Welcome, my name is Dr Warrick Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, an author and a keynote speaker. I'm CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand blood pressure, weight, cholesterol for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and welcome to my podcast and videocastation. Today, I'm delighted to share an interview with Alistair. horsecroft who's ceo of the mind academy and known colloquially as the street philosopher welcome al how are you yeah i'm good Warrick thanks so much for having me on appreciate it Look, it's a pleasure. Before we jump in, I'm going to do a little bit of self-promotion. For those listening, I'm delighted to be able to let you know that my podcast is dropping in and out of the top 100 medical podcasts in Australia. And that's because you guys are listening. And I really, really appreciate that. If you take a moment to subscribe to your local podcast station and leave a review, that'd be so appreciated because I really want to get this podcast out there, the feedback. Feedback I get is really positive. Back to today, Al, the reason I'm keen to speak with you is as we talked about prior to organising this podcast, you can't separate the mind and the body. And I know I look after people's physical components, their moving parts, but you really look after their soul. How did you get into that industry? Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And there's a lovely discussion to be had about something as basic as the mind brain distinction, you know, so look forward to talking about that in a moment. Yeah, I've had an interesting journey, Warrick. I was, my parents were very, I suppose, spiritually progressive, as you might say, you know, my father was a pilot in the military, my mum was a nurse. And by the time they hit their 30s, you know, life was coming apart from them. They had, you know, like many people, psychological difficulties, problems, so on and so forth. So they went searching for answers, you know, their existential crisis, as it were. And so they were early adopters of a lot of the Eastern traditions. You know, they were meditating and doing yoga and following people like Krishnamurti and Sai Baba and the whole kind of, you know, troop of Indian gurus, you know. So by the time I was four, they had me kind of meditating and, you know. kind of immersed, I suppose, in that Eastern mysticism world that I was kind of like neither here nor there about. I was a pretty active kid. I just wanted to BMX and, you know, muck about, you know, but they kept on putting this stuff toward me. And then when I was nine, they really went crazy and they spent a lot of time in India and I was kind of outsourced to a, I mean, to be honest, I would say now it was a cult, but it was a school still famous to this day called St. James in London. And St. James was a very interesting school. So I'd gone to like public schools, you know, up until then. And this was kind of like a private school, but it was a kind of wild school, Warrick. You know, we were taught to meditate. We were taught Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Latin. We did a lot of Vedic philosophy and non-duality. And they combine that very interestingly with Christianity and hardcore military discipline. So it was a wild time. You know, you kind of get to school at 7 a.m. You'd have to circuit train till you were nearly sick. Then you meditated. Then you went to your assembly where you did half chanting Sanskrit, which I can still chant to this day. And in half, you know, Bible studies and hymns, you know, just kind of wild and wacky. And you kind of do all this kind of spiritual work. But I was a big kind of fan of the army cadets. So you are doing army cadets, you know, alongside Vedic philosophy. How's that for a wild start? So that, I mean, that is incredibly, it sounds like field. So it makes me wonder what was the demographic of the parents sending children there? Were they all seeking something different or were they, did they tend to be an aristocracy? Did they tend to be white collar, blue collar? What was the, because that's an eclectic story you're describing. It's pretty wild. It was a wild mix. So there was a school and actually Aldous Huxley was a part of the original part of that. And it was called the School of Economic Science in London. And a lot of kind of well-known philosophers or spiritual seekers kind of set that up. And to be honest, if I look at it now, like I'm being completely honest, it was a cult. There's no two ways about it. It had a lot of Victorian values. They were following in part the work of a guru called the Sri Shankyashari of the East, I believe, over there. And, you know, it was it was interesting. But to answer your question more directly, the most common surname in the entire school was actually Patel, because obviously an Indian, because a lot of the Indian traditions there. So still to this day, I have a lot of great Indian friends. And but it had people who had money, who were searchers. We were we didn't have a lot of money. So we were more we were working class. So I my parents. I was a good sportsman, so I got a sporting scholarship, you know, so I would say you're right. I said there was a lot of money, but it was a combination, I would say, of money, working class scholarships and a lot of the, you know, Indians because that was their tradition. But I think the problem was, is it was a little bit of a smoke and mirrors scenario in as much as it presented this kind of Renaissance style education, you know, let's create, you know, a new Renaissance style child, you know. But we won a class action against it because of what we had to endure. Because there was a, you know, it was pretty horrific. I mean, for me, not really, because I was a very physical guy who could hold my own. But for the ones who are a little more sensitive, you know, they didn't have a great time. So without dwelling on the school too much, an amazing and I guess a hard to replicate experience. But where did that take you, Alan? What did that open your mind to? What sort of direction did that push you down? and tie that into sort of where you are now and where your efforts are towards helping people? Yeah, it's a great question. There are pros and cons of everything, but I always had a slight kind of street smart brain, you know, and I always looked at things very objectively. And so I saw all of these teachers meditating and eating because our diet was crazy diet. It was basically a hard vegetarian vegan diet kind of between the two, the diet of the Essenes. you have this incredible discipline you know violence a lot of all of this stuff and so um and so i would say psycho spiritual abuse you know i mean because i think people who indoctrinate a child into a spiritual tradition too early i would say that would be spiritual abuse you know um and and so the truth of the matter is by the time i was 16 i'd had enough i was like you know i'm out do you know i mean like this is nuts because my home life was insane as well because there was mental illness in my in my household so i was it was pretty brutal you know and so by the time i was 16 I was drinking incredibly heavily, taking a lot of drugs, you know, kind of like, yeah, I was a misfit, for want of a better way of saying things. A misfit with a very philosophical mind and a very physical capacity. To a degree, Al, it sounds like you were really acting out an oppressive period of your time. I think so. I think so. And I think that I was very lucky. I had a lot of classmates who were amazing. Do you know what I mean? So we supported each other a lot. A lot of other kids didn't have that. And so they really had a hard time and fell through the cracks. And I also think, you know, a lot of people today, you know, they love that. They're very into mindfulness and meditation and the Buddhist traditions and the spiritual traditions. And, you know, I'm very outspoken about my less than enthusiastic support of those things. But that's another discussion at some point in time. It's not that I think that they're bad, but I think that a lot of people go all in and they don't really know what they're going all in into. But, you know, we can talk about that a little bit later. But to answer your question again, more specifically, I did a period of I worked nightclubs, bars, you know, I cleaned toilets. I was a cycle courier. I did anything to get by because we didn't have money. So London was pretty hectic. I was a squatter for many years. You know, the famous squatters, you know, with squatters rights. So I lived. I wouldn't say I was very close to the streets. Had a couple of nights on a few park benches, but most of the time, you know, kind of taken care of. But in spite of that, I kind of enjoyed myself. I mean, I would say I was pretty much pretty drunk and high for many, many years. But I don't regret that time at all. I had an amazing time and met some extraordinary people. And then by the time I was 20, I was like, OK, I better get out of here. And then I went to Australia and I kind of did travel and that kind of stuff. And then that's when I started going, okay, I've got to kind of sort my life out. By the time I was 22, I came back to England, fell through the cracks of society again. And basically got to that point where I think it happens at any person's life, whether it's young or old, where you go, if I keep on going down that route, it's going to end pretty quickly. So I need to do a 180 and really dig in. And so I did a 180, much to my, it's funny, you know, here's a good story for you. We're not a good story, but maybe a good thought process is I remember. Everyone talking about, you know, good old Matthew McConaughey, you know, Matthew McConaughey and him, the famous thing where he's going, he's asked, so who's your hero? And he goes, well, my hero is me in five years time, you know, and he kind of talks about how his hero is him in five years time. And I'm like, I simply don't agree. I think our hero is our younger self who made it through all of the fucked up things. Do you know what I mean? That's what the real hero is. I think if people look back at their life and realize that your younger self was the hero, of course, they're the hero because they're the ones who made it through to get you to where you are today. Yeah. So I don't agree with Matthew McConaughey at all. Our hero is not our future self. Our hero is always our younger self. And so I really do look with great fondness at my younger self. He was a resilient, you know, little bastard who just wouldn't give in. Through that period, you know, I did try and seek out help from psychiatrists and psychologists. I had a lot of mental health issues, significant anxiety, had tryptomania where you pick your skin till you bleed and pull your hair out. I, you know, I white knuckled it a lot and used drugs to help me through. And I'm going to be completely honest with you. I just wasn't particularly impressed with the approach of the psychologists or psychotherapists or psychiatrists. I really felt they were, certainly for someone like me. very unhelpful and actually set me back a little bit and so I realised I had to find a way that would actually work and so that led me into my current career. Okay and look in the interest of time because I'll try and keep this to about 10 or 15 minutes but there's I get the sense that we could talk for a long time which would be lovely but in the interest of time was there a defining moment which sort of gave you a pivot or gave you some insight into? where you are now and just just for those listening obviously you've had um a checkered background but fill us in a little bit more on exactly what your day-to-day is and how you're helping people what in and through what processes i think at the end of the day it does come down a lot to mindset but here's the difference that not a lot of people understand say for example you have an anxiety disorder But you're also feeling slightly out of odds. Your life is feeling meaningless or, you know, you're not really sure about your direction or your purpose in life or whatever it may be. And then, say, for example, you go to a well-meaning therapist and they help you and your anxiety disorder disappears. You can still have your anxiety disorder removed and still be in existential crisis, as it were. Does that make sense? So resolving the associational problems of things like anxiety or depression or insomnia or so on and so forth, which is what most people attempt to do to get their life back on track, is worthy, is valid, and is required. But unless the other side of things, what you might call the psychospiritual and the psychophilosophical side of things are taken care of as well, you can just be unhappy without anxiety. Sure. Does that make sense? Your main area is one of... giving people some inner direction which will guide them forward sort of separate to the symptoms that they may have from that internal discomfort it's actually more a synthesis of the two so the mind academy is all about giving people the practical psychological tools um um as well as well as the philosophical tools because people they'll recognize that psychology was a part of philosophy for the last two and a half thousand years and it's only in the last 200 years that it's separated itself as its own you know um field and there were both pros and cons to that of course there's pros because we can focus and define and categorize and but there's also problems to that as well because life isn't just about you know associational disorders like we talked about life is about meaning purpose you know higher purpose and so on and so forth so i think until psychology either embraces philosophy or philosophy re-embraces psychology I think there's going to be this huge gap in people's ability to create both a functional and a meaningful life yeah okay look I one of the things we also spoke about before we uh jumped on this recording was that from a practical perspective for the people who may well be listening to this I'm dealing on a regular basis with individuals who may require lifestyle change or habit change. And that's probably deep-seated in both those aspects, really, in terms of learned behaviours and in terms of individual evaluation of oneself. Would you like to just speak to... the hurdles and the difficulties to habit change because obviously I see it regularly smoking is a great example walking regularly or exercising regularly healthy eating choices all these are things that I keep hitting a barrier to but I suspect you've got an angle of it would you share that yeah so let's just do it very very simply so if you imagine a triangle and at the top of the triangle you have goal a goal an outcome that we want yeah And that goal, as you said, might become a non-smoker or walk more regularly or would it change your diet or whatever it may be. Yeah. A lot of people obsess about the goals, you know, and they go to goal setting workshops and they write their goals down. And hey, but really that's not going to do very, very little. Why? Well, simply because you need the other two parts of the triangle. So on the left, you would have behaviors. On the right, you would have identity. So whenever you want to, you know, achieve a goal, Once you write that goal down, you really need to begin to consider what are the actual behaviors you need to be able to generate to make that goal a reality. Yeah. So it's all about the behaviors or rather the behaviors are far more important than the goal. Yeah. But the goal does at least give you a sense upon reflection of the kind of new behaviors you're going to have to adopt or the behaviors you're going to have to eliminate to make that goal a reality. Yeah. So, of course, any useful psychological approach. um focuses less on goals and more on to a certain degree behavior change yeah and changing your baby isn't actually as hard as people think that it is but again we don't have a lot of time but i can assure people and you that it's a lot easier than most people claim but that's a conversation but you also have identity and that's identity is how i see myself you know or how you see yourself So say, for example, people want to make a diet change and say, for example, we go, let's take veganism and let's take carnivore. Why do so many people find it relatively easy to adopt either veganism or carnivore? It's quite simple because they're not really thinking about goals so much, even though they have a sense that their goal is to achieve better health outcome. They're not even thinking so much about the behaviors because they don't even really know what they are. But what they do is as soon as they identify is either a vegan or a carnivore. all of your behaviors and goals become to a certain degree self-evident because they are contained within the identity of, well, this is now who I am. And to be consistent with my identity, I now have to do these things and move towards that goal. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So people who are successful in changing a habit, a way of being or achieving a goal, whatever it may be. Whether they do it knowingly or unknowingly, whether they do it in a short period of time or a long period of time, they unwittingly line up goal behaviors and identity. Because say, for example, your identity is in conflict with your behaviors. Well, you're not going to get anywhere. You know, you can say all that you like. I'm a carnivore. But if you keep on sneaking in 400 grams of fruit or, you know, a ton of sugar, that behavior is counter to that identity. So you're always going to feel at odds and you're always going to have that kind of. what they call self-sabotage, although I don't agree with that, but let's just name it for now, it's self-sabotage. So, you know, I know plenty of vegans who publicly display themselves as vegans, but behind the scenes eat bacon or sneak a little bit of fish or that, you know what I mean? And they'll find a way of justifying it, you know, to themselves, but in the public persona of identity. So what you have then is you have a persona rather than a true authentic identity. And if you've got a persona, you're always going to basically wibble wobble on your, you know, uh on your path to your goal yeah because your behaviors are out of sync but if you've got a true identity that's solid then that normally assists with keeping you on track with your behaviors and your goal yeah oh look that's incredible I think that's incredibly powerful and it's something in fact I came across a book relatively recently by a fellow called Joe Dispenza who you may or may not have heard of but he talks about using meditation to really change the person you are and it really reflects or echoes the sentiment that you're talking about with him sort of suggesting that you think do and be which is you start to meditate or imagine the person you the identity you want to be you start to do the behaviors your body starts to learn those behaviors and then you achieve the goal whatever that may be so really think do be is it's very much like the uh behavior identity identity behavior and goal that you're talking about and it all makes perfect sense when you lay it out well i'm going to be a bit of a pain in the ass here sorry well i'm going to be because as you know i'm sure as uh you know as a cardiologist is you have to say it's similar is not the same yeah and this is very important in the area of change because meditation for example has become a generalized term yeah So people think we all know what we're all talking about when it comes to meditation, but we really don't because one person's version of meditation, you know, maybe for spiritual development, another might be a form of hypnosis. Another form might be a returning to breath. And this is an incredibly important distinction because I spend most of my time kind of saving people from problematic versions of meditation. Yeah. Because there's a lot of versions that just simply aren't useful. And then in fact, they're even contraindicated. in a lot of psychological approaches like anorexia nervosa for example meditation is contraindicated um a lot of people with a lot of internal internalization programs uh or problem internalization programs meditation obviously is relatively contraindicated because they're already too self-aware and too self-absorbed and so they actually need to become more externally you know focused and aware so when it comes to meditation here's my big issue with it okay it's not that i have an issue with it but there's always an and like a synthesis and today you know in the area of psychology it's very interesting because i wrote a government accredited qualification called the diploma of modern psychology and as an attempt to try and maybe arrogantly kind of clean up some of the areas in clinical psychology that just seem bananas to me I mean it's a but again let me create a caveat here where I'm a big believer in what Jung said where he goes it's less the method and more the man yes so you know we can all learn a method but it's up to our us to develop the the artistic sensibilities and experience and time on tools to be the person to drive that method yeah so a lot of people they hide behind a certification and I well I only care a little about your certification. Yeah. I care kind of more about the man behind the certification. Does that make sense? Because, you know, I'm resitting. I used to be a nutritionist back in London and various other things. And that's all weight. That was 23 years ago. So it's way past. But I'm resitting a course here in Australia. And it's great. And it's accredited and certified and all the rest of it. But to be honest, it's just a matter of reading PDFs and having the person prove that you read them. Do you know what I mean? I wouldn't exactly say. You know what I mean? I mean, I get it and I get I have to do that. But let's just say that I'm earning my name nutritionist in a way that I'm like, yeah, sure. Really? You know what I mean? I'm sure there's plenty of people without that certificate who have far more knowledge and experience. So there's a bit of a tension there. But to go back to the meditation thing, I think this is a really important topic. OK, because. When we look at dopamine pathways. We know that the most successful people in the world find a way of basically embracing struggle. OK, so there's a big difference between struggle and suffering. Suffering is the continual looping of struggle with no way out yet. And that obviously will wear away at your sense of self, your productivity and your ability to achieve outcomes. However, struggle in and of itself needs to be embraced. Because without struggle, we can't grow. In philosophy, we call it the dialectic. And the dialectic is basically the friction of opposites that creates consciousness. So without friction, we cannot evolve or become more or change or do anything. And so my problem with a lot of the meditation approaches is living in the now and blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that kind of stuff. To be honest, it robs people of... the joy and vitality that struggle brings. And I think what most people really need to do is, sure, meditate if you want to, I get it. But as a mindset tip, you really need to start embracing struggle. But here's the problem. Whenever we try and change, whenever we want something new, your brain doesn't like it because it wants to burn as few calories as it possibly can. So it starts creating a neurochemical cascade. um that basically we can identify as the as as as irritation agitation and frustration so whenever you're feeling irritation agitation and frustration when you're trying to maybe write a piece or do something new or change a habit Rather than blame yourself for that, or beat yourself up about it, or try and meditate that away, which is a form of dissociation. Instead, what the truly successful and alive people do is embrace that as inevitable. It is an inevitable part of change. Why? It's very simple. It's a new your dopamine receptors. Yeah, they cause you to have to go through this gateway before you receive the hit that you want. And if you don't go through the gateway, you don't get the hit. Yeah. So there is a gateway to the success that you want. Yeah, there's a gateway to the new life that you want a gateway to the new behavioral responses and habits that you want. And that is agitation, frustration and irritation. Now, things like good quality psychology, hypnosis, good quality approaches help you get your head around that and potentially minimize it. But you're never going to get rid of it completely. Yeah. And so I see a lot of people wasting their lives trying to meditate away the inevitable struggle. Yes. That we have to engage with and not just engage with, but embrace. In ancient times, they called it divine agitation. Yeah. Because it's this. it's we've got it in us you know this agitation to become more and i see a lot of spiritual people trying to meditate away the divine agitation within them that's actually going to bring them the joy and vitality and extraordinary life that they want al on that uh agitation frustration and irritation note i might wrap it up because we've gone a few minutes over We'll come back for a part two, if that's okay with you. And I'd love to dive more into this because it's hugely important because it really is the foundational stonework for people being able to change habits. So for now, I'm going to thank you so much for sharing. For those listening, I'm sure you've been informed as I have and learned heaps. If you've got any queries or questions, please drop me a note. For now, thank you so much for listening. Until next time. Please live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now. 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