want to ask you some other questions that I ask a lot of other people. So, it seems to me that you’re very relaxed. So, I don’t know if you’re watching a video right now, but Brandon has not seemed stressed at all, whereas I’m like, I have to remind myself every 30 seconds, take a breath, relax, it’s okay. You’re going to make it.

And I get the sense that you just do a lot of spending time in this meditative state to create additional clarity. Can you talk to me about the importance of creating clarity in your vision, in your goals, in your life? And how much time do you spend doing that? Or what does that look like? And maybe, I’m wrong. Maybe you don’t do that as much as I think you do, but…

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, I would say that my calm comes more from the 20 pages of beliefs I’ve transmuted, which just like triggers. It’s like all this stuff loses its subconscious level. It’s pretty hard to push my buttons and to get me fired up over something because I’ve just done all of those things I talked about, like with my wife, like uncovering that belief, or so many other ones I’ve had over the years.

And so, my state, like, I think our natural state, and you probably see this with your child, it’s like as a child, our natural state is actually calm and peace and joy. And we may have emotional experience where we get super angry or super sad, but then, babies are able to cycle through it and they’re just back to smiling again a few minutes later. And so, I think that is our natural state. I think I’ve just done a lot of the work of auditing all of the internal resistance and turning it over and transmuting it so it becomes more of a natural state. And I can live more in that constant state of meditation, and then to speak…

Dean Pohlman: Do you just keep a journal? Did you just keep a journal and you started writing these down and keeping a log of these triggers, these irrational beliefs? What else?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, just the subconscious limiting beliefs that I had, and then one by one, I would transmute them and I would put them into the audios I talked about. And in the beginning, I would listen to them so I could transmute them. And now, I think just like any skill, you get really good at it. Now, I can just process it almost like that, so I can just uncover it, breathe through it, accept it, surrender it, boom. It will take me in, in a matter of seconds. But in the beginning, I had to listen to the audios for weeks for things to change, or even like months, some of them.

Dean Pohlman: Wow.

Brandon Epstein: And so, over time, I’ve just done more and more of that work. So, it’s like there’s just not as much tension. There are not buttons to push. There are not triggers, none of any triggers. But of course, there always are. Like, I could check my notes and I’ll uncover like one. And some of them, they don’t even necessarily make me feel bad, but I just might choose a different belief because I don’t think it necessarily will serve me in the future. I’ll be like, maybe I don’t want that.

And so, now, I’m like playing the game because I really believe that my beliefs create my reality. So, I’m constantly trying to audit and look at my abilities and make sure they’re projecting into the future that I want, the future experience that I want. And so, to speak to like the clarity of my vision, it’s more now that like, yeah, I know the different experiences that I want to have in life and I don’t set as many goals. Instead, I’m more like, just what are the things I want to do?

Like my goals are more the things I want to do. Like I want to mountain bike every week and I want to work with clients and I want to record meditations and I want to be on podcasts. It’s less, like pure vision outcome-based, that was a stage for me, and now, it’s more activity-based. I know the things that I want to do consistently. They’re going to make me feel good.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, things for the intrinsic benefit of the activities themselves rather than when you get out of it. And I’m assuming this is what you help people with their coaching. I’m hoping all this stuff is what?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, this is it, man. You mentioned I have the fitness company, Jump Rope Dudes. I don’t do any coaching with fitness stuff anymore. I mean, some of my clients, like I’ll just use my knowledge to support the, but that’s all like kind of my online teaching workout fitness stuff and the one on coaching work is all of this stuff.

Dean Pohlman: Gotcha. That’s awesome. This is cool. I’m glad we walked through what you do in a way that I feel like someone can listen to this and start working on this. And if this inspires them and they want to get more guidance on it, they want to go deeper into it, they know where to find you. They know Brandon Epstein, The Owned Industries. Man, I got so many questions I want to ask you, but can you just really quickly kind of walk me through The Owned Industries? And what the goal is with that?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, bro.

Dean Pohlman: I watched the industry video, but…

Brandon Epstein: Nice. Yeah, dude, I’ve been trying to make this mental fitness meditation stuff sexy for 13 years.

Dean Pohlman: I wrote that down, make mental fitness sexy.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, it’s been difficult, man. And so, The Owned Industries is just my latest iteration of trying to just make it sexy and tangible for people because I think most people, they have no interest in working on their mental health. Like, that’s boring as hell.

Dean Pohlman: That’s not going to make my pecs look good.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, that’s not going to get me more girls. That’s not going to get me more money. Except the truth is, it gets you more of everything that you want. But for most people, they just view it as like, ah, I don’t need to do that because I want this. Like, they don’t make the connection.

So, The Owned Industries is an umbrella for teaching this information that hopefully will resonate with people in a more modern and connected way just because, like the last iteration, I was trying to do mental fitness training. And I do have a mental fitness training course, and it’s all the same material, but it just didn’t feel sticky to me, so I’m still trying to figure that out.

Dean Pohlman: Got it. Okay. Is that mental training course still live? Is that something?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. They can go to a MentalFitnessTraining.co and they’ll see it on there.

Dean Pohlman: Okay. Awesome.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. And I got a meditation app as well that has that training on it too.

Dean Pohlman: Very cool. I’m going to check that out. Alright. So, I’ve got a few rapid-fire questions. Rapid fire, as rapid fire as can be. So, I’d love to hear one habit, a belief, or mindset that has helped you the most or helped you significantly in terms of your overall happiness.

Brandon Epstein: I believe everything is happening in my best interest.

Dean Pohlman: Okay. That’s a great mindset to have.

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. It’s a belief. It’s a mindset. It’s a life philosophy. Like I talked to my uncle yesterday who was recently diagnosed with cancer, and that’s just like the perspective I bring to him because what other perspective would you want to have? Even the most terrible things that happen to you have to adopt that mindset. In my opinion, everything is happening from my best interest. Otherwise, the opposite would be the world is out to get me. And I wouldn’t want to live in that personally.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That would be a tough space to live in. What’s one thing you do for your health that you think is overlooked or undervalued by other people?

Brandon Epstein: This belief work, man, this is the core foundation for everything. Like I’ve become such a resilient person by being able to align my beliefs to the outcomes that I want. So, yeah, doing this belief work is by far the most powerful thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I’ll be honest, it seems really inspiring to me. I hope this sticks with me enough that I want to keep doing it or that I want to do it, that I want to stick with it, and not just think, hey, that’s a really cool thing, and then not follow through with it. But I hope that this– because it just makes sense to me. It just makes sense to me that working on the core of who you are, your beliefs, the story that you tell yourself can help with everything. So, I mean…

Brandon Epstein: That’s why I stack beliefs before habits whenever I’m trying to help people make behavior change because if you don’t believe it’s possible, you’re not going to do it. I’m sure you’ve had clients you’ve worked with, you’re like, why didn’t you do it? And they’re like, I don’t know, I just whatever, insert excuse, but it’s not about this.

Dean Pohlman: I didn’t have the discipline. I didn’t have the motivation. Well, that’s not what it’s about, but…

Brandon Epstein: Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: What’s the most stressful part of your day-to-day life? Because I’ve talked to you and I have this assumption that you’re just like these– every interaction that I’ve always had with you, you’re like, you’re just here. You’re like, man, life is just great. I love life. I’m like, Brandon, you’re just making everyone feel bad about how good you feel. Tell me something real. What’s a stressful part of your life?

Brandon Epstein: Oh, yeah, dude. Dude, I’m so involved heavily right now. Hopefully, not for too long in operations with my Jump Rope Dudes business where I’m just using my rational mind to solve problems and I really don’t feel like it’s a good use of my unique gifts. And that can make me feel stressed sometimes for sure because I’m like, ah, I can do this, but it’s not using my unique gifts, which creates some stress in my body because it’s like going against my nature. And I got more bro. I mean, I moved into a house. I am really poor at doing mechanical things in my hands. So, I’m constantly having things that I have to fix or try to figure out that I don’t know how to do. So, you know life stuff, man.

Dean Pohlman: I didn’t have a power drill until I moved in here to a house. And Marisa is like, “You can’t do that.” “You know I can’t do that. I’ll call.” Or like, I put a porch in like a year or two years ago, right before Declan was born. And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I put a porch in there.” Like, “Oh, you built a porch?” Like, “No, I didn’t build a porch. I called someone to build a porch. I didn’t build a porch myself.”

Brandon Epstein: Yeah, exactly. I’m the same way, so.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, outsource. Definitely outsource. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing men in their well-being right now?

Brandon Epstein: I would say being disconnected from their body, across the board, physically, mentally, emotionally.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Alright, man, that was awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I think I got a lot of that. I think that other people will get a ton of that. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you, about what you’re doing, stay connected with you?

Brandon Epstein: Yeah. I do a free newsletter every week at TheOwned.Industries, and like this stuff I talked about in this podcast here, like I just try to infuse that newsletter every week with free tools and information to kind of continue to drive this home and all coming back to owning your focus on your choices so you can own your life. So, that’s a great way to just kind of enter my world.

Dean Pohlman: That course that you mentioned, does that kind of walk you through? Does that walk the user through kind of that process that we talked about?

Brandon Epstein: It does, yeah. It’s available in a couple of places. If they go to MentalFitnessTraining.co, they’ll find the course there. Also, in the App Store for Android or iOS, I also have an app out that has an audio version of it, and that’s called BE: Mental Fitness Training.

Dean Pohlman: Sweet. Alright, guys, you heard it. Thank you so much for joining me today. Again, Brandon, it sounds like you’re doing a lot of amazing things. I know that I’ve come away from this conversation with a lot of tools and a lot of inspiration. So, thank you for that.

Brandon Epstein: Thank you for having me. And it’s been such a pleasure, and I’m so grateful to spend this time with you.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Alright, guys, I hope you enjoyed that. And I’ll see you on the next video or the next episode.

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