John Sanei — Part trend specialist, part business strategist, part mystic, author. All absolutely fascinating

- Man, it's been a busy night tonight. And my next guest in studio with me, John Sarnay. John Halsett, welcome. Thanks for being here tonight and being on What's Involved. - Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. - I actually came across you via, via, via, and it was the launch of something called Singularity U. So I wanna get into all of that. But tell me a little bit about, John, because in my mind, you suddenly popped on the scene, popped onto my radar, and you're launching an awesome book. And I was like, but you're way more than that. So tell us a little bit about John. - Well, thank you so much. I am a human being fascinated with our perception, our motivating factors, what get us to act and behave in certain ways, as well as fascinated with the future. I'm an early adopter from a very young age. And the connection between human consciousness, awareness, and futurism is my forte and has what's put me on the map. And it's only a recent career. I've only been doing it for about three years now, but in those three years, I've had two best sellers. And hopefully this book also becomes a best seller. I'm also the first African Singularity faculty member. So yeah, this is what I do.

- Okay, but you say this and it just rolls over the tongue. I mean, Singularity U is for those people who don't know, it's a university in the States. - It's in San Francisco. It was started by Peter Diamandis, a globally renowned futurist and Ray Kurzweil, who is the head of AI for Google. Extremely smart human being and a living genius, to be honest. And the two of them decided that there were no universities teaching anybody about the future, but only about what happened in the past and trying to extrapolate the past into the future. So they've found faculty members from around the world that have got specific specialities. And then we get deployed into seminars, workshops, and conferences to go and help organizations and individuals and governments prepare better for the future. - What qualifies somebody to be a futurist, to look to the future? Do you, 'cause you can't study for that, surely. - Yeah, you can't study for it. I think an economist is a good place to start and early, for me, an early adopting personality. Somebody that's just always been connected with what's next. And I think for now, before it can be taught, these are the things that make a futurist. And also you have very many different layers of futurists and very many different sectors that people can focus on.

There's people that can really focus in on 10 or 15 years ahead, there's people that can focus on two or three years ahead. So there's many variations of it. And futurists have their own sort of frameworks that they use to help organizations become more courageous and have more clarity on the future. - Because this is one of the things that struck me about the book. Number one, brilliantly put together. - Wow, thank you, thank you so much. - Not just from the aspect of reading the book, but in terms of the print and the quality and it's just, it's different. - Thank you, well, you know, we're living in an age where reading a book on its own is not something that happens that much anymore because we've got Audible, we've got podcasts, we've got interviews, there's so many ways to access information. And so if I am gonna write a book, I wanted it to be as interactive and as an incredible experience as possible. And so that's why I've done full color page prints, I've written 20 essays, which then make it much more palatable for people to wanna read an essay at a time. So I've written 20 shots of foresight to prepare your vision for it to become 20/20 vision for the year 2020 and beyond.

And we're gonna be talking more about this, but the reason that you're around and you're with Singularity U is, and I think we all know this, and I think Africa's gonna, and you can help me here, being able to have this early adopter and you get to meet all these people. Africa, I believe, is going to be a hub in the future in terms of what we do, how we do, and when this fourth industrial revolution. Are you a fourth industrial revolutioner? Because I keep hearing about it, but nobody can tell me when it's happening. - Well, we are in the midst of it. I mean, your phone can tell you which direction to take and when. You have a phone that can translate Spanish into English. We are in the fourth industrial revolution, but we also have to give heed to the fact that the third industrial revolution has to take hold. And nobody really talks about the third industrial revolution. The third industrial revolution is the fact that Jeremy Rifkin, a global economist at Britain and New York Times bestseller called The Zero Marginal Cost Society, writes in detail of how the three pillars that have held up economies for the last 150 years are imploding and becoming free. Communication, transportation, and energy are on their way to become free, which has really set the tone for the fourth industrial revolution to be accessible by the whole world.

- Because this is the thing, and I've spoken to a lot of people, particularly in South Africa, and they're like, oh, when it happens, the only thing we know about it is everybody's gonna lose their jobs. And yet, I see people, and you seem very optimistic in some of the shots in this book for the future. Are we all gonna lose our jobs? - Well, if you just look at what happened at the turn of the 19th century, 80% of the human population were farming, and today, 2% of the human population are farming, and we still have lots of jobs. In fact, we don't have enough people for the jobs. So there's actually a shortage of people for jobs for the new skills that are required right now. I'm doing work with an Indian blockchain right now. I just interviewed their whole board for a leadership workshop I'm holding with them. Their number one problem is not enough stuff. So I am very optimistic about the future, but let's just make sure we all understand. Optimism is a choice. You have to train your brain to look for opportunities rather than danger, and the book is very much about that. - I wanna talk about that when we come back. My special guest in studio, author, speaker, faculty member of Singularity, you, John Sarnay.

The book is called Foresight. It is brilliant. Highly recommend it. I have thoroughly enjoyed it to date. What's involved this Monday night? My special guest in studio. Author, speaker, educator, John Sarnay. We're busy chatting about his new book, Foresight, Awakening, Curiosity, Cultivate Wisdom, Discover the Abundant Future. Just that says to me that you are very, very positive about the future. One thing that we discussed off there, which I'd like to just bring up now, is I'm a huge big fan of Dr. Joe Dispenza and on his latest book, Becoming Supernatural, the things that he talks about. You mentioned this in your writing as well, but you've gone a step further. You've actually attended some of his workshops. - Absolutely. It's one of my intentions to share a stage with him and using his methodology, I'm getting closer and closer to doing that. I'm a huge fan. He starts off his seven day meditation retreats with I'm not a mystic, I'm not a believer, I'm not a man of faith. I'm a scientist. I am a neuroscientist. For the last 30 years, I've been researching a whole bunch of things around science, and now I am a mystic, a man of faith, and a believer, because he has proved it to himself through science of the formula that's required to awaken innate software that's inside our brains that we just haven't accessed before.

- Now you reckon, if we pay attention to that, and this thing about the future being and creating our future, embracing our future, rather than living in fear, starts with making your mind up? - Well, it starts with wisdom. Wisdom in the book, as I explain, is healing your past. Most of us are in a repetition of what happened yesterday, trying to make tomorrow more like it was yesterday, and that's based on us living because of our past and because of our memories. What we have to do is heal them and let go of them. Alan Watts has a great saying. He says the knowledgeable man has to learn something new every day, but the wise man has to unlearn something new every day. Dr. Joe Dispenza says having memories with no triggers is wisdom, and so in order for us to become focused on the future, we have to let go of the past, and that means we have to heal our past, and Tony Robbins calls it moving from unconscious memories to conscious memories, where you blame your past rather than thanking your past. - And this is a trend amongst a lot of people that have walked this path and done that. Is this thanking your past? I mean, we've had it in a watered down version before, you know, with Oprah and the attitude of gratitude, but it works.

- Of course it works, because you're made up of a set of memories, and if your memories are hurtful and you're resenting your past, you are a resentful human being. And so what we do is we sit in a puddle of victimhood, and then we become righteous in our victimhood, and then say, well, there's no opportunities out there. How dare you say there are opportunities? Look at all the suffering around us. And the truth is, is your personality creates your personal reality. And if you aren't able to take control and responsibility of that, the future is daunting, ugly, and scary. If you are able to make that decision and become wise and curious, the future is nothing but abundant. - Could we have such a thing as cultural scarring? And I'm talking specifically in South Africa. I think globally, every country has its own personality that fits into this. I think I imagine Canada doesn't have so much scarring. I would imagine Germany and America does. South Africa definitely does. We've just come out of apartheid 25 odd years ago. There's a lot of unforgiveness between people, and there's a lot of sort of resentment between people, and that underlying resentment creates a set of victim mindsets.

White people wish like it used to be. Black people wish that it was different, and both people need to heal the past. Now, that's easier said than done, of course. I think that what happened in apartheid was absolutely atrocious and very easy to say, just forgive and move on. But ultimately, if you aren't able to do that, you suffer, nobody else does. And so if you're a child that has been molested, or if you had a tough upbringing, if you want to keep blaming your parents for what had happened, you, the one who suffers, nobody else does. And so my book is about how do we prepare our consciousness and our awareness for the future? And I was very much motivated by a question I get a lot after my talks, is how do we prepare our children for the future? What should they be doing? And my answer always is, it's not so much what they should be studying, it's how should they be behaving? And the truth is, is that we have been constantly educated into linear industrial revolution thinking. And every sort of degree in MBA is based on understanding case studies, understanding processes and frameworks, and then applying them and extrapolate them into the future. We are in the midst of a societal shift moving from industrial times to quantum times.

And the behavior that's required is adaptability and flexibility in the future, not linear repetition. - But you know, we are so much victims of that, and I find myself at home. At home, we have, and I grew up in a time when, I mean, when I told my parents I wanted to be on radio and be a radio presenter, they were horrified. You have to go out and you have to be a banker, or a lawyer, or this. And I've railed against that my whole life. Now I find myself in a situation thinking I have become more enlightened at home with a 21-year-old, almost 21-year-old, and I'm sitting there going, bloody millennial, there's no idea, get some stability, get it. And I think, whoa, I thought I'd dealt with that. Is this something that a lot of us are having problems with? - Yes, absolutely. I mean, the best example is I had an ex-girlfriend of mine join me in Petra in Jordan. I was there for some work and she came and joined me and she lived in London and she told her mom, I'm gonna go meet my friend John in Jordan, and her mom said to her, my darling, you 38 years old, when are you gonna settle down? And her name was Natalie, and she said, Natalie said to her mom, mom, but were you happy in your marriage?

And she's like, no, I hate your dad. And she's like, well, there you go. It's like, you wanting me to get into something that you actually didn't really enjoy. And because our constructs and belief systems and behaviors have been drummed into us to live lives like that, and that's the second part of the book is that curiosity has been drummed out of us. And so in order for us to be flexible and adaptable, we have to let go of our past and heal it and also make decisions through curiosity, not through logic. - And this, I mean, as I've been going through the book, I haven't managed to get the whole way through it yet because I keep meandering off. And it's because each and every, and you call them shots, each and every essay, shot chapter, it's not something I don't believe, and I could be wrong with. This isn't a book you sit down and read at one sitting. This is a book that makes you think. - Well, I was hoping that I could make you think as much as possible to help shift your relationship with the future because your perspective of the future determines how you prepare for it. And if you aren't able to prepare for it correctly, you will be disrupted. Your job will be taken, and that's an unfortunate place and can and is, you can, there's a remedy.

And I'm trying to help you get the remedy for it because no matter how successful you used to be, no matter how much degrees you used to have, it's actually called the expert problem. It's people stuck in insight. If something doesn't fit into the same framework that they've been educated on, they boo-boo it. They become cynics of it, and that's a very unfortunate place to be. - Well, you know, there's things that scare people, things that people worry about, and we do, and specifically in South Africa, we spend so much time worrying. One of my mentors used to often tell me when I used to worry about the future, and he used to look at me and go, what is the worst that will happen if you do this? No, but, and he goes, will you die? And I'm like, no, don't be stupid. Of course I won't die, and then why are you not doing it? - Well, it's your reptilian brain. You have a larger reptilian brain to become your major decision-making process, which means you haven't trained your brain. You're still an ancient brain. And so people that are anxious, people that are paranoid, people that are looking constantly for danger or cavemen stuck in a modern world. And you can retrain your brain so that your decision-making process is not from that part of your brain.

That's why my book is half psychology, half futurism. - Because this is the thing, this reptile brain, it's the fight or flight. It's keeping you, it's designed to keep you in status quo, to keep you safe, but also you're living with that continuous sort of fight or flight response, which then releases all sorts of nasty chemicals. - No, because you're sick because you're not able to rest your body because you're not trusting of anybody in any situation around you. And again, this is your personal choice. Don't think for a second that this has happened to you because if you do, you're a victim. And this is a horrible thing to hear, but it's the most important thing to hear because if you think you're not a victim and you are acting like a victim and nothing's going on in your life like you wanted to, you're wheel spinning. What you're doing is repeating yesterday over and over and over and complaining why tomorrow doesn't look more like yesterday. And that's a shocking place to be. - I find this fascinating. I find the book fascinating. We are talking to John Sarnay, the author of "Amongst Other Things" because your first book was "What's Your Moon?" - "What's Your Moon?" - "Magnetize." - And then "Magnetize." And now "Forsight," the latest one.

We'll be back. We'll be chatting some more with John. I wanna find out 'cause this blockchain thing, everybody's been laughing at me about blockchain and the future of blockchain and what it is and digital currency. We're gonna talk about it. I'm gonna see if he's got an opinion on Bitcoin as well. All of this and more when we come back on "What's Involved." It is "What's Involved." John Sarnay, my guest in studio tonight. We're talking about the book "Forsight." Somebody said you have absolutely interesting topics and guests on your show. I always feel inspired on a Monday night. And that's from Jackie. - Hello, Jackie. - Inspiration is a good thing. Inspiration is a good thing. John, the book, you wrote it. It's brilliant. There's 20 shots in. My initial reaction when I looked at it was like, "Okay, this has been done for those millennial people "that can't focus in." But I think if you'd written it any differently, it would have turned into a book that people went, "No, it's too complicated, too difficult, not interested." Because you can read and digest one chapter, but it's got this horrible habit, at least for me, of making me think about what I've just read. Because it's easy.

If you're looking for distraction, don't buy the book. That's my opinion. - Right, well done. - Thank you for that. - Because it does, it does, where is it available? Is it available yet? - Yes, it's available everywhere. Expensive books and loot and take a lot of the normal ones. Amazon, Kindle, I'm about to start recording the Audible version, which is my least favorite part of writing any book. It's the third time I'm doing it because you have to reread something very slowly that you've been writing and massaging and rereading and editing for eight months. But that process starts in two weeks' time, and then I'll have the Audible version. - But then it's as read by the author. - Of course, it's necessary. - I think that's important. - No, absolutely. - You know, as opposed to getting it-- - Well, you know the thing is, some people ask me, it's like, well, what's the lifelike of an author? And I say, well, that's not the type of life I have. I have a multimedia brand, and I must be accessible in every touch point of media, from life, from high touch to high tech. And so Audible is just another version of that. - Absolutely, I love Audible. I gotta tell you what I do. I love reading, but when I'm traveling anywhere, then in go the headphones, boom, and off I go.

- In another world. - Yeah, absolutely wonderful. Jackie, the name, sorry, not Jackie, Jasmine. Jasmine, the name of the book is Foresight, and the author, John Sarnay. And it is a brilliant book. - Can we talk about the first one, or maybe second shot, or how would you like it? - I wanna talk about, 'cause this one came first, but let's talk, and I haven't read it. I'm gonna be honest, I'm open. Moonshot. - Yeah, what's your moonshot? - Why? Why a moonshot? - Well, in the 1960s, I think it was 1962, 15th of May, or 25th of May, when JFK gave that speech to America and the world that we will put a man on the moon and have no technology to do so. And he awoke a sense of inspiration in the country, and eight years or nine years later, they had a man on the moon. And so the idea behind that book is, is how big, how bold, and how courageous are your decisions about your future? And if they are not big, bold, and audacious, you don't understand technology, and you don't understand the ability we have now to access four billion people, which is about to become seven and a half billion people, has never been available to us. The reason you're not accessing technology is because you're a victim of your reality.

And so the book spends 50% of its time breaking down the different types of victim I was, because in my book, I describe how I became very wealthy in my early 20s and mid-20s, and I lost everything in my late 20s and early 30s, and I went through a depression of five years or so. And that depression was such a genius thing, because the depression happens very slowly, and as you start toiling into this depression of victimhood, your friends become just the same as you. So you just start hanging around with the same people, with the same energetic sort of resonance as you, and I had to really break out of it. And it took me a few years to break out of that cycle, and then you think like a victor, you make decisions with opportunities in mind, you understand what technology can do for you, and you can build a global brand, which is what I've done. And so I have utilized my understanding of psychology and technology to build a brand that's now growing globally. - What I find so interesting, and I think Tony Robbins was the one who mentioned it, we do things essentially for two reasons, we're either moving away from pain or towards pleasure. However, in my experience, I have found that sometimes we take pleasure from the pain, and that the depression cycle is such an insidious thing, and it creeps in. - Slowly.

- And I didn't realize, I always used to go, what are these people that are depressed? What is this depression thing you talk about? I can't understand it, put your shoulders back, chin up, just carry on, keep on soldiering on. Until one day I found, I woke up and I was deep, deep within that. - I think it's embarrassing for a lot of people to speak about. I certainly was embarrassed about it because I was this audacious 20 something year old, I owned six restaurants and retail stores, and now all of a sudden I couldn't afford to live in a house, I had to stay in my friend's second bedroom and didn't have a car, so it was embarrassing, it was shameful, but it's very much part and parcel of the hero's journey all of us live on. And my second book, Magnetize, I start off with a line that's very similar to what you just said about Tony Robbins is, are you running away from the darkness or are you running towards the light? And most people are running away from the darkness. And the way you can determine whether you're running away from the darkness or the light is that one of them is fueled by anxiousness and the other one is fueled by excitement. And if you're fueled by anxiety, you are depressed because you are not seeing any light, you're just trying to get away from that line is gonna eat you.

- Very, very true words. Somebody just, guys, thanks for the interesting interview, we'd love to read your book, Jacques, all the way from Zululand. So we have people in Zululand listening as well tonight. Thank you, Jacques. Blockchain, let's talk about this. Do you notice how subtly changed away from this depression thing? 'Cause that just hit home there. So this is called the subtle radio wave just changing the subject. - It wasn't very subtle, but anyway. - Yeah, no, well, I know it's never subtle when I announce it. But blockchain, cryptocurrency debt technology, is it the wave of the future that people say? - So let me just first start off by saying that if I had to describe the internet to anybody 25 years ago, you wouldn't have a clue because there was no frame of reference. There was no benchmark. You didn't know what to compare it to. It was so brand new that there's a TV interview on ABC where the presenters are trying to figure out what that at sign is. They didn't know if it was an about sign or an at sign. They didn't know. They'd never seen it before. And so today blockchain is very similar to that. And I'll give you a couple of examples of what blockchain is in very layman's terms.

Have you ever had a Word document that you've been working on with you and a team and you send it between each other and you keep trying to make edits. And then what you do is you save it as final and then final, final, and then final, final version two, and then final, final version three. By the end of it, you don't know which version is actually the latest, right? Today you have Google Docs. You can all work on one document at the same time in live and everything is stored in the cloud and it's open and public and transmutable and everybody can see it. That is what blockchain will create for us as transparency of all transactions. From very little transactions to very mega transactions will all be on the blockchain. Let me give you one more example. I was in San Francisco a year ago. We met the car of the future. And the car of the future has many technological advancements inside it, like exponential technologies inside it, like networks and sensors, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, et cetera, et cetera. The car came to pick me up and because it has facial recognition, it recognizes me and says, "Hello, John." I say, "Hello, car." I get in and it says, "Where are you going?" I say, "Airport." The car says, "It's $22.50." With voice recognition, blockchain, many contracts, I'm able to transfer the $22.50 into the car's account and we start moving towards the airport.

On the way to the airport, I realized I'd be running late for my flight. I tell the car, "Listen, I'm running late for my flight. "Can you speed up?" The car says, "No problem." Give me $7.50. I think to myself, "That's weird, but no problem." I give it $7.50. It then starts connecting with every other car on the road, giving it each one dollar to get out the way so we can get to the airport quicker. That's blockchain. Machines speaking to each other. Humans speaking to humans. Humans speaking to machines. All of it is done in public, transmutable, and totally transparent. It'll change the way we transact and it'll change the way we interact with the internet. Right now, we have banks. We have real estate agents. We have lawyers. All these people are middlemen. They will be replaced by something that is so not common that people don't quite understand it. I think the best thing you could do is watch one or two talks on blockchain, get yourself into the language of it, and then try to see whether you can use it somewhere so that it can start making sense to you because the people that started off the internet many, many years ago are incredibly wealthy. The people that are getting into blockchain and cryptocurrency and the like will be very wealthy because it will become the future.

- Well, I mean, the naysayers. Last year, when Bitcoin tanked, they were all like, well, we told you. We told you this was gonna happen. - Well, my book has the description of those people. They're called people that live in hindsight. - Yes, hindsight? - They're living in the past. - 2020? - Yeah, well, you know, exactly. That's the most dangerous thing you could say is like, oh, I saw my past. Oh, that makes sense now. And so people that don't understand the future and don't want to understand the future become pessimists, become cynics, and they become the people that shut down anybody who is acting in line of the future. And that's just an ego defense mechanism. Rather than being a pessimist or a cynic, the choice for you is to either look for opportunities or shut up, because if you're not gonna look for opportunities, don't stop the people who are. - Yeah, because you're gonna be part of the problem and it's part of the solution. - And then what you are is a victim of your circumstance, but God forbid you call them victims because it'll give them another reason to get angry. - Do you find that with the kind of outlook that you have, when you talk about these kind of things, 'cause it's kind of, it's very emotive.

Do people go, listen, John, really? - Old white men don't like me. - Don't they? - It's not all of them, some of them love me, but I see their faces in my talks and my workshops where they are unbelievers and nonbelievers, and they just think, well, it's just another guy talking a little bit of rubbish here or there. - Yeah, it's just one of those raw, raw kind of people. - Yeah, and the truth is, I actually don't care because they're gonna be the ones disrupted. And it's just a defense mechanism. They're so deep in the victim thinking, they're so stuck on what their success used to be that they can't foresee a different future because what it means is they have to reinvent themselves. And old men are the worst at reinventing themselves. And so what we need to become is malleable, and we need to become flexible and adaptable and adopt an optimistic viewpoint. If you don't, you will suffer. I mean, that's the most ridiculous notion of this is that you can either sit and complain or you can look for opportunities. - But we're sitting, you and I, we're sitting talking here with essentially old technology because radio has been around for a while. We now are moving towards a new kind of radio in the form of podcasts where people now get to choose, which is for somebody in my position as a radio presenter, we'd normally have been something very scary.

But what the future is doing, am I correct in saying this, is it giving us or making us more awake to choice? - Absolutely. I mean, we crave efficiency, convenience, and everything, if you look around you, every business that does really well has a major aspect of frictionless interaction. Amazon is one of the best performing stocks in America. Do you know which brand has done better than it? Domino's Pizza. It's the only brand that has done better consistently than Amazon and this goes to prove that Domino's Pizza has an extremely average pizza at all, I mean, you can really just taste it, it's average. But they're the number one growing pizza brand, why? Because they're the smartest in convenience. They were the first brand that delivered with drones, robots, now they have autonomous vehicles delivering their pizzas and they have an app called the 10 Second App. It does three things, it knows your GPS coordinates, it knows your credit card details, and it knows the best pizza or the most pizza, the pizza you've ordered the most from them, you open up the app, you have 10 seconds to press no. If you don't press no, it charges the pizza and delivers it to you. Hyper-convenient, hyper-efficient, and so sometimes we make decisions based on efficiency over quality.

- So where do we start, Johnna? We're getting time to wrap up, but where do we start? The book is great, your philosophy, and the book is, as I said to you, this is not something that's going to, it's not a quick read, okay? It's just, it's gonna kick you in the pants, repeatedly. - But it doesn't sound very fun, but yes. - But I think it's necessary. - Yes, it is necessary. - I think somebody to wake up and say, hey, have a look. And what I appreciate about the book is it's unapologetic. If you read the book, I read the book, I interviewed you tonight and I'll turn around here and I go, well, you know what, John sucks. You don't care. - I can't care, and Mark Twain said it best, he says the two most important days of your life are when you're born and when you find out why. When you find out why, you have no energy for people who don't agree with you, and that's okay. You're not supposed to agree with me, and not everybody is going to agree with me, but I have a mission, and my mission is to try and awaken as many people as possible to the potential of an abundant future rather than be fearful of it. And if you want to take the ride with me, please jump on board, and if you don't, good luck on your ride, it's no problem with me.

- Which I like. So where do, let's assume we want to do the ride. Where would one start? - That's a good question. And I think people are expecting a silver bullet, and the silver bullet actually is a process of accretion. Accretion is a word from the solar system where you have space dust floating around, and from the collision of the space dust, bit by bit, bit by bit, bit by bit, after a million years, a star is born. And if you want to be changing your behaviors, habits, and rituals, start slowly. Every day, expose yourself to a podcast that's about the future. Listen to YouTube, get your family together on a Thursday night, make it future night, get your staff together on a Friday morning, spend in half an hour talking about the future. And slowly but surely what starts to happen is your language changes. And everything that I'm saying to you here, if you ever watch me talk, I always tell the audience, everything that you saw on this talk was from Google. You have the opportunity of access to information at such a rich and abundant level that if you don't expose yourself, you are the one that's suffering. So just start slowly, start to 10 minutes a day, just like Jim, let's say you want to get fit.

What do you do? You train every day. And so for me, it's like, it's my deepest fascination to be exposing myself to this information. So I'm doing it nonstop all day, every day. I'm mixed between psychology and philosophy to futurism. And I'm constantly in like interacting with that information. And so what happens is that it becomes a natural ability for me to see opportunities because I've exposed myself to the information. So start slowly, but start, start now. - Yeah, well, what was the, I think was it Chinese or Japanese proverb? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next day's best time is right now. - Yes, absolutely. - Where does meditation fall into this, do you think? - Well, meditation is our ability to hear ourselves at a much better level. Prayer is about asking, meditation is about listening. And what we have is an innate wisdom above all of us. The Romans called it a pocket of genius above all of us. We all have a pocket of genius above all of us. We all have a very clear, unique signature. And if we're able to access this pocket of genius, we access an incredible level of energy, creativity, and innovative, just nuance. And for me, meditation is a big part of just quietening the brain and retraining it out of that constant need for anxiousness to a place of calm and serenity.

And in that place, you're able to be creative and have access to information that you never had before. That's why the book, I've actually written the book because of that as well is that we all have access to a type of information. So you can access yours. It will be very different to everybody else. And that's why for me, competition is based on something that is lacking, not in abundance. And so for me, I don't believe in competition. I believe in collaboration. Because if you tap into your unique flavor, who are you competing against? Nobody, nobody's competing against you. But if you're doing something that everybody else is doing, or if you're commoditized in your training, like university and school did to us, yes, then you're all about competition and wanting to beat everybody else. - Wow, okay. The reason I dwell on the meditation thing is when I first came across it, I've got a bit of a martial arts background and that's a whole lot. But I could not sit still. - Most people say that. They all say, well, other people can meditate. My brain's too busy. Guess what? We're all the same. - And I only realized at the later stage after sticking at it, that it's what they call the monkey mind.

Because I used to describe it to people as my brain lurches around like a drunken monkey. - Right. - And it reminds me of the movie App. You're like, oh, that's, that's, that's. It does get better though. - Of course, like anything. Like let's say you're training for a marathon. Are you gonna run out, get out there and run 42Ks first day? Of course you're not. You're gonna start at two Ks and then you're gonna stretch. And then you're gonna start at three Ks and then you're gonna stretch. And then, and so the process had, people have to be patient. I think the most important thing people can do is to write a to-be list and get away from your to-do list. Your to-do list is very short term. A to-be list is who do you wanna be? And if you wanna live an exponential life, start with the end in mind. Start with who you wanna be and work backwards. And for me is I wanna be fit, stronger, healthier, emotionally, physically and spiritually than I've ever been. So I've gotta work backwards from that to-be list. And I'm able to then design my life based on who I wanna be rather than being stuck in my to-do list day by day. - Wise, wise words. John, thank you. - My pleasure. - Thank you so much.

This was one of those unexpected interviews for me because I had a preconception and it's been blown up. The book is called Foresight by John Sarnay, S-A-N-E-I, John Sarnay. There's another two books. I'm rushing out and I'm gonna grab hold of those as well now 'cause I wanna read those. Thank you so much, John. We wish you all the best. Is anybody gonna get a chance? How do we interact with you on social media? - Yes, Yogi Bajan said it best is if you wanna learn something, read about it. If you wanna understand something, write about it. If you wanna master something, teach it. I'm constantly sharing videos across all my social media channels, trying to share some of the insights I've got in order to develop Foresight for all of us. And I'm doing a book launch on Thursday night at the Hyde Park events on 7th. There's about 600 people registered already, but please get onto Quicket if you wanna come through. It's free and I'll do a 60-minute keynote. - Fantastic. So on Quicket, what do we look for? John Saunay. - John Saunay Foresight, yeah. - Okay, on social media? - Yeah, John Saunay everywhere. You know, there's only one John Saunay in the world, which is the most incredible, remarkable thing.

There's no other John Saunay. So if you put John Saunay into Google, that's only me. - Well, there you go. Number one on the Google rankings. Thank you so much, John. We wish you all the best and good luck with the launch. Go out, get the book. I'll catch you again next Monday night between six and eight. Before I go, one more thing. Thank you for listening.