Unlock Your Potential with Brandon Epstein

george grombacher 0:02
Brandon Epstein is a world class mental performance coach with over 15 years of experience coaching professional athletes, entrepreneurs and executives. He founded the jump rope dudes initiative. It’s an online fitness community with over a million members. And he is the author of programmed to fail, how to break through your mental blocks and achieve greatness. Welcome to the show, Brandon.

Brandon Epstein 0:24
Thanks for having me, George. Appreciate you. And thank you to your audience for tuning in. Let’s let’s make it beautiful for the man.

george grombacher 0:30
Let’s let’s let’s do that. get us started. Tell us a little about your personal last more about your work. And what motivated you to write the book? Yeah,

Brandon Epstein 0:39
absolutely, man. I love that performance coach, like you said, so my dream was always to work professional athletes. Because I played sports growing up, I played college football, I just didn’t have the genetics, I didn’t have the shell to go to the next level. And so while I was in college, I started looking at different alternative modalities to get better at sports, you know, going down the rabbit hole, the normal stuff, meditation, but then that brought me to like energy training, learning about the energy system in the body, chakras, meridians, and then starting to understand that I could do some things that were weren’t supposed to be possible. It’s like learning how to conjure energy and be able to jump higher, become stronger, more powerful. And then going down the rabbit hole of research, I saw weight, as well as research is peer reviewed out there that says that if you use these energy or visualization techniques, you will be stronger, you’ll lift more weights. And I just realized that that was never talked about my football team, right? My coaches never going hey, guys like visualizing it’d be stronger, or, you know, try to drop your brainwaves to these meditative techniques. Now, none of that stuff is part of the conversation. So I took it upon myself to start sharing it with my teammates, and they started getting great results. And that brought me to where I am today, really, 16 years later being like, well, maybe sports specifically, I couldn’t go pro it. But I could go pro with empowering professional athletes with these mental tools. And so that’s what I do in present day. And that’s really what the book is. It’s my story of how I got here, because I didn’t grow up knowing anyone who was successful in business, I never knew a professional athlete growing up, I had no frame of reference. So I had to go on this massive inner journey myself to get here to where I am because pro sports are a very close circle, you’re either in or you’re out and sick a lot to get into that circle. And to do it my way. Because a lot people who do what I do, go and get an advanced degree, they get a clinical degree in psychology, they get all these advanced certifications. I went to college, I created my degree in mental aspects human performance, I wasn’t getting the tools are actually helping my athletes or helping myself. So I took a very untraditional path. And the untraditional path is in the story of the book. And then in the playbook, we’re actually show people like, Hey, this is what I tell my side young award winning pitcher to do to go out there and performance best. And it’s definitely not for everyone. But it’s for the people out there who are the seekers who want to know, okay, how could could I be if I have a given craft is something that I really enjoy? Like, what would it be like to fully show up in this thing and be my best at it? And so I did that for myself. And the book is a story of that and a playbook because I just wanted to get it out into the world. Now that I can’t work with everyone. The book gives me the opportunity to share the information.

george grombacher 3:27
Appreciate. Have you always been a seeker? Oh,

Brandon Epstein 3:31
of course, bro. You know, I’ve always had those existential questions. I think like most people, like what are we doing here? Where do we come from? Where are we going? And I’d say probably up until about five years ago, that was something that I was really hard seeking. And then I had experience with the Bufo alvarius toad. You familiar with that? A little bit. Yeah, buffo five Meo DMT through that ego death experience that allowed me to kind of like, relax my shoulders a little bit, sink down into myself and be like, Okay, now I’ve had this visceral experience of God. So I don’t need to necessarily go try to figure it out in my head as much. And as a big, big a big experience in my spiritual growth journey. And ever since then, I’ve been able to seek knowledge and greater wisdom, but not necessarily as much like the existential like, make everything okay, information now, everything just feels okay.

george grombacher 4:32
So, you talked a little bit earlier about not having a frame of reference, you didn’t know any professional athletes. And so it’s tough to connect those dots and I certainly appreciate that and, and had a very similar experience growing up. And then you have this DMT experience this ego death, which is a whole new frame of reference. Yeah. No

Brandon Epstein 4:56
doubt brother. Yeah, that’s, I mean, I We’d never grew up around religion, my dad’s Jewish, my mom, but he wasn’t really God wasn’t talked about in the house, my mom’s an atheist. And so I had no spirituality in my life. And in everything I heard I, I lived in New York for the first 12 years of my life, and I moved to Oregon to a very liberal town were like, religion, and God was actually looked down upon in a way, like it was almost seemed like it was like something that was less than. And so I got programmed with that right talk about my book program to fail, I was programmed to believe that like, even like giving that my energy is actually some form of like, lesser thinking. And so when I had that experience with the five Meo DMT, and you know, and other subsequent experiences, it gave me this frame of reference of like, no, no, this is it right here. This isn’t like something that should be pushed aside of like, oh, no, those are just for people we’re looking for, to be put at ease through their fear of death. This is actually like the essence of living is to understand that we are in this interconnected consciousness, and we are an expression of the whole. And so being that we should embrace it.

george grombacher 6:12
We’re all subject to programming. Yes,

Brandon Epstein 6:15
we’ve all been programmed 100%. Or better and worse. Right. Yeah. 100%. Rather, I’m curious for you. What are some of the things that come up in your life that you saw, these programs are put inside of you that once they become aware, you became aware of them, you’re like, wait a minute, this is why I haven’t been able to achieve X, Y, and Z or experience these X, Y and Z feelings I want in my life, because this invisible roadblock has been there. And then you seem like someone who’s been on this journey as well. So like, what were some of those for you that you’re able to, to lift up so you could flow through so

george grombacher 6:58
much of my life, and my work is around money. And I recognized when I started learning about limiting beliefs that I had limiting or negative beliefs around finances, and it was to your point. So like a self imposed glass ceiling, or a glass cage, because it’s there, and it’s limiting me and my potential, but you don’t realize it’s there. So you just keep kind of running into it. And until you start realizing, I have been programmed just from the way I grew up in my lived experiences. And there’s something that I could actually do about it.

Brandon Epstein 7:31
What do you do about it? Just recognizing,

george grombacher 7:33
okay, I feel like there’s not enough money, because I grew up in an environment of scarcity. And I realized, Oh, well, I get to choose how I want to feel about everything. If I want to feel like I’m going to be really successful with money, then I get to do that. So it’s a function of making that decision of how I wanted to feel and then paying attention and noticing, when I was getting triggered or falling back into those scarcity programming, to stop it, and to, for lack of a better term, reprogram the way that I wanted to feel. So that’s what I’ve been working on.

Brandon Epstein 8:07
Nice. And what have you seen once you started to reprogram some of those beliefs around money? What’s happened for you? Did you because a lot of times my clients and in my life, like things that seem almost magical happen, it’s like, Wait, what happened here? And it’s like, I didn’t really do anything different, but then different results come from that. I’m just curious if you had any experiences like that?

george grombacher 8:30
Yeah. Well, some of it is, is recognizing that the avoidance and the scarcity caused me to not pay close attention to my finances, even though I work in the field. And so recognizing I need to change how I’m actually interacting with money and how I’m paying attention to it and start paying closer attention and doing the things that I intellectually know that I’m supposed to be doing. And I do believe that we are interconnected to your earlier point and that when you realize that, there’s more and you can access more

Brandon Epstein 9:14
getting clear on what it is that you truly want, and putting inspired action towards that and service of the things you want. Then you start to get more of those things that that that that you want. Yeah, in the way I view it. Like there’s there’s two aspects of this, you know, specifically talking about money and creating more wealth in your life. The first aspect of is like living in the frequency of abundance, which it’s a real thing like it’s just like, you know, when you’re living in a low frequency like what people meet you there, right? You end up with people who are in that kind of like low depressed state, like they’ll meet you there. Right? It’s the same thing with money. If you’re living in a high frequency of abundance, you feel like you have more than enough like those type of opportunities will meet you in that frequency. So that’s the part that some people might roll their eyes and go, Okay, that’s a little woowoo. That’s been my experience, it works every time. But if that’s something that someone’s like, I don’t know if I fully believe in that, that’s okay. Because the second aspect is, when you whatever you believe to be true, you’ll delete, generalize, and you’ll distort the reality that’s coming in for you. And so essentially, if you believe that you can’t make a certain amount of money, or that it’s impossible, only bad people make a lot, a lot of money, then you’re literally closing down the subconscious pathways in your mind, and you won’t see the information that could create the opportunity for me, right? Like it could be, you can read a blog article, you can have a conversation with someone. And if you believe that it’s impossible, Make Money and Finance then even though someone else would do it, you’ll go well, not for me, impossible for me, once you believe it is possible for you the great the openings happen in your subconscious, it’s all happening beneath the surface, those pathways open up and then the aha moment of like, oh, I can do this, this. And if there’s opportunity, I can do this. I’m not doing this yet. And boom, all sudden, the opportunities to make more money, present themselves to you.

george grombacher 11:05
And this is true of athletic performance, true financial success, true of love and relationships.

Brandon Epstein 11:12
100% Yeah. You know, we all know the story of like this, someone who who’s been cheated on, you know, maybe earlier in life, and that’s happened multiple times. And they believe all men are cheaters or all women are cheaters. And then somehow they only end up with cheaters. How’s that work? It’s the last thing that they want. But they continue to attract the same type of relationship because they believe it to be true. So they will delete the people who wouldn’t reinforce our belief that all people are cheaters. And then they keep running into same kind of negative person over and over again. They’re living in that frequency. And so this is what I think most people don’t understand is that like, we’re having this conversation. But it’s not an intellectual thing that’s happening. It’s like, you really have to drop yourself down into this almost meditative state, right? We have to get out of these beta brainwave states, we have to get into more of that Alpha Theta, brainwave state. And in that place, like, that’s where your subconscious become something, we can start to move, we can mold and we can hold out these beliefs, and we can replace them with other ones. And I think that because we’re always moving so quickly, people are in their head, they’re very rational and trying to figure it out, like, what do I do? Yeah, I changed believe I’d already had had had that doesn’t happen in your head, you have to slow down enough to give yourself that space to go in your body, because in your body is where it lives. And it’s okay, I want to kind of share with your audience right now, like how they could do this for themselves in real time. Great. So if something triggered within you as a listener, and for like, you know, I have a fear of money, or when you talk about money, I felt maybe someone might feel a little bit of a pain in their solar plexus, you know, and that’s usually where we feel fear, anxiety, worry, concern. So it actually lives in your body, this belief that’s causing these issues for you. So you have to close your eyes and actually get into that solar plexus, feel the fear, feel the fear, feel the fear, and in the fear not from the head, you’re going to be able to ask yourself, what am i Believing to be true about my ability to make more money and it’s making me feel so afraid right now. And you actually just have to sit and that long enough for not come from the habits have come from the body? Because the body will actually speak to will go? Well, I believe I made more money in my life, believe me, what? My wife will lead me Why would that happen? Right? And then why is that happened? Maybe they had an experience where like, their father, or someone they knew growing up, got a divorce when someone started making more money. And it’s like, it seems completely irrational, say my wife is gonna leave me if I make more if I make more money, but you got to find out what are those broken pieces of code, they’re living in your body. And that’s how we actually get to them. It’s not a head thing. It’s not a thinking thing. It lives in the physical body. And, and that’s really where the magic happens is like when you have the patience to go into your physical body and the courage because we’re going into the darkness, like what’s down there, to actually pull out each one of those code piece of code one by one, so we can see them. Okay, it’s a broken piece of code. I don’t want to believe that to be true anymore. That sets us on the path of being able to change that belief.

george grombacher 14:15
And whether I believe it to be true or not, if I’m as as as I’m listening to this, you know it to be true. You’ve seen it work. So do you ever just say well, why not try it?

Brandon Epstein 14:30
Yeah, well, most people don’t want to go to that. Right. I think, you know, this is like a deeper spiritual conversation of like, each of our souls purpose for being here and are like, what are we doing here? Why did we decide to be incarnated? Like some people are not meant to do this work? Like, I believe that we’re all here to resolve some of these patterns that we have, and to get ourselves to this place of wholeness so we can just experience the present moment, joy and peace. But some of us during this incarnation are actually I’m not going to ever do that work. And so I’m in a deep state of acceptance around like the people who are seeking it, they come to me something, the lightbulb goes off, they feel something, they feel pull, they feel a call, and they’re like, I need to do this. I don’t even know what this is, I don’t fully understand. But I know that you’ve got what I need. And those are the people who show up for me, because right there in that frequency, and they’re ready to do the work. A lot of people are not, they’re not they’re going to stay where they are. And that’s okay, too. So I’ve come to a deep state of acceptance around that, that it’s not for everyone.

george grombacher 15:35
It’d be weird if you were totally fighting against that. Like, I’m not doing it right. I keep resisting. And that’s, that’s, that’s of course not the not the key. So interconnectedness? Is it? Do you feel like like you are that you have been connected to Source Energy forever? Is it just your conscious ness that’s connected?

Brandon Epstein 16:12
Yeah. Oh, yeah, I feel like I’ve been connected. I mean, I think I’m of this, right, whatever this is, I’m of this, I’m an expression of it. I was what I get here, otherwise, some of this, so I have to be connected to it. So the way I view things is like, and this helps a lot of people who are very much in their head is like, I just view that I am this conscious human being having this human experience. There’s only two things I can control that if anyone can challenge me on this, I can control my focus. So where am I putting my attention in the present moment, and I can control my choices. That’s it. That’s really all I have. And I can’t do it in the past, I can’t do in the future. I can only do it right now. So I have to surrender everything else to something greater than myself. And this is a huge things I found for athletes, I’ve actually seen that athletes have a lot more success when they have a belief in a higher power can be universal source the all God a lot doesn’t matter. But if you’re trying to control the uncontrollable as you’re wasting energy, and you’re calling himself unnecessary anxiety, and worry and stress. So for me, my framework is I control two things, my focus my choice in the present moment, I surrender everything else to whatever it is whatever came before me, whatever is here was whatever is emanating this conscious experience that I’ve seen experience, whatever that is, I can’t fully name it. That’s the unknowable, right? Truly, we can call it God, we can call it whatever it wants, whatever we want. But that’s what I’m surrendering to.

george grombacher 17:46
And how do you, how does one start? And maybe that’s that that’s that’s not the right question.

Brandon Epstein 17:55
That’s a great question. Okay. Yeah. And you know, this right, from all your work on mindfulness, awareness. Awareness is how we start. And awareness of feeling for me is actually where we start even before we go into like thoughts, awareness, your thoughts is awareness, your feelings, because, like I shared, the feeling is the gateway to get to the underlying programming. And a lot of men especially are so detached their feelings, they can’t even uncover how they’ve been programmed to fail, because they can’t even feel their feelings and feel safe or feel like that’s okay. So, an exercise I give people in the book, the first step on this journey is to set alarms in your phone to go off every three hours while you’re awake. Just to ask you, how does it feel to be you right now? And this does two things. One, it anchors you back in the present, right? Are you so mind? So many of us spend so much time thinking about what went wrong in the past? Or what could have should have been? Or what’s going to happen in the future? Asking this question forces you into the present moment, which is just good in general, right? We feel our best in the present. And then it helps you build a muscle of being aware of your feelings. And the more aware you can become your feelings, the more power you have in changing them. So that is where the journey starts, in my opinion.

george grombacher 19:10
Appreciate that. And it’s self exploration. It’s a process that maybe it takes some people very little time because they have less bad programming. Some people it could take a long time. Fundamentally, it’s a lifetime thing.

Brandon Epstein 19:30
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s there’s levels to it’s like you get through all your programming, the surface level stuff, but then you think you’re done. But then you start to achieve more. And then you’ve started to run into new program that you didn’t even know it exists. Because you know, I call it the governor or governor on a call, right? It’s like I’m going 60 There’s no problem and then you try to go at and the governor was like, Hey, don’t go that fast. You know, the body wants to stay in homeostasis. It goes it’s safe here. Stop trying to achieve more. What are you doing? Everything’s fine here. We have food and a roof overhead, everything’s fine. People love you. But they start to achieve more. And then that Governor turns on it might be the imposter syndrome might be, who do you think you are, might be, hey, if you keep going, you’re going to lose it. All. Right? Those are beliefs or programs that come up for a lot of people. And so there’s foundational work we have to do to get ourselves to a pretty clean inner world by doing that, and then you have to anticipate that as you try to go for more and more and more, which if you want to do that you can achieve more and more joy, more satisfaction, more abundance, you probably will run into more programming, because that’s just how the system is built. It’s built for survival more so than thriving. It’s built to keep you alive, first and foremost.

george grombacher 20:48
Do you approach the work with joy? I’m sure that some people talking about it’s scary. So we need courage to be able to approach it. But this point, how do you do you advocate that people approach it in a certain way, or people are going to feel it and experience however they want to? Yeah.

Brandon Epstein 21:11
comes up for me as I approach it with a matter of fact, attitude. Matter of fact, it just is what it is, right? So we’re not getting so attached to it’s like, you might feel the emotion as it comes up as you go into the piece of programming. It’s holding you back. It’s like, Whoa, that’s a really charged thing there. But giving you the salt, the ability to be a little bit of the observer in the process. I think that matter of fact, attitude works well. And I don’t know if anyone likes the NBA. It’s like you look at Nikola joke Ah, he’s, you know, could have won the MVP every year, last five years. He’s the most matter of fact, dude ever. And like that’s the energy and also tennis. You play tennis right. Jovovich very matter of fact, energy, like the best athletes are not super high or super low. No, they’re just kind of matter of fact. And so I just think that’s just the way to operate in general. Of course, we experienced the peaks, the highs, the lows, that’s part of the human experience. But if you can settle yourself somewhere try to be in that matter of fact, place.

george grombacher 22:14
Yeah, I think that that makes a ton of sense. impartial observer of. Of how messed up I am. But that’s but then I was I was tongue in cheek? Because I’m not messed up. Or maybe I am. How do you think about that?

Brandon Epstein 22:31
I think that you probably have some programs that don’t serve you. Doesn’t mean you’re broken. Just means like, that’s your work. But we all have it, you know, you know, messed up more messed up than I am or anyone else. Like, it’s just it’s like, how expansive Do you want this experience of life to be right? Because every piece of programming that you have that makes you feel bad is contracting your possibilities of emotion of experience. So as you go through those, you just get a more expansive life. And the question is, how expansive this experience do you want to have?

george grombacher 23:05
That’s super powerful right there. I want mine to be very expensive.

Brandon Epstein 23:12
Brandon, go baby.

george grombacher 23:16
Thank you so much for coming on. Man. Where can people learn more about you? Most importantly, where can they wake up? Where can they get their copy of programmed to fail? How to Break through your mental blocks and achieve greatness? Yes,

Brandon Epstein 23:28
they can get the book on Amazon. I think everyone’s gonna love the book. It’s very matter of fact, you know, the way I tell the story, I’m not someone who comes from this like it air of superiority of like, I’m going to tell you what’s right. I’m just going to tell you my story. And I think it’s gonna be relatable for a lot of people and I think it’s gonna be really enjoyable. It’s available on Audible as well. I did the audiobook myself. So the book has a main place outside anyone failed on Amazon program to fail. Don’t follow me on social media. I do put out a good amount of videos, Brandon Epstein underscore and my website the Brandon epstein.com. If anyone is interested in doing some of this work with me, excellent.

george grombacher 24:10
If you enjoy this as much as I did, so Brandon your appreciation, share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Pick up your copy of programmed to fail. Amazon, pick up the audible version and go to the Brandon epstein.com Find him on social media, Brandon Epstein underscore certainly link all those in the notes. Thanks again Brandon. Till next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.