Chris Walker built Refine Labs from $3,000 in the bank and $65K in debt to $22 million in revenue in roughly three years — 100+ employees, 350 software company clients, and arguably the most influential voice in B2B marketing. He created the "dark social" movement, redefined how an entire generation of marketers thinks about MQLs, and built a massive audience doing it. Then he walked away. Because the peak of the business was also the lowest point of his life.

In this conversation, we get into what actually broke at the top, why changing your environment doesn't fix what's underneath, and what Chris means when he talks about "frequency" — stripped of the spiritual language and grounded in the engineer's brain he actually has. We debate whether you have to grind before you can transcend it, why limiting beliefs feel like facts, and why he thinks training your frequency will be as common as going to the gym within five years.

We also go deep on extractive vs. regenerative systems — in business, content, social media, and relationships — and why the intention underneath your actions matters more than the actions themselves.

I've been using Chris's ENCODED program for five months. I came in skeptical. I still have questions. But I can't deny what shifted. This one's worth your time whether you buy the concept or not.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why building a $22M company was one of the worst periods of Chris's life — and what that reveals about external vs. internal success
• What "frequency" actually means as identity + beliefs + intentions, without the spiritual language
• Why changing your job, city, or business doesn't work if you don't change the foundation underneath it
• The difference between extractive and regenerative systems — in business, relationships, and how you show up as a leader
• Why limiting beliefs feel like facts, and how to spot the invisible ceiling you didn't know you built
• How the intention underneath your actions — in content, business, and life — determines the results you get
• Why Chris thinks frequency training will be as mainstream as going to the gym within 3–5 years

BOOKS & RESOURCES REFERENCED

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight — https://a.co/d/05UhJN4T ENCODED Frequency Map — https://www.encoded.ai/ We Are Encoded Podcast — https://open.spotify.com/show/5eEzaXy4hUSqlvzD9ROqrz

That's Chris Walker.

He's got dual engineering degrees and he built refined labs B2B marketing agency into a $20 million a year company in just a handful of years.

He bas basically invented the dark social movement that is just really common in B2B marketing now as a, as a term.

And he is probably the most data driven marketer that I know or that, that I follow anyway.

And he, he's now saying that training your internal frequency is going to be as obvious as going to the gym and that we're, we're now just in like the 50s part of figuring that out.

And before you roll your eyes, I will tell you that I've been part of Encoded, which is his new, new company, and that he has for frequency training for about five months.

And I went into that as a healthy skeptic and a very, very practical scientific based thinker and the experience that I've had is just really undeniable.

So I had him on the podcast to talk about what it is that frequency is, how he discovered it.

And we just have a conversation about what it is that's really driving the results that you're getting today, whether you like those results or not and why the grind as specifically as an entrepreneur and that part of building the business may not be what you think it is.

Let's dive in.

All right, Chris, welcome to the show.

Glad to have you man.

Ray, glad to be back man.

Good to see you.

Excited to do this.

Most people know you as Refined Labs guy, demand gen, dark social like the marketer, right?

Like we all and we watched you build, those of us like on LinkedIn and others watched you build a phenomenal company at Refine Labs as you built that company from the outside looking in kind of success success like you're, you had a massive audience, ton of engagement and there's a lot of financial success that was associated with it.

I've heard you talk about that period of time of building is very successful company as also a, a period of time that internally it wasn't, it wasn't correlated to the same degree of success.

You weren't feeling the same way that it, the, the business was, was out.

But tell me about that like that, that transition, like the peak of refined labs, you're crushing it on, on LinkedIn.

But internally, something else is going on.

Talk to me as we go through this.

I totally understand that a lot of people will not be able to relate to the concepts and the ideas that I'm sharing.

I totally get it.

I've been in those shoes before.

And throughout this entire episode, I want to be clear that I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.

I'm also not trying to push my beliefs onto anyone.

So my objective in life in general now is to, to explore things for myself and to share it with others and invite people to consider expansive, empowering possibilities for themselves and their life and their families.

So that is my objective.

I invite you to consider it, but I have no desire to prove or convince anyone of anything as we, as we get into it.

Another thing is that people ask or people comment, you know, kind of in a, in a jerk way of like, oh, Chris, you were the marketing guy and now all of a sudden you're like, out this with a spiritual coach.

What the heck happened to you?

Did you go on a DMT trip?

Ha ha ha.

It's like, no, first off, but to me the transition is actually like very clear and very explainable.

And so the, the, the consistency between both of them is that I was able to look at a, a system and be able to dissect that system and say there's a, there's a big issue here that could benefit a lot of people if it was fixed.

And in marketing and in sales, it was like how businesses are just running this lead gen machine focused on extractive vanity metrics, not getting good results, not just the North Star of not taking care of customers, not acting in the right way, things like that.

And then I ran into this massive insight of like, whoa.

Like actually what it is, is how people manage the frequency, right?

It's.

And how people manage their frequency.

Then they move into a collection of people known as a company or an organization that has a frequency and then they take on investors and those investors have a frequency and all of a sudden that company is operating in a specific way.

And so you wonder why people that work in tech companies are often burnt out, feeling like they're falling behind, stressed out, getting recycled through jobs, turnover, super high.

That is because of the frequency of the company.

And so as I was working with so many of them, I started to observe this pattern that it actually had nothing to do with the marketing or the sales.

It had to do with the frequency of the investors and the leadership team that then goes into the company and how it impacts customers and vendors and everybody else.

And so.

And as we think about this for ourselves and we focus on ourselves, then we see it everywhere.

And so to get back to the original question, and I'm sure we'll get into that more deeply to just remind people, because I think people either don't have a good context to my story, which is totally okay, but it was less than seven years ago that I got fired from my tech job that I worked at.

I had $3,000 in my bank account.

I was living paycheck to paycheck.

I had $65,000 in debt.

I had to sell my car because I couldn't afford it.

I took the subway.

If I needed to go somewhere in Boston, I had to get.

Leave my apartment and go get a roommate to save 700amonth.

It wasn't that long ago that I was on paper.

I had a negative, super negative net worth and would be considered poor.

A lot of people, like, when they hear my advice, they think that I just have been rich forever, that my advice doesn't relate to them.

And I get it.

I understand what that's like.

But I just like to remind people that that is.

It wasn't that long ago that I can relate to where many people are right now.

And I've gone through the things of.

I don't feel ready to start a company.

There's people out there that are smarter than me, that.

That have more connections than me, that have more funding, that are more experienced.

Like, I'm not ready.

Right.

And just that.

And then to feel like I'm 28 years old and all my friends are out there getting married.

Most of them are in deep relationships.

But my set, eight.

We have eight.

A group of eight best friends, and seven of them are either engaged or married.

I'm not even in a relationship.

And all of a sudden it's like, whoa, like, am I falling behind here?

It looks like everybody's way ahead of me in this category.

All these people are out there having fun.

They're going out, drinking alcohol.

And that stuff hasn't been really interesting to me anymore.

But for some reason, I feel like I like it.

It's cool to do that.

So I'll just keep going out to the bars and living this life and feeling like shit the next day.

All these things where I initially had to challenge, like, what are the rules of life that I'm playing by?

Right?

Do these rules make sense to me?

And this Is it can be conscious, people can do this consciously.

I'm inviting you to do it.

But to me it wasn't a conscious activity that I did.

I just started to think about why do we go out and drink alcohol until 2 in the morning and call that cool and call that celebrating.

Why do we go to an office 9 to 5?

Why do we work Monday through Friday from 9 to 5pm Even if we don't feel like it, even if we don't feel creative, like why do we force to do it this way?

So just starting to think about that.

This is before COVID It's like why do we go to an office?

So challenging these types of things just led me to a much better life just by doing that, right?

Without making a ton of money, without being popular, famous, I had become a lot more free, had a lot more freedom just by moving in that through the contribution and the help of so many amazing people, like, and a lot of effort from myself and that type of thing that our company grew and became something super amazing that hundreds of people worked there.

We worked with 350 software companies.

Tons of people accelerated their careers, got promoted, companies grew, increased valuations, created tons of returns for investors and employees and team people accelerated their careers, started businesses, made money, help their family out.

All these amazing things happened from that company that I am super proud of.

And at the peak of the company we were doing 22 million in revenue.

And I'm on Zoom calls 12 or 14 hours a day.

I really don't have much.

I have to do all the business depends on me in a lot of ways.

So I have to go and take all these calls.

I run away to a vacation every 90 days.

I go and take a five day vacation, come back to a thousand emails, just seem to always be falling behind, behind.

And now all of a sudden we're 20 million.

But it, for some reason it doesn't feel like what I thought it would.

And maybe, maybe we have to be at 100 million and that'll be the thing that makes it feel better to get there and to realize, whoa, like I, I did everything that I thought I was supposed to do and now I'm here and it doesn't feel at all the way that I thought it would led me to be into question like what is, what are we even doing here?

And to look around and realize that it seemed like basically everyone is on the same hamster wheel regardless of what level you're on.

Running on a hamster wheel to try to get to where I am and for me to realize, hey, like, if you keep running here, maybe you'll get here.

But I think most people will realize, if not everybody will realize, it's not the way that I thought it was going to be.

So that was a huge, a huge white bulb moment for me.

It started a incredible process.

Probably the most.

It was the most amazing thing to happen to me, and I'm excited to get further into it.

Refine labs, you said it was like 22 million zero to 22 million in.

We went from 1 million to 20 million in 18 months.

18 months.

That's wild.

And you have, you had the light bulb moment around this time.

So what was, for your part, in terms of like, actual actions, what did it look like?

So you're, you're the owner, CEO of this company, 22 million.

You have this light bulb moment.

What actually, like, in terms of actions, like, what did you start doing or what did that process from there to here kind of look like for you

Had noticed that I got like immense benefits from them about, like, setting goals, shifting my mindset.

And then all of a sudden, like, the things that I wrote down were exactly what happened in my life.

I want to be an international speaker.

And then six months later, I'm speaking on stages internationally, getting paid a bunch of money or that I have 100,000 followers on social media.

And then all of a sudden I do or I want to have my business do a million dollars a month in revenue.

And then all of a sudden it is.

I adopted that and eventually noticed that all of the goals were outside of me.

It was almost like I'm setting all these external milestones, thinking that that is what's going to make me happy or make me feel successful.

And there was a big light bulb moment that went off that it was actually the total reverse.

That it's like, actually what it is is how I feel inside, and that then will shift how I, how I relate to everything.

So that was a big one.

I started to, I was taking those trips.

So I started to view taking a vacation as like a necessary thing that I would do every 45 to 90 days.

And I Would real I would notice that right when I came back from it.

I would have, I would be the most clear, I would be the most creative and I would get the most done in like three or four hours.

I would get more than I would get done in a month.

And I started.

People would call that like flow.

I would call that like super flow and something more than float what people would view as flow state.

And I started to think differently about what productivity is.

Like why am I sitting in all these meetings?

Why like what am I actually being more productive by doing all these things or not?

Is it actually a band aid to then an actual productivity?

So I started to go through these processes and lastly questioning what are, what are the definitions and assumptions that I live by?

I call them invisible contracts or the rules that we live by mean what does success mean to me?

What does productivity mean?

What does happiness mean?

What am I going for?

So things like that I spent a lot of time thinking about and redefining what it meant to me.

And as you start to redefine those things as your North Star changes basically everything about how you make decisions in your life fundamentally change, right?

And what I found for a majority of my life, and I think many people, if they are open to it, will admit this to themselves as well.

For a majority of my life, my North Star wasn't mine.

I was going toward a North Star that I was conditioned to think that that's what I should want.

And as I started to redefine it for myself, it became incredible how much different I feel on a daily basis and all the decisions that I made and where I was going at the same time.

I was running a private equity backed company at the time I was CEO.

I made the mistake of thinking it was my first CEO job and I made the mistake of thinking if I'm CEO for a PE backed company, I'm going to be the boss, right?

So I was like really lured in by the title and some equity and did that for a year and a half, two years and I was fucking burnt out like so very, very hard so much.

So we took a vacation, work vacation down here to Cabo and within a couple of weeks my wife and I who are like avid planners, like very structured, very like methodical in how we do at the end of the vacation we said we're gonna move here.

Like it, we're moved.

So we move back to Dallas or We go back to Dallas within 30 days, we've packed up everything.

We've, like, we've said it, we're, we're leaving.

I leave the corporate grind.

I.

And the thought behind it was, if I change the environment and I change the job, that I will, I will, I will benefit as a result.

And there were certain, there were a lot of benefits by changing the environment.

I mean, absolutely, like leaving the pe, at least the structure that I was in, I mean, there's some, there's different dynamics.

But to your point about definitions of success and stuff, I was still there, right?

Like, I, like I, I was still there.

So I had changed a lot of positive variables that influenced me, but I, at that point still had not changed anything related to what productivity was, what success was.

So I just basically took my work ethic and all of that down to Cabo with me and then did almost the same thing.

Like, kind of burned out figuring out LinkedIn and figuring out how to build something online and figuring out how to do consulting.

I don't know, 12, 18 months into it.

And I was like, what the am I doing?

I feel the exact same way that I did before for different reasons, right?

Like different variables.

But I think it speaks to your point about the external objectives and then the internal objectives, because you can, you can change a lot of the externalities, but you're still there unless you change the definitions of things and how you see things.

Right?

It's like changing the wallpaper when the foundation is cracked.

It's like, right.

And so what.

I think people in, in some way can relate to this as I go through some different examples, because if we do not shift our frequency, we will end up repeating the exact same pattern with new circumstances.

It could be, you know, new environment, but same, you know, same getting in the business.

Trap new business, same same eventual trap, new job, same toxic pattern in the job.

You leave a toxic job and you go find a new one.

Then all of a sudden, six months later, you're back in the exact same toxic pattern at a new job, toxic relationship, right?

You have a toxic boyfriend or girlfriend when you're younger, and then all of a sudden you're like, I'm.

I'm leaving this.

And you go and find someone else.

And the exact same pattern happens again.

Right?

There is a fundamental reason why this happens, which is our frequency.

And until we shift our frequency, we will, we will invite and resonate with the same toxic companies, the same toxic people, the same patterns that we form.

And so people try to change and I have before.

I totally get it.

To change the environment, to change the job, to change the person, to change the.

The thing, the wallpaper.

Rather than looking deeper at like, what is this showing about me, right?

Why do I keep recycling toxic jobs?

Why do I keep having the same pattern where I go and build a business and find.

Find myself trapped in it?

Why do I do.

Why do I.

Why is this hat.

Why does this keep repeating to me?

And as we start to look deeper, we realize that it's us.

And that not in a.

Not in a shaming way, actually in a wildly empowering way, that we are.

We are the creator of this.

And it's a big shift.

We've been talking about it on LinkedIn.

It's a big shift from the world happens to me, which I lived in, that I'm a victim.

It's all happening to me, which I lived in that state for the first time 32 years of my life.

So I get it.

Two things happen for me, which is an elevation.

And we'll stick with that.

There's other levels, but we'll stick with these two.

For.

For the sake of this podcast for.

Things are happening for me.

Going through this toxic relationship is.

Is happening for me to show me that this something is something inside of me is causing this.

Right, that there's.

That I'm not on.

Something here is happening.

This friction is happening to show me that I'm not on the right track, that I shouldn't and push and grind through this.

I should take a step back and say, why is this so hard?

It doesn't have to be hard.

Maybe this is an indicator that I'm not.

I'm not on the right path or I'm not taking the right thing, or I need to think about this differently.

The question I want to ask, because I know what frequency is, is like, can you change your frequency?

If that's the underlying thing, can you change your frequency without changing the externalities?

But I think to ask that question, like, I want to address for somebody that doesn't know frequency because we've talked about this now for months and I've done encoded and I'm part of it and.

But just.

I don't want it to be inside baseball.

What is.

You've mentioned it.

Frequency of the company, the frequency of the person.

For somebody who has no idea what.

What you're talking about, what is.

What is frequency?

Most people are conditioned that in order to change something, I need to act differently.

If I want to get a different result, I need to do something different, which is true.

Eventually, we do need to do something different.

However, our actions or our behavior patterns, the repeated actions that we take.

I'll invite you to consider the possibility that our actions are actually the effect, not the cause, and that the cause is our frequency.

This invisible architecture inside of us that runs unconsciously, that drives our emotional state, our actions, and our results in our life.

And our frequency is a combination of our identity, our beliefs, and our intentions.

These are all invisible.

These are all totally inside of us.

Some people, once they see it in themselves, have the skill to read it in others.

Just like, remember the first call that we did?

I was able to read it in you when you said, oh, I'm just an impatient person.

I just need to push it harder.

It's like, no, that's not who you are, right?

Like, I.

So as you get intentional, you can.

You can read it, the internal reference point of who you believe you are, what you do and why you do it.

Like, even just taking the exercise and getting a piece of paper down and writing down, like, who am I?

Not aspirational.

Not who you hope to be.

Really, what do you believe about who you are right now?

Your beliefs.

Beliefs are the filters and interpretations that you use to determine how the world works and what everything means.

So an example here is that let's say we're CEOs, right?

One CEO employee decides, hey, I'm quitting.

I'm leaving tomorrow.

One person, one CEO might think this is the worst thing ever.

Oh, my gosh, this person's leaving now.

We're not going to have someone to take care of.

We might not get that customer.

Everything's going wrong, and then they're panicked, and they're permeating that frequency across their organization and themselves.

And another person might think this is a good thing.

They probably are moving on to an amazing job.

We're going to be all right.

This gives an opportunity for us to promote somebody else.

And everything's.

This is happening exactly how it's supposed to and have an entirely different experience based on their belief system.

And then lastly, our intentions, the why underneath our actions, it is the direction of what, where our energy is going, meaning that you can do the exact same action.

And that's what most people are taught to do, right?

Just do a podcast, just post on LinkedIn, just hustle harder, Just go to the gym.

Just do that.

But underneath it, there's a why to it, right?

Are you going to the gym because it genuinely makes you feel better and you want to prioritize your health or are you going to the gym because you feel like you're obligated to because you're not, you don't look good enough and you need to look better to find a partner?

Two entirely different intentions of why you would go to the gym.

What about doing a podcast?

Are we doing a podcast here?

Are you doing a podcast to express yourself, to share, to inspire others, to empower people with your knowledge and experience?

Are you doing it to manipulate people and get people into your funnel and, and get people to, to buy your thing?

Right.

Two entirely different intentions underneath the exact same action.

And so as we become aware of this invisible architecture underneath the visible things, the visible things would be our emotions, actions and results that, that becomes the core cause of our out external experience.

And as we focus more on it first we become aware of it, right?

Become aware that it exists.

Have a belief in the possibility that it could be meaningful for us.

Then have an awareness of what it is for us and then to consciously recognize that we can change it.

That you are not a fixed personality.

You are just because of what's happened in the past and what you believe, that you are not creative or you're not smart or you're just an anxious person or whatever.

Some things that people believe about who they are, it's not really who you.

It is simply a reflection of what you believe about yourself right now.

And I think the most empowering thing about frequency is that frequency is a trainable state that every single human has access to every single frequency.

And it's not like, oh, that person's a low frequency person and they're a bad person.

It's that person is operating at a low frequency state and their, their behaviors, actions and results reflect their low frequency that they operate in right now.

And you could even envision that exact same person operating at a higher frequency.

All the frequencies exist inside.

Everyone has the possibility and the access to every single frequency for clarity.

We've worked together for months and I've used encoded.

I'm very familiar with frequency.

I've experienced it.

I feel much of what we're talking about.

I think for the sake of this conversation, I'll certainly share my experience or what it's been.

At the same time, I'll all, in some ways I'll play a skeptic because like I told you from, from, from the get go, I was like, I don't know Chris, man, like some of this sounds a little woo woo to me.

You know, it's like it doesn't.

It doesn't fit into my very like very.

What I think is very practical.

Like just like, you know, and you're an engineer like by, by trade, so I'm sure you've, you've thought the same thing.

But it makes sense here, I think, to, to play like a devil's advocate because I have right?

And I'm, and I, as I go through this process, I probably still have things to still like work through on.

Like, hey, that's a limiting belief.

I didn't even realize that until after you, you flip it.

And so to dig in like the examples you gave.

So say like going to the gym, right?

Like the intentions of going to the gym is, you know, whether it's to, to get ripped so I can find a partner or it's to improve my health.

If I go to the gym, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get the same result theoretically.

Like the, the output is like a physique and fitness and health is the output kind of regardless of the intention that I put in in a lot of ways.

Would you, would you disagree?

I'm totally disagree.

Okay.

Why?

Why?

Let's model it out with two people, right?

Person A, right.

They're inside of their identity.

They believe I'm not attractive enough.

That's part of their identity.

The belief is that people won't accept me if I'm not attractive enough.

And then their intention is I need to go to the gym and do feel obligated to do this so that I can try to close this gap of not being good enough so that someone will accept me.

And then when they go to the gym, the emotions underneath that are obligation, shame, not good enough.

They take the same action of going to the gym with low energy.

They, it feels hard to do.

They don't do it with pride.

And then the result that they get is a low quality workout that feels hard to do and unlikely to sustain.

Think about it.

That person's going to go to the gym not frequently because of the emotional state and the reasons why, underlying reasons why unlikely to be sustainable.

Then you have person B who says I'm someone, their identity is I'm someone who prioritizes my health and the belief is that all areas of my life improve when I take care of my body.

And then their intentions are I'm going to the gym in order to feel good and show up good for every area of my life.

I'm doing this because it benefits all areas of my life.

And I feel that the emotions they feel are calm, confident, excited.

The action they take is they go to the gym with a purpose, they have a plan, they enjoy it, they maybe say hi to other people in the gym, they start making friends, and the result that they get is they get incredible sustainable workouts that they feel good about.

Just like how two people can do a podcast and one podcast can totally suck and another one can totally bite someone up.

Why is that?

Why, why is the difference in that or why so the.

To say that, oh, just because two people go to the gym, they're gonna get the same result is just something I don't agree with.

Okay, that makes sense.

And along those same lines you would argue, and this is kind of what you're saying too, is the sustainability of it is what you don't get the result.

Like if, if you're, if the intentions are in one way, but the, the, the argument would be, yeah, Chris, that's just not like enough discipline, man.

Like, you just gotta have more.

If you can just muscle through it, if you can grind it out and if you can do it for 21 days and make it a, you know, install it into what you're doing, then it will work.

Like, if I can just, if I can just grind through it and I, and I have enough discipline and, and by the way, if I go and fail at it, if I go and stop after a week, after two weeks, whatever it is, it's a lack of discipline, right.

Like, then I've, I've kind of, I'm not, I'm not doing it.

Right.

Like, I've got to, I've got to fix something in order to be able to fix that.

How many different things did you try before you tried frequency training?

Just an estimate.

Me personally?

Yep.

Everything in the book, man.

Like, I mean, I don't, I mean, quantitatively, I don't know.

I'm a very experimental P100.

Probably a lot, right.

Different books, processes, coaches.

Yeah.

You know, discipline, accountability, all these different things.

Right.

And most of them aimed at what I thought was the thing I was trying to change, which was the symptom.

So like the such and such coach, the such and such training, the such and such thing, but all of those were kind of like individual symptom type, type of deals.

So.

Yeah, sorry, most things that people try to do is optimizing within the same game.

Right.

I'm going to have more discipline, I'm going to be more accountable.

I'm going to wake up at 5am, I'm going to build, get a SaaS tool so I'm more productive I'm going to hire an executive assistant so they can schedule things more productively for me.

Right?

You're optimizing within the box that you're living in, right?

And so what we're doing with frequency training is we're looking at the box and saying, actually, I want to live in this box over here instead.

And so that is the fundamental shift here that most people would view as, this is not possible, right?

This, the world is fixed.

Like, a lot of people believe that these are facts.

Like, it is a fact that the work week is Monday through Friday.

It is a fact that I have to grind and to get ahead.

It is a fact that if I don't have the right credentials that I'm not going to be successful.

It is a fact that the world's falling apart and because of X, Y and Z, I'm a victim and I'm not going to get ahead.

Right?

Those, those are not facts.

Right?

And so what we're doing is we're evaluating what are the rules of the game that I'm currently living by.

Are these actual facts or not?

And what you will find as you evaluate them is that almost none of them are facts.

They are beliefs that you have unconsciously agreed to.

And as you shift those beliefs, you start to end up playing in a different game.

And when you start playing in a different game, then you realize, oh, I don't need any of these productivity hacks anyway.

Like, having an accountability partner is a band aid.

Hiring an executive assistant to save a couple of hours to do these things, sure, it will save you a little bit of time, but it doesn't change the, the underlying game that you're playing.

And so I think that is the, the core insight of what we're doing here, right?

Because you've started to feel this experience, right?

It's like, oh, like, I'm actually, I'm playing a different game.

And when I start playing a game that's mine, like every.

It's.

It's smooth, it's sustainable.

It works.

Like, I don't need.

I don't need a coach to tell me what is right.

I don't need someone to text me in the morning to say, did I go to the gym or not?

I don't need the accountability because I'm playing my game.

I think that's like one of the most empowering things ever.

The significant breakthrough when I, When I think about frequency has been not, dude, like, you've got the fucking answers.

Like, you just.

What do you think about this?

Like, before you go hire a coach before you go do that thing, like, what do you, what do you think?

What is your intuition?

And what, like the agency that people have within yourself.

But if you go through, like take LinkedIn for example, which is, I mean in terms of content right now is very successfully.

But you know, the, the whole, the whole like my entire feed is filled with, hey, you don't know how to do this, you got to hire me to do this.

Right?

And it's, and I think there's something like 3.8 million coaches on LinkedIn right now, and it's all based on, you can't do it, you can't figure it out, hire me to do it.

Everything from spirituality to tactical marketing funnels.

Finding the right balance between your, your own intuition and what you're capable of and when to, when to go for help has been like a big breakthrough for me.

But if, if somebody else were listening to this and they said, I get that, but I don't know that that, that works for, for me.

What are you just smiling?

What do you, what do you think?

So let's just use this as a coaching moment.

Right?

Because you, you not to coach you, but to illuminate this to others.

Right.

So you said that it became.

The action was that I started to seek out coaches for answers.

Right.

When you start to do it repeatedly, that is known as a behavior pattern.

Like you even called it a habit.

Right?

A habit.

So to consciously realize that that habit is a effect, not a cause.

And so what is causing us to consistently take this habit?

Now let's break it down.

Okay.

What was the identity?

I'm just gonna, I'll guess, but you can clarify.

But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be at least semi accurate on this identity would be there's someone out there that's smarter than me.

I'm not smart.

I'm not smart enough or any.

Or I'm someone who can't handle uncertainty or something like that.

Beliefs might be.

There are other people that are more experienced than me.

I'm not sure that I need to go and seek someone out to get the right answer.

And the intention would be to avoid, avoid failure or avoid risk.

I'm going to go out to somebody else in order to hedge my bets and make sure that I don't fail.

That is why you go out and take, go out and see coaches.

Right.

And as we've, as you have.

Right.

I just provided a framework.

You've actually done it to believe like I know what's Right.

For me, right.

That is an identity statement.

I'm the person who knows.

There's nobody that knows what's right for me more than me.

Right.

I have all these answers.

I have a level of intuition.

I am super experienced.

I can make these decisions on my own.

And to have an.

Have an intention, to trust ourselves and to be able to have agency and that type of thing, and then we don't seek out coaches anymore.

And so it's just a perfect moment to slot this in because you can analyze, and this is for the listeners analyze what are the things that I do repeatedly, and then to use that framework to understand why do I do it, right?

And this, this invit, the invisible frequency inside of it, we all know it exists, right?

You, you know that you have an idea of who you are.

You know that there are things that you believe about the world that other people would disagree with.

You know that you can go to the gym with a bunch of different intentions of why you're.

Or do anything with a bunch of different reasons as why you're doing it.

To prove to people, to protect, avoid failure, to express yourself, to empower people, to inspire others to do, like to do something.

All those different reasons, right?

Even though it's invisible, right?

Wi fi is invisible.

Gravity is invisible, electricity is invisible.

There's plenty of things that are invisible that we believe in.

And this is something also.

It's like, oh, this is, this is there, right?

So I think that some people, especially because it's called frequency, some people are like, oh, that's that, that, that spiritual thing that Joe Dispenza talks about where it's just like, oh, I have this, I admit this energy, and then magical things happen to me.

And that is not at all what we're talking about here.

Although when you show up with a different frequency, you do tend to resonate with different things, right.

In a previous version of me, in a lower frequency version of me, I resonated with being at a bar at one in the morning on a Friday night, right.

In the current version of me, you wouldn't.

You're gonna find me in bed at 8:30pm on a Friday night.

Like I could.

There's not a place that I would rather, I'd rather not be than in a bar at 1am on a Friday night.

And it's the simply the difference of what frequency I'm operating on.

And you can do that with anything, going to parties, being at a certain company, right?

So we haven't even evolved this.

But if you Think about it.

In an individual, all of us have a frequency that we operate on.

We've created tiers, and you can go and visit that at the encoded frequency map.

That's almost like a maturity model.

But in reality, there's an infinite amount of frequencies that are all micro steps within that scale, and we all operate at one.

And then when you put a group of people together, a group of people will, over time, if they spend enough time together, they will assimilate to the same frequency and there will be a dominant frequency in the group of people.

As you spend more time with people, you absorb their belief system, you absorb how they believe the world works.

Right?

Do you believe that there's a, like, there's competition and we have to beat everyone else in order to win, or do we believe that everyone can win and there's an infinite amount of opportunity and it doesn't matter what other people are doing?

We're going to focus on what, what we want to do.

Right?

If you work at a company that is in one of those two spectrums, over time you will assimilate to that belief system or you will leave.

There's no other.

There's no other way around it.

It can be a company, it can be a family, our family, our relationship, our group that, that has a dominant frequency.

As parents, we can set the frequency for our children.

Do we want to have an expansive, empowering frequency or do we want to have it a frequency of scarcity and fear and not enoughness?

And our children will tune to a similar frequency that we're setting as family.

As leaders of companies, our leadership team, all the people that work at our company, will eventually begin to assimilate with the frequency of the leadership, mostly the CEO and the investors.

As a country, a country will have a dominant frequency.

A majority of countries operate at a very low frequency right now.

And then the world, the world has a dominant frequency, which is incredible.

Incredibly low.

Tier 1 frequency right now filled with survival, scarcity and not enoughness.

The way that those dynamics shift is through each of us, that as we take ownership over our own experience, we elevate our own frequency.

We show up differently for our family, for our team, for our friends.

They feel that they start to rub off, that starts to shift in them and it creates a rippling effect.

And if you can believe it, that that is the way that the entire world can shift.

But it all starts with each individual change.

I'll oversimplify this, but I think there's an interesting segue between marketing and what you did at refine in this and I'm sure you've thought about this and I'll if I oversimplify marketing but as you were building on LinkedIn I thought outside looking in one of the really cool things was you shifted the entire marketing landscape in B2B right.

And the reason was you took it from this activity based thing where there was a lot of measurement and a lot of numbers, but the actual desired output was not even the thing that they were doing.

So you had a whole bunch of people spinning wheels and using numbers but it didn't actually create the output that they really wanted.

So it was a bunch of measurability without the result.

And what I think of the reason they didn't measure it the right way, correct me if I'm wrong, is because it's really hard right like to really, it's to really understand what drives like a buying decision.

And it be there's different touch points, there's a different process.

Like it's not some linear landscape that you can just like from here to here to here.

You want identified that and then found better ways to measure the.

That really matters even though it was difficult.

And I, I contrast that to a degree with frequency because a lot of what we're talking about, let's assume somebody says yeah, I kind of buy in but like is like what's, where's the meat?

Like where's the numbers?

How do I measure?

How do I know where I'm at?

Like how do you, what makes it real?

Like the, the practical part of it and especially the measurability is that, is that a fair comparison?

And, and how do you measure it?

If, if so one of the most valuable skills that I have been gifted to cultivate, everybody can do it.

I just have happened to focus on it more is to take a step back and question why do we do this?

When, when did we decide to start to do it?

Who decided that we should do it this way?

Why do we think they decided to do it this way?

If we started over again today, would we still do it this way?

Like why do we do it this way?

And I think a lot of people just accept this is the way it is and I just choose not to.

I just choose to question why is it this way.

To me it really didn't have anything to do with how hard it was to measure or that you know, people didn't want to do it.

And if you just get enough, then that's.

Then everything will work out.

Right.

And then for some reason, we just keep doing the same dumb until.

Whenever I looked at it, I'm like, if you just go in and look like, listen to the sales conversations, customers hate this.

Bers get no impact from it.

Like, you just look at the data, it's not working.

And nobody seems to care.

And it's like, okay, so.

But why doesn't anyone seem to care?

It's because all these companies are propped up by a ton of venture capital and, like, the only objective is to either grow or die.

Like, and it does it.

It leads to incredibly extractive intentions.

They focus on, how much can I take?

How much can I take from customers, how much can I take from vendors, how much can I take from employees?

How much can I.

How much talent and energy can I extract from these people?

And then can I.

How can I discard them after 1.9 years so I could take their stock options back when I burned them out completely?

Right before they cycle it, recycle it again with somebody else.

Yeah.

And it becomes something that's like, how can I, I just need to spend money and steal this person's email address and then try and steal their time and then steal their energy and then steal their money.

And it's like, how can I just get, get, get from all this stuff?

I just took a step back and I was like, well, what, what if we just flipped it and did what we thought was right for the customer?

Instead of just accepting that this is what we do, why don't we, what if we just thought about it and started with a blank sheet of paper?

Oh, okay.

So if we make a good product and people like it, what if we just explained it to them and then we didn't have.

And then.

And we just allowed them to understand and make their own decision about when it was right for them.

And it's our job to just help our customer understand that and then let them make a choice instead of trying to extract and take everything from them.

And it really was not a very revolutionary idea.

And then all of a sudden, who would have thought when we put our customer first and we focus on what's right for them, more people buy and it's actually way more efficient and it's actually way better for our team and our customers and Our investors and everybody.

It wasn't very revolutionary.

I've just cultivated a skill where it's like, why is it like this?

And I'm doing the exact same thing with encoded.

It's actually.

It's no different.

It's like, why.

Why do we.

Why do we live our life this way?

Why do we restrict ourselves?

Because I started to look around, right?

And it's not just me, right?

It's not just me who.

Whether you're.

You have a million dollars in your bank account or a thousand dollars in your bank account, it feels like you're falling behind.

It feels like there's people that are doing better than you.

You're comparing yourself to other people.

You're, like, not present with your family.

You're wondering, is there something wrong with me?

Like, what's missing from me?

And I realized that basically everyone feels this way.

And so it's like, as I started to see the pattern, it's like something's.

Something isn't right here.

And I've just been able to.

And then through figuring out for myself and then being able to share it with some other people and see, whoa.

Actually, like, this works for everyone.

Like, this is a repeat.

It seems like a repeatable process, and that's been super cool.

The interesting is, like, when we.

When I first discovered Encoded and we sat down, if you look at, like, if I.

If I flash back to that moment, there was nothing really wrong, per se.

Like, by.

By most definitions, I'm in shape, all right?

Like, we.

We live in Cabo, we travel.

We.

Like, money is.

Money's okay.

Like, there were, like, things were.

By most definitions, things were the way they were supposed to be, right?

Like, it was.

But it was still this missing component, right?

There was a piece that.

And I think I was beginning to discover something along the lines of what you discovered as you, like, built the refinery.

You get to a certain point, you reach the threshold, and you're like, well, the dog caught the car, and this isn't.

This isn't what I thought it was.

And so you have a choice to make.

And I think a lot of us, we just try to achieve more.

Like, we think, well, the problem is, well, clearly I haven't done enough.

Like, I just need to keep going.

I'm fortunate enough to have enough people around me to know, well, you can.

You can just keep going.

Like, I know many people personally who have more than I would ever need, and, man, they're not.

They're not happy.

And I. I.

That's.

That's why the concept of frequency, like, clicks to me is because there's.

There's a certain level of, like, once you've realized it, it's.

It's much easier.

I think the challenge is prior to realizing it, prior to experiencing it, it still sounds like, out of left field.

Like, I don't know, like, it's.

It's kind of there.

And one thing that I like that you've done with encoded is you've begun to find good, like, an effective way to measure it.

Like, what.

What is it?

So you're.

You've done a good job, I think, of defining it in a way that if you're willing to hear, you can.

You can hear like, you've.

The podcast, like, breaks down some of these things really, really well.

And then through encoded, you can actually measure it and you can see.

You can see where I'm making progress and I.

Where I'm regressing.

But not only do you see it, what you see is actually what you feel.

Like, we had just talked about this before.

Like, I had.

I had a change in frequency, but I felt it long before I could see it.

But then I go into the system and I'm like, well, gives me the actual number and I'm like, well, that is about dead on, like, based on.

On what I'm done.

So how do you, how do you measure frequency?

Is.

Is I. I guess what I'm asking.

Imagine.

Imagine how people will have the different belts in karate, right?

And so within those bands, you can you assess about, like, am I a yellow belt or a. I don't even know what the colors are blue, or different things like that.

It's a maturity model of how, how.

How much of these different skills have I developed to move through it.

And so we've created that which is the encoded frequency map.

As you think about, like, what is my frequency?

If my frequency is the combination of my identity, my beliefs, and my intentions, that is all about how you relate to everything.

So we move through a intentional reflection process that takes 45 to 90 minutes.

And then through that, we use an a. AI algorithm to be able to match you with the tier that you are in based on the.

The things that you report and what we found in early research.

It's not part of the product yet, is that you can actually downstream correlate your frequency, AKA how you relate to life, what you believe about life, to your emotions and your behaviors, your stress levels, the emotions that you feel, the regulation of your nervous system, the capacity of your energy.

And so we're starting to create there's, and coming from like who knows who.

Who would have thought?

I studied biomedical engineering in college and now all of a sudden we're here, we're round trip, like whatever, 16, 18 years later.

And there's a fascinating component in terms of bioelectric measurements related to our nervous system clearly can be correlated with our frequency and have clear indicators of, of longevity, happiness, clarity, you know.

Right.

Emotional regulation.

And there are some really amazing things that are, that are brewing in terms of the measurement of this.

Have you seen any correlation or how correlated is frequency to external events?

Like so if I today I'm, you know, I'm at, call it a, I'm, I'm at a three hypothetically.

And we say hey, you're at a three.

But then something externally my business tanks, my business burner leaves tomorrow.

Or like I experienced recently, like a heart thing pops up and you're like, well wasn't expecting that.

So like external things that typically we think of mess up our mood, our stress levels, like the other things that are associated with it.

So how correlated is frequency to the external events, do you think?

So it's actually a incredible switch which is that we find out who we really are when challenges arise.

And it's easy to think that we're high frequency when everything's going well, but it actually when thing when quote unquote challenges arise.

Right.

It's also your interpretation of whether something is hard or whether something is a challenge.

Not everyone like having a conversation with your wife, not everyone would say that's a hard conversation.

Only certain people would, would, would consider it a hard conversation.

When we experience quote unquote challenges, it, it pushes us to our true frequency.

It exposes our true frequency.

I wouldn't say that, that having an event like certain events dictate our frequency.

I think that it actually just shows us what the true frequency is.

And so, so what was happening for you most likely is that you had established a mid tier 3 frequency and did not have the capacity to hold it consistently.

It's actually what a couple of people have reflected and what's been my experience as well is that as we do frequency training, what happens is that the, the highs get higher, but the important thing is that the lows get higher.

And so as we keep moving that baseline up, then all of a sudden as we experience a challenge, we recover faster, we don't see it as a challenge anymore and things like that.

The interesting part of it is not just reaching a frequency.

Right.

I felt all six tiers of frequency.

But I've only held tier six for three days because I do not have the capacity to hold it consistently.

It's the having the capacity that this is who we are always.

Not just when things are good and not just when everything's going our way, but always we show up when our best employee leaves, when something happens with our health, when any external event happens, that we show up in that way.

And so I think it's a little bit of a mindset switch because circumstances do not dictate how we feel.

Our beliefs around the circumstances is what dictates how we feel.

And as we begin to really recognize that, we realize that.

I get that many people will not recognize, will not be able to relate to this.

But just because somebody passes away does not mean that it's a bad thing.

Like you could look at.

Just because something bad, quote unquote bad happens does not mean that it is a bad thing.

It is our subjective opinion that is judging the event as good or bad, which is known as a duality.

And dualities are entirely made up.

It just is what it is.

And then if you want to decide that it's good or bad, you are welcome to.

However, when you do judge things as good or bad, it creates in a huge level of suffering in both directions.

In order to judge some things as good, it means that you must have a reference point of things that are bad.

And as you do that over time, you realize that you create a big level of suffering of these, of in both directions.

You know, just speaking culturally because of the duality, it's.

And this also speaks probably to parenting and how you can influence the frequency.

But one of the shifts for, for me, or observations, I would say is when we move from the States.

And I mean, I lived globally as a kid.

Like I grew up, up, you know, around the world.

But I was, you know, I'm American trained, right.

All through and through.

And we moved to Mexico and Mexicans have a different relationship with death, right?

Like, it's, it's a completely different look on it, right?

And they.

And you know, and in some ways there's a, there's a celebration of it and this and that.

And you're like, hey, why do we sell all these skulls everywhere?

Like this guy.

Come on.

Like, and, and once you better understand it and then you realize, hey, it's just a belief system.

It's a shift in a belief.

It's the same event that's happening here versus versus there.

But how you look at it is, is.

Is Everything.

And you know, there's a, I did a lot of reading of like stoicism and stuff, like over, over the years.

And you know, there's like the, the Marcus Aurelius and all the others who are kind of like, it's not the events, it's your response to the event.

Right.

And so I like fundamentally kind of know that.

And when this heart thing popped up, the immediate reaction was like, why in the fuck is this happening to me?

Like, after all I, I do like two hours of cardio a day.

I eat good.

Like, and it was shortly after my drinking, it was like, like, basically I just like almost stopped.

You know, I was like, well, why in the hell would this happen to me?

Like, I'm, I'm basically an athlete and I now have a heart condition, blah, blah, blah.

Took a period of time, like a smaller window, but my response to it like changed very quickly.

Like I'd say within, within a week or two.

And it was, well, hey, this is actually great.

First of all, I'm conditioned enough that this, this, this heart condition is not a major threat.

That.

Right.

Like, so that's, that's great news.

Secondly, it's hereditary.

Like, if I can fall on the sword and identify this, like, this is great.

I identified it at 45.

That's awesome.

Like, most people don't find out about this till like 65 and they're dead.

Cool.

We're going to have later today echoes done for our kids.

So now like, it's.

If because it is genetic, we'll know about it.

There's all of these positive things that, that are a result of it.

And it's just a shift of the belief.

Like, but it, but it wasn't the instant reaction.

Like, the instant reaction is, oh, but there was a very quick snapback, like a very quick bounce.

And I'll add one piece to this, like, to this conversation because like, I'm very open minded, very experiential.

Like, it's how I got here, right?

So, but I'd be like, like I'm very grounded in, in science.

But what I can tell you, just personally, for anybody that's listening to this, like, it's only through my experience that I feel confident enough to like, to, to open this up and say, listen, I don't even fully understand all the science guys.

Like, I'm just telling you, once you've experienced a shift in these things internally, then you have a completely different perspective and a completely different paradigm on this conversation.

And, and that's been.

But, but it's hard and you're doing a good job of it, but it's hard to impart that as much as possible to the very practical mind unless you've experienced it.

So is that, is that the resistance you get?

And how do you.

How do you address that when you're talking about it?

And they would recommend bed rest.

For a long time, Time magazine would talk about how exercising is dangerous.

And that happened in the 30s and 40s, and most people didn't exercise.

And because how things have been accelerating, I don't think it'll be more than three to five years until, Until a majority of people will believe that it's irresponsible not to do something on a daily basis that improves their frequency.

It won't be that long.

The evidence is very clear, and more people will become aware of it over time, and more people will experience it and share it with others, and the wheels will turn rather quickly.

And so that's the way that I view it in terms of adoption, that it'll just takes it.

It'll take some time.

Even though most people don't believe that that's what is healthy or smart, There are people right now that, that see the same thing, that like a lot of things that people do with their life, regardless of how aesthetically in shape they are or how successful they are or how much money they have or how many followers they have, that the things that they do to acquire those things are like smoking cigarettes all day, and that it actually has a huge toll on their happiness and their life on an ongoing basis.

And so I think we'll just, We'll.

We'll see that play out over the next.

It'll be.

It'll grow, but over the next three to five Years, I think it'll be a majority of people will believe that this is a necessary part of life, of taking care of yourself.

You read Shoe Dog and you're like, and you realize, holy.

Like before Nike, wearing tennis shoes as a daily driver was absurd.

It was goofy.

People didn't do that.

And it's just the world that I know, it's the paradigm that I have and to realize how quickly we've shifted from tennis shoes being weird like, and running being a thing that people did.

And like it was, it was odd like you were saying, like the, the conditioning and the health association of it.

Like Phil Knight was like pushing upstream.

And now it seems, it seems crazy in hindsight, right?

Like to, to think that that was the, the prevailing position.

It's interesting because I'm positive that Phil Knight, while he was quote unquote pushing upstream, it was inevitable.

Millions of people are going to do this, right?

I feel the exact same way.

Like they're.

I, I don't view it as pushing.

Like I'm not push, I'm not pushing.

But I do recognize that most people are not open to this concept right now.

And I also view it as inevitable.

Millions of people will do this.

One of the things that I would say, I don't think I still struggle with it, but one of the, the dualities that I, that I still think about frequently is the difference between seasons, right?

Like you go through different seasons.

So you take like entrepreneurship and you built businesses, you advise people on building businesses.

The belief that I've generally had has been you go through these, these different seasons and in the early, early phases, when you're a one man band and you've got a shoestring budget, that some part of that process just involves grinding it out, involves doing a bunch of shit that you don't want to do, involves doing the thing that is necessary to create the environment where you don't have to do that thing anymore.

So it's almost like I need to endure what we would like just for the sake of argument, low frequency for a period of time to be able to afford the luxury or have that, the optionality to, to, to, to do higher frequency stuff.

And if I don't do this, then I don't get to.

There's like, I can't build from a high frequency standpoint.

I've got to grind whether it's, whether it's frequency directly or not.

But you know what I'm saying.

I know that was one of the invisible contracts.

And in your kind of, in your process, like in your, in your experience, like you went through that.

But it, I'm sure it in some ways made it easier to pursue higher frequency work when you have, when you have those resources.

So what would you say to somebody that says, chris, that's cool, you know what I'm gonna do?

I'm gonna grind it out for the next few years.

I'm gonna make a ton of money.

And I think I just have to endure this for a period of time because it's part of the game.

So one, everyone is welcome to do whatever they want.

So please, if that's what you think is right for you, go for it.

Right?

I have no interest in convincing you otherwise as you were going through that.

And I invite someone to rewind back two minutes and re listen to that again and try to count the amount of limiting beliefs that were in that statement.

If it was at least two dozen limiting beliefs in the statement.

Now, the thing is that where we are, where we sit as quote, unquote, middle aged, right?

That when we enter it, we need to unwind all of the garbage that we have received over the past 20, 30, 40 years of our life through school, media work, magazines, MTV, friends, influencers on social media, all this garbage that we've been receiving, AKA like just programming, right?

But think about it as a child and think about how the world could look like if people were taught how to elevate their frequency in school instead of memorizing useless information.

And that they came out of school and they had clarity on who they are, about how they could contribute.

They trusted themselves.

They had the ability to explore things that actually matter.

They didn't get pushed into engineering or coding because that's where all the money is.

Or being a lawyer or being a doctor when they didn't want to be.

They're 18 years old and they're operating in a high frequency and that's how they begin their adult life, to contribute to the world.

It is an entirely different paradigm than the paradigm that we lived in.

And that's the world that I envision.

And I think that is a.

So, yes, for a lot of people that are our age, you can decide what you want to do.

Basically, you need to unwind what's been given to you and get back to the core of who you really are.

Everyone is welcome to play whatever game they want.

You can keep playing in the world that exists today.

I'd invite you to consider the possibility that the world that we grew up in is not going to last for very long.

If not already collapsing.

The idea that our credentials matter, that our idea that our work ethic matters, the idea that how much information we can memorize or how experienced we are, that those are the things that matter anymore.

I believe that how calm we are matters, how present we are matters.

How much trust we have in ourselves, the discernment that we have around what's right for us and what isn't right for us.

How we can see potential in others and the potential that they have in themselves more than they see for themselves.

How clear we can make it for others instead of being stressful or urgent.

To me, those are the most important things moving forward.

And so I'd invite people to consider the possibility that things are changing pretty dramatically and it is totally up to them what game they want to keep playing.

Going back to the limiting beliefs, like, one of the.

One of the challenges is, I bet if somebody rewinds that and they.

And they listen to it, they go, yeah, that's.

That's what I mean.

I don't, I don't see the limiting belief.

Like, that's, that's it, Chris.

Like, that's the real world.

Like, you're, You're.

You're not.

Because the, the interesting thing about limiting beliefs is, like, you don't know that they're limiting, right?

I don't know.

I. I don't know.

Otherwise I'd probably change this.

Like, awareness of the.

The limiting belief usually helps spot it.

I guess a better way of saying it is I usually ident.

I better identify limiting beliefs in hindsight.

Like, it's easier for me once it fit.

I'm like, fuck, man.

Like, that was a.

That was a real limiter.

But previous me didn't see it because that was the belief.

So that's the whole point.

It feels like, how do you.

How do you find them?

How do you.

How do you hunt down limiting beliefs when.

When you're kind of blind to them?

Like, that's the point of them.

It's a skill, a skill that can be developed.

The skill of knowing the difference between a fact and a belief.

Additionally, early on, it can be helpful to use tools or coaches to be able to pull those out for you as you work to develop the skill on your own.

So that is something that can definitely help.

And the whole point of a limiting belief is that it feels like a fact that you don't question it, that you think that this is just how it is, that it's normal.

Normal.

Right?

And to imagine, like, what we call.

We call it an invisible Ceiling and finding the ceiling that you've created for yourself that we are not aware of, right?

And so there's a experiment that has happened where you catch like a firefly or something in a jar and then it's stuck.

You poke some poles in it and it's stuck in the jar and it keeps banging up against the ceiling and it realizes, hey, I'm not going to be able to get out of here.

And then you take the cap off and it doesn't leave, it stays in the jar because it thinks the ceiling's still there.

And we do that with our life.

It doesn't matter how far you are, how much money you have, how successful you are.

Every single one of us, including myself, is way more capable than we are taught to believe that.

We believe for ourselves right now that we have way more talents and way more capabilities than we believe for ourselves.

And the only thing that is holding us back from achieving those potentials is our own beliefs about what we're capable of.

And so I think that building the skill of recognizing where is my ceiling and how can I identify and break through the ceiling, not through force or willpower, but through metacognition, a higher, high form of intelligence.

And I think that is a, a powerful skill that every human should know is possible and that invite them to explore it.

Think through several, like audit what the limiting beliefs of five years ago, you were right, like younger you had these beliefs and if you start with you've already done this, right?

Like this isn't, this isn't new.

Like this is just, you're at a new place and some, and for some reason we get to a new place and we think we're, we've, well, we've figured it out.

Like we've, we've cracked through them all.

But 20 year old Ray and 30 year old Ray and 40 year old Ray like had had different breakthroughs.

So it's really, it's a continuation of, of the same thing you mentioned earlier.

So there were two examples you gave when we were talking about intentions and, and one of them was, was the gym, which we already explored.

The other was content, which I think is really interesting.

It's a fun conversation with you because you've been a very prolific, very successful content creator.

I mean your podcasts were fucking crushed.

Like on, on the B2B marketing side, you, you killed it at LinkedIn, like very good in terms of copy writing, turning, turning content into marketing.

To paraphrase kind of like what you were saying, you can like, you can go into content with 2.

2 intentions.

1 is expression.

Give myself energy because I, I feel like I've got something to contribute or even like it's, you know, it's a.

And then there's the flip side would be just manipulative, right?

Like, my, my intention with this piece of content is to manipulate a behavior, and that's arguably marketing.

Like, some people would define, like, the, the purpose of it is catch attention, change their minds, get them to desire something that, that maybe they didn't desire before.

And my, my question would be for the person that's thinking, hey, I want to create content with better intention.

But Chris, I needed to sell shit.

Like, I still need my content to.

To sell shit.

And a lot of the stuff when I feel like when I'm creating content with better intentions, it's a better energy.

Like, I love doing it, it's fun.

And, you know, there's some people tell me it's great, but that doesn't grow my business.

That doesn't help me build the audience.

It doesn't help me generate the lead.

So I've got to do it this way.

Is it.

Is it either or.

How do you look at it now?

There's very little in this world that are either or.

So there's a major amount of gray area in the question that you asked.

As we go through this inside of your question, there are definitions and assumptions around everything, right?

I do marketing to get leads.

Right.

That isn't a fact.

That's a belief that people, People agree that this is what we do.

Right?

I need to do this to grow my business.

Well, why do you need to grow your business?

Probably because you, you need to buy a car or a house or something to improve, to impress other people, or to feel better about yourself.

As you unwind the question in itself, you.

You see that, and I've, trust me, like, I know what this is because I spent most of my time on LinkedIn and, and there are a wide variety of intentions.

It's not just do good for the world or manipulate people.

There's a wide variety.

And for a majority of mine, mine was to prove things to people, to prove that I was right, to prove that I was smarter, to prove that my way was the right way and my energy while I'm doing it.

I have no idea.

I just think I'm doing the right thing and I'm helping out people and I'm expressing myself, but underneath it, in hindsight, I'm like, whoa, I was really trying to prove stuff to people.

And so I'm not, I wasn't necessarily trying to manipulate people.

I was just trying to make people know that I was right.

And in reality, what does right even mean?

When I approach content now?

Like, in order to show up with like proper intentions, you must have a foundation, a foundation of not needing anything for.

From anyone.

I don't need your money, I don't need your validation, I don't need your approval.

I don't need, I don't need these things from you.

Big part.

When you don't need anything from everyone, then you can show up with pure intentions.

Without that foundation.

It's very, it's very easy to leak into needing something, to, to try to get something, or to leak into negative intentions.

And then once you have that foundation, then it's like, okay, so what am I, what am I sharing?

What am I, what am I doing this for?

And part of it might be self expression, self exploration.

When I think about content and business now, I think about it like music.

I think about it like making a new song.

Like, we're right here, we're making a song.

I get to express myself and share it.

And I'm inviting people to listen to it if they want, right?

And they might love the song, they might not want to listen to it.

And that's all good.

And some people will say that was the most, that was the most amazing song.

It changed.

I've had songs that changed the trajectory of my life.

I listened to it and something ma.

Something happens and it's been life changing for me.

And so maybe that can be some.

Like, that's.

I can relate to that person.

And I, I believe that.

And how much that would have changed the, the experience of my major entrepreneurial life, that I would be delighted to be that for even just one person.

And so the level of intentions, there's a lot of them.

And at the very foundational level, if you need stuff from people, you will leak into the spectrum on the negative side of intentions or the better framed as extractive side of intentions.

Then to clarify, you're not saying you need to be, you need to be rich to do this.

Like, it's not like, I don't need your money because I've got a ton of money.

It's because I've raised my internal frequency to a point where my intention, like, I don't need it because I'VE I've, I've stabilized or I have enough of a foundation internally that I'm, I'm not, I'm not doing this for, purely for, for, for monetary reasons.

One is why you're doing it.

Why am I doing this overall?

But then there's even, like, for me, I sat in this level of conditioning of if I want to make money, these are the available options that I have.

I have to study science, I have to work in tech, I have to do, do these things.

And it pigeonholes you to literally less than 1% of the things that you could do.

And likely with that percentage, it's not the thing that fires you up.

You're doing it to make money, not because you love it or enjoy it.

Even if you tell yourself a story that you do love it, like I have before you actually, you don't.

You've just been conditioned to.

And when you break out of that and you look at, whoa, there's all of these things that I could do, and there's these things that I'm way more passionate about, and I recognize that anything that I can make money with, anything that I do, so I might as well do something that I love that fires me up every day.

It just changes the whole conversation.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, I know many people are like, yeah, easy for you to say, bro.

You sold your company, you did those things, like, you got, you know, a bunch of money in your bank account, blah, blah, blah.

I understand, right?

And that's what I know.

Maybe a couple people will relate to it.

And I think that's amazing.

You've mentioned the word extractive a couple times and as it relates to marketing content.

And what I find is, is what's interesting is even at the platform level, like, the more extractive the, the creators become on a platform, the less desirable it is to be in that place.

And I'll, I'll use like LinkedIn as an example.

It's not just to be up on LinkedIn.

Like, I, I've got, you know, I've built a business, I've got like, engagement there.

As you've seen the trends over, over, over the last year or two, it's just become like this place where feed is filled with purely extractive types of stuff.

It's like, get my lead magnet, get this.

And where do.

Because of.

But I see that on not just LinkedIn.

I guess it's like social media in general.

And so my, my question is, as this becomes more popular, which seems inevitable because AI makes it so easy to create content.

Now as as that happens, what is in your mind?

What's the future of, of social media as it relates to it being a platform for whether it's marketing or just in general?

This is going to be great.

Okay, so let's look at, let's just set the spectrums first.

Okay.

So on one side of the spectrum we have extractive.

Extractive meaning I am here to take more than I give, I'm here to get stuff.

And on the other side of the spectrum we have regenerative, which means the reason I'm here is to empower and energize the entire system.

So if it doesn't empower and energize the entire system, it is not success for me.

Right.

The, the basically the entire world today operates within with, on the extractive side of the spectrum.

The food system extracts all of the energy and resources from the soil and destroys it.

To get as much production as they can to squeeze a little bit more profit, they ruin the land to get a little bit more profit.

The pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry focuses on basically leading you to get sick so that they can extract all your money to fix your problems.

Rather than focusing on preventative things.

Media networks extract your attention and your energy to monetize it against ads and put you in a fear or scarcity based state so you stay on the platform and become addicted to it.

People have extractive behaviors, they go for extractive dopamine sources like doom scrolling or alcohol or you know, risky type of dangerous behaviors or toxic relationships.

Instead of regenerative behaviors like exercising, eating clean foods, celebrating in ways that don't like make, don't use alcohol and make them feel disconnected from themselves.

And so there's everything in life, it falls onto this spectrum.

Business, many, most businesses are there to take more than they give, take more than they give from employees, from customers and from the environment and the world.

And there's a small subset of businesses that are operating in regenerative ways.

So when we get into social media in particular, you can look at the dynamics of how it's created.

So at the platform level, the objective is I need you to stay on the platform longer so that I can serve you more ads to make more money from you.

And so how am I going to get you to stay on the platform longer?

I'm going to Deliver this content that extracts your energy and attention and I trade that for someone's money.

That is the base algorithm of every modern social media platform today.

Because they all monetize with advertising.

Free, you're a free user, and then they put ads on top of it.

Now, because that is the state of the algorithm, all the creators, in order to play the game, must play in an extractive way because that's what gets, what actually gets the attention because it helps them sell the ad.

So then all the creators, you either have to be super extractive and do all those types of things, polarizing content, making people feel not good enough, comparing, make them compare themselves to you and think that they need something that you have or whatever, that those are the things that get the most traction because they sell, they get the most, they extract the most energy and sell the most ads.

I mean, I think there's already some studies out there, but I think it's going to become pretty apparent in the next two to five years that scrolling social media is as bad as smoking cigarettes for longevity.

Longevity, health, stress response, things like that.

I can't say that for sure, but that would be my, my best guess at where it's going and that it would require in any area of life, it requires a fundamental shift in intention from extractive to regenerative to change.

Right?

And so it require, it requires changing the North Star at the highest level.

If the food system wanted to move to a regenerative model, they would have to care more about doing the right thing for the environment than extracting a little bit more profit.

A new social media, it wouldn't even be called social media, but a new platform would need to originate that cares more about empowering, energizing the user than selling more ads.

This is not a, a philosophical argument to me.

This is just where is your North Star?

Especially with the ongoing rapid development of artificial intelligence, that there is going to be a, a, a serious divide in how the world works in between regenerative and extractive worlds.

So I invite people to consider that possibility to begin to observe it.

People like relationships that you have are regenerative or extractive.

You can feel it.

Some people suck your energy, other people empower you and make you feel fired up after you spend time with them.

Every single thing that you experience in life either is giving you energy or taking your energy.

And how are you approaching creating regenerative content today in an, in an extractive platform?

My content consumption has never been lower.

I think that on, I think that today my, my post got 3, 500 impressions.

Where a couple, a couple of years ago my average post would get 350,000 impressions.

So that's a, that's a 99% decrease in views and impressions.

And some people would say, hey, it's just because you're talking about stuff that people don't care about now.

You used to be good and now you're talking about shit that I don't care about.

And sure, I think there might be some truth to that, that people don't care about it as much right now, but they might in the future.

So I think I would say I'm, I'm just early to the party of where this is going.

You know, we met years ago and you know, as you were, as you were building refined labs and you know, outside looking in, like, like we talked about like it was doing really well and internally there were, there were some bottoms for you.

I want to kind of close on the opposite note.

No, because like, I don't want to think about this, the frequency piece.

What was the moment that you knew, like absolutely knew that you had this frequency thing and it was real?

Like when, when you like, was there a, like a very, like an instant that you said this is real?

Was it a gradual process?

What was that moment?

What do you think that the moment was where star athlete realizes they're going to be a star athlete?

Yeah, I don't know.

It's not the drama.

Yeah, it's not a moment, it's a choice.

It was a probably a 10 year journey of trying to discover what do I care about?

What matters to me, what's fulfilling to me, what is my purpose?

How am I going to make an impact?

Who am I?

That eventually culminated in a Holy shit.

When I look back, like the number one thing that I did to get to where I am was this thing called frequency training.

And I actually was just reprogramming, evaluating and reprogramming my beliefs, focusing on metacognition.

And that is why I am where I am today.

And with that recognition, I felt this, this overwhelming sense of responsibility, but not responsibility in an obligatory way.

I don't feel obligated at all.

I feel excited to share this with anyone who would like to experience it, that it's made such a huge impact in my life that it's just like, this is what I'm meant to do right now.

And I love the possibility that my objective purpose, goal will continue to expand over time.

But right now I believe that I, there's millions of people that would get significant benefit in their life in a short period of time from understanding these concepts.

And so I'm pumped to do that.

I'll close with this, man.

I, you know, I've been doing Encoded for, I don't know what it's been, four months, five months, something like that.

And I think I was the first customer of the platform when it's, when you did the app.

Yeah, you were.

That was amazing.

Yeah, I like.

So what I will say is, and I, I've said, I've hinted at this like throughout the thing.

I like, I, this wasn't blind belief, right?

Like, this was, hey, I'm open minded enough to try some stuff and, and I think that over time those will be the best advocates of Encoded because there will be the people that do try it, people that do it and, and invest in the training and invest some time.

I think there will be a point that comes very quickly that you like, you can't deny what happened retroactively, right?

Like you experienced it.

You go, well man, I don't know.

Like, I can't explain all the science, but I can tell you this, right?

And I can only tell you from, from experience.

And personally, it's, that's, that's where I speak from, like recognizing, hey, this is probably an infinite path like that goes on for forever.

And if it just keeps leveling up, up in the way that it has up to this point, like, man, this shit's really, really fun.

Like there's some significant unlocks, but the, the impact isn't just on business.

It's not just on, you know, your fitness, it's not just on health.

But it's, it's interesting because frequency affects it all right?

Like the business has transformed as a result of buy frequency because I, because I own the place, right?

And so the, the way that I lead and the way that I manage and where I allocate my time and how I allocate my time is like felt within the business.

And I see results on, on health.

Like, I didn't start this to be more fit, but as a result of starting this, Mike's, my relationship with fitness has kind of changed.

And it's, with relationships, it's everywhere, man.

It's 360 and I think it's, I think it's phenomenal.

And you, and you can't deny it once you've gone through the process and until you do like, then you know, hey, people like us are weird.

Like that's, that's fine.

Like, that's, that's okay.

I'm, I'm, I'm good with that.

Any final comments?

And where, where can people find out more about Encoded and, and find more about you?

So for a majority of my life, I thought that people who didn't drink alcohol were weird.

And now I believe that people that.

No judgment here, but it's my own belief that people that do drink alcohol are weird.

We're put.

Putting poison in our body and calling it celebrating or high class.

And that again, no judgment there.

It's just a shift in belief system that a while ago people thought that people that exercised were weird.

They would, they, in Time magazine, they would have exercising for circus performers and they would make little jokes like, ha, ha ha, like, like, look at this Jack, circus performer.

He.

Those are the only people that exercise.

And now everyone thinks, whoa, exercising seems like it makes a lot of sense.

And the same thing here is that people think that this is weird right now, or some people do.

And it won't be very long until everybody believes, or most people choose to believe that there is a significant benefit in doing this.

And so I invite you to, to be open to that.

It probably was better to be early to fitness and exercise or be early to stop smoking cigarettes or to be early to some of those things.

So I invite you to consider that as a possibility now to close out.

I really appreciate you having me on.

I really appreciate you being a super early adopter and an advocate for this and for being the first customer on the, the True Encoded platform.

So that'll be something that when millions of people are using it, you will go down in history.

We'll send you a, or send you a plaque or something like that, like a trophy.

And, and I appreciate that.

What the, the most impactful thing that we all can do is focus on how can we show up better, how can we show up more, how can we show up more with more potential for everybody else.

And when we do that, we inspire others and other.

Not necessarily to just do the same things that we're doing, but to see, whoa, like, I didn't even know that was possible.

I didn't know you could run a business that way.

I didn't know that you could, you could be in that type of shape at that age.

I didn't know that you could like, do those things.

I didn't know that you could feel that way.

I didn't know that you could anything.

And I think that through our own progression and knowing for ourselves that our potential is literally infinite, that we get to share that potential with everybody.

And I think that's probably the greatest gift that anyone can be given is to the acknowledgments that someone sees more potential in them than they see in themselves.

That's what I'm here to do.

And for those of you that are interested in learning more, I host a podcast called the We Are Encoded Podcast.

I share Some thoughts on LinkedIn every once in a while.

Sometimes I'm there, sometimes I'm.

I'm bailing out of that for three months while I'm doing something else that I enjoy.

So feel free to follow on LinkedIn as well.

And if you're interested in learning any more, feel free to visit Encoded AI and feel free to explore what we're doing in Encoded as well.

Excellent.

We'll link to it all in the show notes too.

And pleasure having you, man.

Look forward to catching up next time too.