From Survival to Joyful Leadership: Redefining Success with Garey Simmons

In this episode, we sit down with Garey Simmons to explore a powerful journey shaped by resilience, faith, and life experience.

From his mother’s survival during the war to his own path as a father of ten, entrepreneur, and global traveler, Garey shares how these moments shaped his perspective on leadership and success.

Together, we talk about:
 – What resilience really looks like in everyday life
 – Why success is not about achievement, but alignment
 – The role of faith, mindset, and gratitude in leadership
 – How to slow down and reconnect in a fast-paced world

This conversation is a reminder that true leadership starts from within - and that a meaningful life is built on purpose, not pressure.

About the Show

Insight into Leadership explores what becomes possible when leaders stop operating on autopilot and begin leading with clarity, awareness, and purpose.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi Gary, welcome. Welcome to Inside Two. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:03

I'm doing well. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

I'm so glad you could be here. And I know that um you've got a really interesting background and um a lot of tidbits and wisdom in regards to leadership. So I thought we could meet today and we could talk a little bit about that and share some of that wisdom.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Sure. I'll I'll put the cookies on the lower shelf so we can all get them. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

There you go. There you go. Well, just you know, give me a brief background, um, you know, as far as your your family origin, as far as where you were raised, what part of the U.S., that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah, I guess uh we would start with um I was born in Washington, D.C. My dad was in the military, so I was born at Walter Reed Army Hospital. My mother uh is an immigrant. She came from Europe, from Vienna, originally born in Vienna. Kind of a rough time getting through the war because she was about eight years old when uh when the Nazis needed more housing in Vienna, so the Jewish quadrant was emptied and people were put onto trains, promised that they would have uh an acre of land to grow vegetables and that there would be a doctor in every village, none of which was true. They were actually they they left Vienna on a passenger train and then in the middle of the night, somewhere in the Ukraine, they were told to exit and uh board uh cattle cars. It was your typical maybe you've seen if you're if you're an older person like me, we saw those those documentary videos from the war where the the Nazis had taken video taken of some of those transports to to the to the concentration camps. So my mom ended up in Malitrotsenitz. It's a camp outside of Minsk, which is now the capital of Belarus. And uh she survived well, first of all, to get into the camp as a child was kind of a miracle in and of itself. Old people, infirm people, sick people, little kids were not needed. So they were generally given a one-way ticket out of there, you know, the cheapest way possible that they could end life. And then somehow or another, my aunt, who was ten years older than my mom, who was eight at the time, she argued or controlled an SS officer to allow the little sister to enter the camp with them. And uh that that was the first miracle. And then several other, maybe hundreds of other miracles took place in order for me to wind up being born in the United States. But suffice it to say, she did survive the camp. She survived escaping the camp. She was orphaned for a few years, not knowing if she would ever see her father again. The mother, my grandmother, lost her life at the camp. Another aunt of mine lost her life at the camp. And then um by a series of incidents, I think after the war, uh, there was no real centralized way to find displaced people. It was just a random, random acts of kindness that took place that would uh help people to find ways back home, especially for children. So eventually my mom met a German officer. This is probably a year or two after the war had ended. They still had prisoners in Belarus, Germans, but they couldn't feed them, so they would let them go out and forage in the forest, or they could go to the villages and beg for food. So a German came to my mom's village and the people directed him to see my mom, who was known as the German girl. She was she no longer had the identity of being Jewish. She gave that up in order to survive. Eventually she actually became Catholic with the uh people who had taken her in. But this German officer was uh kind enough to and nice enough to make friends with my mom, and my mom trusted him and gave her real name to him, and she gave him the address that she had lived at in Vienna years before. So when that German officer managed to make his way back to East Germany, he passed the information on to a nephew who was in West Berlin who got it onto one of the radio services, either uh the Red Cross or some such organization. And by that time, this is probably, I guess, in the late 1940s, my grandfather, who had also survived the war, he had made it back to Vienna. And one of his employees knocked on his door late at night saying, I just heard your daughter's name on the radio. And uh from there, another year's worth of, you know, no cell phones. Yeah, I guess they had telegrams. They could telegram and uh, you know, pay uh 50 cents a word or something like that and let people know what was going on. So eventually my aunt, who was in uh Washington, D.C. by that time, she was a seamstress, and among her clientele were State Department women. And the wife of Avril Harriman, Mrs. Harriman, became interested in uh my mom's story that she was kind of trapped in Belarus. And her husband had been the liaison with Stalin the last two years of the war. And somehow or another, a Russian government official takes a train from Moscow out to the west of Minsk, about 50 miles west of Minsk, tiny little village in the white white forest. It's all birch trees out there, managed to find my mom. He was looking for a Jewish girl with such and such a name, and they said there's no Jewish girls here, and they they finally figured out it was the German girl, my mom, who was pretending to be German. They've put two and two together and came up with the right answer. Escorted her back to Moscow, took a couple weeks to get a displaced person's passport, and then she was able to come back to Vienna. So I think within six months she had transformed from a little freckle-faced pony, you know, pigtail young girl to a woman of Vienna with lipstick, hair coffed, and nice wool coat and a pocketbook on her arm. I have pictures like that. So it was quite the transformation. Mom ended up in around Washington, D.C., where I happened to be born. And uh so I was raised Catholic. My mother had converted to Catholicism. And I I asked mom later in life, I asked her why didn't she revert back to Judaism? And she said, Well, I was a teenager, so I was rebellious. That was her answer. Um, and then for me, uh, I was raised in the in the Catholic faith and in Catholic schools, got my education like that. And I went on to become um missionary. I was not in the Catholic Church, but as a uh more of a Protestant, evangelical, actually, it was Jesus people back in those days. We had an unchurched movement of people, sort of the end of the hippie movement. And uh so I I traveled the world for about 30 years spreading the gospel and ideas about God loving us. I had my own personal experience probably in the third third, I needed I needed some help. And I couldn't get help here on earth, so I I snuck into the church on a Saturday afternoon. They were waxing the floors, and I I prayed for the help that I needed, and by the next Monday my my prayers were answered. So I I knew that there is a God, there's a benevolent source of energy that actually gives us the ability to be conscious beings, first of all. We're conscious. We can determine right or wrong, we can see, we can make moral judgments, and we can also exhibit love through art and through poetry and through nature and all those things. So I'm I would attribute any success I've had in life to having that that absolute faith in the divine. So I I believe in joyful divinity. That's uh one of my one of my brands that I that I publish under. And um, yeah, uh also my other claim to fame is I'm actually the father of ten children. So maybe you have questions about that. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

I mean, as far as um just backing up to your story about about your mother and uh the resilience um that she had um you know as a as an individual, um, what was that like? I mean, as far as growing up with a mother who had gone through so much and and um I know you're a very spiritual person. And um what what did she teach you as as far as resilience goes?

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Yeah, well, it's not all peaches and cream, obviously. Uh she did have a very tough beginning in her life. And I would say that's half the story, right? Then you have a father, you have a mother and a father, right? So dad was, I guess he was confirmed alcoholic and was not a very good caregiver for us as children. Mom would have us on our knees before we went to bed every night, and we prayed. We prayed for his, you know, his recovery from this uh disease. And sure enough, uh, by the time I was 13 or 14, he stopped drinking for a period of time, which was really fantastic. It was uh as a young teenager, I was able to actually get to know him as a decent person. I learned a lot about business from him. He had his own business doing a tree service. But mom's uh mom was just uh she is still, she's 91, uh going on 92, so she's she's still with us, and she is uh, you know, the mother of divinity for me for sure. Uh we're we're all divine. We all have this seed of magnificence within us that sometimes we take for granted this ability we have to be human and to experience all the things we experience. But certainly she taught me the benefits of prayer, the benefits of being a survivor. And uh, you know, we we lose a lot of battles in life, uh, but we win the war. You know, we we win in the fact that we're we're alive, we can do good. And I think that's, you know, so it's life isn't like uh a straight line and not it it's always ups and downs. We have mountains and valleys in our lives, and certainly what my parents did for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Well, as far as the the spiritual part, I know that you said it it took you on a journey at high school and then college. What happened within those years is direction and the the guidance that you got?

SPEAKER_01 11:01

I think, you know, the teen so well, I've studied psychology quite a bit, and really the teenage years are a teenager, one of their jobs is to differentiate themselves from their parents. So, you know, and this is the funny part about our humanity. We we do get imprinted when we're young children with a lot of the beliefs and the social systems and the convictions that we have. Those are imprinted very early in life, you know, what's good, what's bad, how to keep yourself safe and all those things. By the time you get to be a teenager, the job is to differentiate yourself from your parents. You have to leave the tribe at some point. Sort of the failing of the last couple generations is how difficult it's been for kids to actually grow up and move out of their parents' homes and start a life. It's just, you know, it's tough. But yeah, I I left home when I was 18 and went to college and I I didn't look back. I was next thing I knew, I was in Europe and then I was in Asia and traveling the world. You know, for me personally, being the firstborn and the oldest child, you know, those were rough years. The early 50s, nobody had money. There was nothing uh really uh we did we didn't have any anything near the materialism that we have these days. Sumerism hadn't really totally been born yet. You know, it's quite it's quite a different world. It's interesting. Two of my girls, I took them to Sedona and m met up with my sister, who's 13 years younger, and sh they were asking my sister about her upbringing. And her story is like a hundred percent different from my story. She grew up middle class, you know, because that dad had stopped drinking and built his business, and you know, there was a lot more around at that time. And I was like, wow, that's really different than the way I grew up. But yeah, so you know, like I say, everybody has challenges in life and things they have to get over. It doesn't matter what kind of family you come from. There's always going to be something that propels and motivates kids to want to be different than their parents and go out and strike, you know, strike it out on their own and make it on their own way. I would say that's one of the keys to success is having that experience of launching out and trying different things and seeing what works.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Well, I mean, as a father of of ten, surely you you have seen that uh with with your own children as far as going through the teenage years, becoming independent, um, and developing their own individual self.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Yeah, indeed. I've got five boys and five girls. Uh it's uh that's two marriages, by the way. So it was four kids, two girls, two boys, then it was six kids, three boys, and three girls. So a nice, nice balance in the family. But yeah, all my kids are grown and out of the house. I think I could I think by 18, all of them had left, you know, by age 18, each one of them had left home on their own volition and started making their way. You know, sometimes it was washing dishes for$10 an hour and uh for a few years before they figured out, well, this is not a way to live. Let me let me go get some more education and and do something different. Yeah, but I have uh one son who's uh he's a remote worker, he he's a graphic artist and he travels the world. He's been in Rome for a couple years in Italy and moving back to Brazil to be with his girlfriend. And I have another son who's in Argentina, same sort of story, and uh works for an American company, does take care of remote IT business. And yeah, so the I've got kids that are in business. I've got kids that are one one of my daughters is a Muay Thai kickboxing coach. Uh another, my youngest daughter just had her first child, and uh, she graduated with two bachelor degrees, spent six months in a nonprofit, went back to school, became a massage therapist, very happy helping people heal through massage therapy. So there's a broad spectrum of uh vocation in our family for sure.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Would you say you gave them the space and the encouragement to approach that self-discovery stage so it help them um with that path that they're on right now?

SPEAKER_01 15:25

I don't take any credit for anything. I think, you know, uh uh it's nice when they call and they need counsel on something. It's nice when they don't call. That's also nice. That's that's fine with me. They they're yeah, they're doing well. And I'm appreciative of of each one of them and their own their own flavor, their own color, their own schematic of life and how they're how they're treating life. Yeah. So one of my daughters uh graduated with a PhD in poetry, which of course means she's now a farmer. So they grow flowers and they grow vegetables, and uh they started the first farmers market on Washington Island, which is part of Wisconsin. So, you know, life leads leads uh individuals in many different ways, and you never know what's around the next corner.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

What business? And I know you've had several businesses, you continue to um develop and expand in business. Um, as that goes, I mean, it's leadership, leading, you know, your family, having 10 children, and having traveled the world and just the genetic makeup that you have, extracting those learnings from being a father of 10, how correlating that into the into the business uh world that you were successful and are successful in. Can you go into a little more detail about that?

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Well, yeah, thank you. I think what I would like to say is, you know, so we're we're born into this world. There's some different theories about why and how, and is it reincarnation? You know, what what's going on, you know, what's the story behind everything, which uh, you know, can go many different directions. It can go into quantum, the quantum physics of the nature of the cosmos, or it can go into I'm here to make money and bring stability to my family. So depending where you come from, what your sights are set at, certainly there's uh, you know, there's there's a wide variety and difference of how to view life and what is the philosophy of life. But yeah, um, I think the, you know, the success, so-called success. Look, so here's let's backtrack. If we start from the end and look backwards, none of us are gonna take anything out of this world. It's all gonna be left behind for, you know, if we have some material wealth, we're gonna leave it to our kids and or to our foundation or to a charity or something like that. We're not gonna get out of this world carrying things with us. So the material results of work and labor certainly uh we we have an innate drive to want to be successful and to achieve, most of us do. And to that end, if you're joyful and happy in what you're doing, you know, for me, that's the key to success is what's life like at home? What's life like at work? How much stress, negative stress are you enduring? You know, how much how much conflict is there in what you're trying to do and trying to achieve? So, you know, some people say, you know, if you are following your passion, you never work a day in your life because you're joyful in what you're doing. And that I feel that's somewhat true in my life. On the other hand, sometimes you have to work for 10 years to get to the point that you can launch and go into something that's really your passion. And maybe you have to pay the fiddler along the way. So that's the that's the reality, you know. You know, yeah, I was a busboy when I was 14, 15, 16 years old carrying dishes in a restaurant and uh$2.50 an hour, whatever it was, you know. And and and to that end, you you you want to make the journey of life to be joyful. That's my thing. I I believe in joyful divinity. And what I want to do is, you know, but I I'm also at the age where I can look back and say, yeah, those were tough years, but I'm glad I did it. I have no regrets about anything that I've done in my life, you know, 30 different countries around the world, I've seen all the different cultures. And it's it's wonderful to have that breadth of experience, the life experience, where when you finally decide to come back to the States, for me, like it was like, wow, this is really a good place to live after having been in so many other places who don't necessarily have all the benefits of society as we do here. So, and I guess that brings up the point of having gratitude for whatever it is that you are experiencing in life. I think that, you know, if you have a clear vision of what it is that you want, you have faith to believe that you can accomplish this. You're grateful for every step along the way, and you're able to take the right actions that bring into reality whatever it is you're envisioning, whatever you're creating. So just as a curiosity, I'll share with you this past year, my calling changed. I was a health coach for about 20 years and I ran a dietary supplement company. I was interested in health because I had a diagnosis that forced me into studying and learning about these things, not necessarily accepting all the medical advice I was getting, but looking more to holism and holistic ways of taking care of some of these problems. But I had two experiences in the past year where I went to a retreat in Costa Rica last December, and then I went to another one in May. And between those two, uh one week or two-week uh stepping out of the ordinary here in the States and going to Costa Rica, which is a beautiful paradisical country uh with, you know, regenerative food and lovely people. The the the uh the catchphrase of Costa Rica is pura vida, it's pure life. And that's what people experience there, most of us. You know, we go down there and it's like it's so joyful and it's so wonderful. But I knew when I got back to the States that there was something I had to do and I didn't know what it was. And it took about three weeks of morning walks and reflection to finally get the point of what it was that I was what was my next mission, so to speak. And it was uh joyful divinity. So that's that's how that branding came to be. So joyfuldivinity.com, joyful divinity meditations on YouTube. And the latest twist in the saga, well, before I tell that part of the story, one of the things I am able to record, write and record spoken word meditations. And they come out really pretty nice, uh, the feedback I've gotten from people. One of my daughters is a singer and a vocalist, and she's really, really talented with her voice. And I asked her if she wanted to help me participate with uh with these meditations. To add the musical flair to it. And she said, yes, she was very excited about it. So we have a couple of three, I think, three meditations done with me speaking some words and her adding the musical vibration to it. So it's very, it's very heartwarming and uh a big, big blessing to me in my life for sure. And more recently was, you know, is is this it's kind let me put it this way. It's hard to make a meditation and record it and get it right. It takes a long time to get a three-minute meditation done right. Sometimes three weeks. Sometimes we can go over something for three months before it's really ready to be published. And I came upon this idea of creating a joyful divinity coloring book. So for kids and parents, you know, kids, teenagers, and adults, everybody, you know, it doesn't, you can't really start too early to teach children how to set an intention, how to affirm themselves in what they're doing. And uh coloring is become a really big business and a big pastime for even adults to release stress. There's adult coloring books where people buy them and they use coloring as a technique to relieve their daily stress. So this idea just started formulating, and and I'm I just published it today. It's probably in review with uh Kindle for the next 72 hours, but it's soon to be released, uh Calm Coloring. So it's a it's about a 60-page book with animals and affirmations and sacred geometry all strewn throughout. And uh it's just another way to bring joyful divinity into manifestation for me.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Well, I know a manifestation is is a huge thing for you, and we've talked about it. And um, I know there's a lot of work that you have done um around the meditation side of things. As far as manifesting, can you take us to where your journey went? I mean, it began with the meditations, or maybe it started with the manifestation. I don't know which came first, but can you explain a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Yeah, I was introduced to um really, it probably started with my diagnosis. So I I'm already a believer. I believe in spiritual things and God and and all that. Crunch time is when you get a diagnosis that's pretty gli uh grim. If people get a cancer diagnosis or they get a heart disease diagnosis, you know the clock's ticking and you know that there's only a certain amount of time you have left here on earth. So what are you gonna do with it? What are you gonna do with that kind of a diagnosis? And um it happened to me when I was probably, I don't know, maybe mid-50s. So I got this heart disease diagnosis, and it really took me a long time to figure out what it really meant. And I wouldn't take, I decided not to take the satin drugs. I hadn't taken any pharmaceutical drugs for since I had been a teenager, and I just didn't want to go there. I I had lived in third world countries, and I knew a lot about the alternative and the holistic and the more indigenous medicine. I was more interested in that way of looking at things. It's just part of my nature is that I believe in nature. You know, nature has the solutions, and I think our own bodies have solutions that we don't give ourselves credit for. And it's a it's a matter of alignment of our mental, spiritual, you know, it's uh mind-body, you can say, whatever, however you want to address it. But there is certainly power, powerful, you know, we can make ourselves sick. I think everybody will agree with that. If we think really terrible thoughts all the time, we're gonna become ill. If we hold on to bitterness, if we hold on to anger, we're not hurting anybody else except ourselves, you know, and the people around us, you know, like with that. So the mind has a very big part to play in this uh health thing. Um so the manifestation and and meditation and prayer and all those things, it sort of came to that fine point of, well, you know, I may die in the next one, two, or three years or 10 years, or it might be 20 years, who knows? But uh when I close my eyes at night, we all sort of go through that exact experience of of going to sleep and we're no longer conscious. We're in a dream world where, you know, crazy things are going on in our dreams that we can't necessarily know the answer to or decipher or even remember when we wake up. But it happens to all of us, and every single night it does. Like our subconscious is at work while we're asleep formulating things. So is this a mechanism that we can control? Is kind of the question. And I think one of my teachers, Bruce Lipton, he's a good read. He wrote the it was a book on biology, and he identified, and I think he might have coined the term epigenetics. So epigenetics is it's not so much your genetics, it's the epigenetics. So genetics has maybe, if we wanted to give it a percent, let's say it has 20% to do with who we are, the epigenetics or the lifestyle that we manifest around us and how we treat our bodies and how what we eat, what we think, what we watch with our eyes on the TV, on the news. Now we're we're all sort of using the the cell phone, the little screens to nourish ourselves in in a manner. And whether it's doom scrolling or whether it's uh listening to great teachers teach us things, um, you know, we have a a wide variety on the menu. So for me, um, I was able to learn a technique of using the last five minutes before I go to sleep at night. And hopefully the first five minutes when I start to awake in the morning to remember that I have control over my subconscious. In other words, I use affirmations or I use a program, I use my own program to instill in me what it is that I really want. So if I want, you know, if I want to lose that extra 10 pounds I'm carrying around, I can do that through the last five minutes when you were moving out of beta into alpha from alpha into theta. And before we hit delta, we have a a wide open aperture to our subconscious. And when he we can imprint instructions on that and manifest pretty quickly that whatever it is that we really want. So that's how manifestation started with me. I actually did a journal that's I also published on Amazon, probably one of my best-selling books. It's uh using the 369 Tesla formula for manifestation. Three, you know, the uh three times a day, uh, you write out what it is that you're desiring. Uh yeah, so there's a formula, it's in the book. And that's that's how my journey began. That was probably 10 or 15 years ago. And in the meantime, since then, I've learned many more from many more teachers, Wallace Waddles, Neville Goddard, Alan Watts, um, a lot of great teachers have brought light to this area of being able to manifest what it is that we want. I mean, if you look around, if I look around this room, I see a lamp, I see these monitors, there's a chair there. None of this stuff would be here without someone having thought of it, designed it mentally, and then brought it into production. So uh, you know, the great bridges that we have crossing our rivers, that was someone's idea at some point. Otherwise, you were taking a canoe across the river. Uh, you know, so we have to we have to give ourselves credit that anything that you see that's man-made, it came from somebody's idea, which means it originated as a fought. It had not existed. And I mean, you you look what happened with the Wright brothers, and you know, there are hundreds of experiments trying to fly a hundred feet in the air. And uh today we get on, you know, they're they got 11 million people flying today uh around the country getting ready for Thanksgiving. So in less than, well, a little bit more than a hundred years, how we've advanced uh aeronautics for just as a one example.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

It's interesting that, you know, you you bring up um, you know, the technology aspect. I know you've seen a lot of changes in the world around you in the last 10 years. And we're hearing more and more people reverting back to the basics and self-care and meditation, walking, connecting with nature. What have you observed as far as somebody who has, you know, experienced it, but also seeing it in the world around you? How is that showing up for people who are in overwhelm?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah, I think I got your question. I would say if you're dealing in any kind of overwhelm, obviously the first thing to do is to stop whatever it is you're doing. Just cut it out, you know, at least for a time, a day or three days or a week, take a week off from whatever it is that's overwhelming you. And probably going into nature is one of the keys. Getting back to nature is being able to, you know, walk the beach, have the salt air in uh in, you know, the biome, going to the mountains, walking in a forest, you know, you don't have to hug the tree, but if you touch a tree, there's a lot of power there. There's a lot of life force in in uh, you know, life is just so abundant and so viral on this earth, you know. You can't, I mean, if you if you look at the sidewalk, there's grass growing up between the cracks and the sidewalk. You can't stop life, you know. It's and even as much as we have desecrated the planet and done a lot of pillaging and extracting of mineral wealth out of the earth and devastated forests and you know, all the harm that we've caused, still the earth rebirths itself. And which leads me to another more of a quantum thought is that, you know, we think this is the reality. Everything that we can see, feel, and touch or hear. Like that's for us in our five senses, we think that's reality. But in in true thought, what we see with our eyes is like 0.03%, not even 1% of the light spectrum. The electromagnetic light spectrum is huge. And some animals can see much better than we can see. An owl at night has much better vision than we have. We don't do very well without light, but owls see a lot more than we do. Dogs can hear a thousand times more than what we can hear. We're we're if we think this is reality, what we can see, feel, and touch, we're really deluding ourselves. There's much more to reality than what we than what we know. And that brings me back to a great famous quote, Socrates said, the more I know, the more I know I don't know. You know, like we make these scientific discoveries and we get all excited. It leads to a thousand more questions as to why and how and you know, that sort of thing. So, you know, we're we're in a we're very privileged to be alive today where there is this huge amount of technology being being brought to light that we've never had the opportunity. I mean, I was, you know, we had newspapers when I grew up. That's how we got news.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Well, I think information is coming at people at such a fast rate that people are just having they're forced, some people are forced to take a step back, and which can be a good thing because they're taking a deep breath, they're just looking around them. And like we talked about, you know, doing a fast. I mean, doing a technology fast. So there's some people that are building that awareness around there. And as you mentioned before, some people are hit by bad news and circumstance, whether that's financial, whether that's health, and then they're forced to look at what is serving them and what is not, and that elimination. But it as far as the overwhelm goes, and technology has a part of that. And I feel that there's a lot of disruption right now. There's a lot of disruption in business, and people are getting disrupted. And so you can approach that in a philosophical way. It's um, you know, people go inward, they look to more of meaning and and what is, you know, what is joy and how they're living and how they're showing up for themselves and for others. And then there's others that are just caught up in the rat race and they're just looking to do things quicker, faster. And it's quantity over quality. So um, I know we've had conversations about slowing down, and you know, I know manifestation is is a big part of your life, and there's so much to be said about that. And different people have different journeys when it comes to that. And I I think it's just a really interesting perspective where we are in life right now, as far as there's so much information available. However, it's almost like getting back to the basics, like you were saying, slowing down, connecting with nature, connecting with ourselves before we can actually be more effective to others around us, whether that's family, whether that's work.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Yeah, we're we're just now approaching the Thanksgiving holiday. So what a great time to take a day or two or a weekend off and be with family and you know, assess and reflect and be grateful for what you have. Uh yeah, so there's many there's many examples, uh, but I I feel like that you're you're talking about something that's important for everybody at a particular whatever the particular time is in life when something gets hurled at you that's unexpected and um sh a little bit shocking or stressful, good time to stop and just reflect and just think about things and let go of what it whatever it is that you know uh we have been seeking in order to find out what's really important in life. I think that's probably the most important thing. And I I think almost in a certain sense, some of these things have to happen, you know. And if you're able to, if you can be grateful for even the setbacks and the difficulties, knowing that there is a greater outcome ahead of us. I guess one of those sayings is there's no failure. You you either succeed or you learn. If it doesn't go your way, you've learned a lesson. If it goes your way in your success, great. But generally, there's going to be a combination of both ways of receiving things from from this life, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. I mean, we want, I think most of us want to be quote unquote happy or content, have a certain amount of contentment in life. And yet at the same time, we've got this urge and this need. It's almost hormonal that we have to achieve in order for the dope to keep the dopamine flowing, you know, like it's part of our nature. So yeah, and and there's a season for everything. There's a season for working really hard and accomplishing a goal. There's a season for taking time off, being with family and reflecting and being grateful for what you have.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

I asked you what your definition of success is now versus 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

Yeah, it's pretty simple. For me, it's just joyful divinity, being being at one in alignment with who I am. So, you know, that's maybe that's something we need to talk about is like determining who who am I really, you know, like take away the labels, the masks and the, you know, whatever it is that we cloak ourselves in and dress ourselves up as and the titles that we have, take all the w that away, you know, like go out to the desert and live in a cave for seven days and then let's talk about who you really are. Like, yeah, there's you know, we're and when it comes down to it for me, you know, I, you know, I know I'm on this planet at this particular time for a particular reason. You know, I have a big why that is particular to me and what my mission is. And it has to do with joyful divinity. You know, that's that's who I am and what I am. You know, it doesn't matter the the numbers on the spreadsheet and the bank account and the number of kids, all that stuff is, you know, that's part of our journey, but really breaking it down to fundamentals. What is it really that life is about? So, and and it starts with that question, who are you? You know, that's that's sort of the the module of, you know, we're human beings, we're here to be, we're not human doings. It's not about how much you can do in a day or in a lifetime. It's really about who are you as a human being and your purpose on earth. Uh if you And that might take decades to figure out, you know, there's parts of me I'm still trying to figure out, you know, I'm in I'm 71, gonna be 72 next month. And I, you know, there's there's a lot of things I have questions about, you know, what's the next, what's 2026 about? What's what's the manifestation for me and what's my part to play? And can I do that with gratitude in my heart and being joyful about it? So I just keep coming back to the same thing. You could ask me any question you want. I'll always come back to the same foundational principles.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

Well, as somebody who is um into health and wellness and um spirituality and mindset, can you walk me through an average day? I know you do start your days with a walk in nature, but just walk us through if you would.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

Yeah, so several years ago I listened to a guy named Andrew Huberman, and he challenged or invited people who listen to his podcast to greet the sun every morning. And uh it's hard to do in the winter time. It's a lot of wintry clouds around here, but it doesn't matter. The sun's still there. And for me, I have through a series of injuries, of course. I've had this past year has been about rehabilitating my knee. I just uh ran out of cartilage and uh you know I exercise my way back into uh health using physical therapy and uh a technique called knees over toes, which is walking backwards and pulling weight in the gym backwards. That if you if you uh when we walk, it's heel-toe. When we walk backwards, it's toe-heel. So that is a um a technique for rehabilitating knees, which comes from the Far East. Uh in China and Japan, elderly people walk backwards. And that's to keep their balance and to keep fit with uh with their joints. So uh my morning starts with about an hour and a half to two hours of a morning walk. I walk about five miles and I generally try to get back um in time. My work day starts at nine o'clock. I've got a little team of people that I meet with, and uh that meeting can take 20 minutes or it can take two hours, depending on what's going on. And uh then I break my fast around 11. That gives me about 14 hours of or 15 hours of fasting, intermittent fasting. So I stop eating by usually six, seven o'clock. I might have a little bit of yogurt or something at nine o'clock, but by 11 o'clock, that's that's 14 hours. Um I I my diet is consists of normal things like eggs. And I've recently started a program using five different kinds of seeds in a smoothie that I make that's particular to me. There's a lot of protein in seeds and more protein than in eggs, for example. And then in the afternoon, it's gonna be other errands or family events or shopping or whatever it is. And then by the end of the day, I'm ready to go back into my routine of either listening to something that's going to edify me. Um, you know, I'll watch the evening, six o'clock news on one of the channels, stay in touch with what's happening in the world. But yeah, then I'm I'm ready for bed by 9 or 9.30, and I'm up at before sunrise the next day to get my walk-in. And it's a really good feeling if you've had your 10,000 steps before you sit down at the desk. And probably one of the technologies that I use is my watch tells me to get up every hour, you know, to stand up. So I do that. I'll I'll take a walk in the backyard or uh go outside and visit with the sun, whatever time of the day it is. Like every degree the sun moves across the sky, it's another set of codes that are nourishing our bodies. This is one of my big things is the first nourishment is the sun. There's no food on earth without the sun. The plants grow, the animals eat the plants, we eat the plants, we eat the animals, and we're imbibing energy from the sun. And our mitochondria inside every cell is there to produce energy, and that energy is photonic. It's it's sunlight. We are our starlight, we are golden. That's that's who we are. That's part of who we are.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

Well, the sunlight is the inkadium rhythm. You've got um, you know, just so many positive um effects from the sun. And um, I know you're saying plants and growth, that I mean, as far as ourselves go, and as humans, our minds, it helps our minds not only to rest, but to process and to understand ourselves a little better.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

Yeah. No, I think uh I think you know, it's um again, this is one of those ideas that if you break it down to the fundamental facts of what is. The sun is utterly important, you know. That's where everything begins. So we can give give a lot of credit to, you know, and I've some of my medical teachers have said the older you get, the more sunlight you need. So move south, you know, like Myrtle Beach, Florida, Costa Rica, all those places have a lot more sunlight than we do up north here in the wintertime. So something to think about.

SPEAKER_00 44:24

So you mentioned 2026 and what what does that look like? I know you're in the midst of publishing something right now. Is there anything coming down the pipeline that we can keep an eye out for?

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Yeah, I I was just introduced to this. One of my teachers is Dr. Zach Bush, been a mentor of mine for the last three years, and uh really helped me a lot to shift this whole perspective about diagnoses and what to do about it and how to treat it. You know, like circadian rhythm, as you mentioned, is really one of the most powerful tools that we have in the toolbox. Uh, if if anybody's interested, they can go to ourorigin.earth. So ourorigin.earth. And that that launch of that program, it's a worldwide consortium leading up to October 19th, 2026, where uh there's going to be a confluence of one billion people. They're shooting to have one billion people online together or in person. The launch place is really the cradle of civilization just north of Johannesburg in South Africa. There's a meridian that runs straight up from Johannesburg to the Nile, Egypt, the pyramids there. And that's sort of the birth canal of the planet. That's where humans came from. It's it's a lot of indigenous peoples from all over the world sharing their wisdom and science. Coming together to sort of recreate, you know, I think for a lot of years now we've been expecting the world to collapse and food to go away and water to become scarce and too many people on earth and all these sort of mythologies that we developed. But in the cycle of life is birth, life, death, rebirth. So it the cycle keeps continuing. And one of the uh I think Zach Bush was one of the instigators to bring this movement together, that this is this is what biology has done over and over and over again. We ke the when left to itself, nature can recreate itself in abundance. You know, if you if you study 60 million years ago in the age of the dinosaur and the reptiles and what the planet was like, and then there was this cataclysmic event, whether it was a meteor hitting Earth or whatever caused the ice age, then the cycle started again. And the rebirth brought in all this beauty. It brought in dolphins and blue whales and humans and flowers of every type that didn't exist before. There is a hopeful future out there. And if you want to know more, you can go to our origin.com, it's dot earth. And you'll hear some very beautiful music, some very interesting stories about the indigenous peoples of the earth that still survive to these to this day. And it's encompassed in this idea that for us to get back to nature as our origin point and to be one with nature, that we're not separate from nature. Human beings are not, you know, there's there's the, you know, we have all these antibiotics to try to keep nature out of our bodies. But that's sort of uh a backwards way of looking at at health. If we actually imbibe nature, bring as we were talking about, bringing the sun into our lives, aligning ourselves with the circadian rhythm, we can be a lot healthier.

SPEAKER_00 47:49

So um, what you've got in store for next year, any new books or anything that are coming out?

SPEAKER_01 47:55

Oh, yeah, I've got plans for at least five new coloring books. Those are really easy compared to writing about stem cells or something like that. I've got two books on stem cells already done. But yeah, I'm I'm actually more interested now that I'm I've got about 10 grandkids as well as 10 children. So I'm interested in programming our kids with some of the beliefs that I have about going inward, having peace in our lives, knowing where our strength really comes from, and bringing families together over something as simple as coloring a page. I think that's a you know, small actions lead to great results at sometimes. So that's what I'm aiming for. And that's what 2026, I believe, is for me.

SPEAKER_00 48:38

As far as legacy goes, what does that mean to you and and how do you see that relating to yourself?

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Yeah, one of my daughters just bought me this book. Dad, I want to hear your story. I have not written one word in it yet, but it's there's uh a lot of prompts to tell the story of who I am and uh my journey. And uh so that's one of my projects for 2026 is to do some writing in that just for my family. Leg legacy is uh certainly, yeah, when you get to your 70s, you want to start thinking about that for sure, maybe earlier. Um uh it's important to put things down on paper. And you know, we now we have pictures, you know. I was thinking the other day, my mom called me up. So there's a funny little story. She's Gary, I'm reading the Bible. Why I'm reading the Old Testament. Why are they all killing each other all the time? And I I said, Well, when you write history, this is a history, you write about significant things. And the significant things of of those days was who owned the land, where are my animals gonna graze, and where are the watering holes? And that's what the wars were about. Was you know, just as simple as you can get. And then we continued the conversation. I said, I mean, let's think back to your father and and his parents. Like they, you know, that was Poland, Ukraine, that sort of corner there. They didn't have enough money to buy a license to get married. So my grandfather got his name from his mother, not his father, because they couldn't get a state license to get married. They did a Jewish wedding, and that was it, you know. So that you know, we we became Gruenbergs instead of Feuersteins. I don't know. Yeah, like and that's and we don't have any pictures. You know, we have no there's no stories, there's no recollection of even three generations ago. You know, on my father's side here in the States, I knew my great-grandfather. He died when I was 18. So I knew a lot of his story, and I was able to sit with him, you know, uh, those last few years of his life and you know, help him with an electric shaver to shave him and that type of thing. But yeah, uh nowadays we have the benefit of all this digitalization of our pictures, and you know, I think my great-grandkids will know what I look like, you know. I think so. But if they know a little bit about me and if some of my books are still around, then they'll know a little bit more. But legacies, yeah, it's important. It's important to pass on. And it starts with, you know, child rearing in your first marriage or second marriage. It's uh then there's then the grandkids come along and we get to, you know, grandkids are a lot easier than than kids for sure. And then, you know, one day they'll be great grandkids, which will be wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 51:33

So on that note, what advice or words of wisdom do you have for this younger generation?

SPEAKER_01 51:40

I think it's all the things we've been talking about, you know, being able to take a fast away from the phone, get away from the screens, enjoy life in in nature, go on trips to maybe exotic places where the environment and the temperature and the ecosystem is different than what you're used to. I I will give anybody the advice to visit Costa Rica, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. They have no standing army, all their money goes into education and to the welfare of the people. They have a lot of regenerative farming, so things are done in a very holistic way there. And everybody's pleasant and the coffee's great. Costa Rica. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

And surfing too. If you're a surfer.

SPEAKER_01 52:20

If you're a surfer, certainly. It's uh Nosara is a great place to surf for sure. That's my that's my my my best experiences have been around Nosara on the north, on the west coast. Uh a little bit north, but kind of in the middle. Beautiful place. Well, that's a very well-developed place. Uh it's pretty touristy, but that means there's good restaurants everywhere and stuff like that. So if you're uh if you're looking for a place to vacation that's enjoyable. But and life isn't, you know, we can count beans are all we want, but that if you do something experiential, you know, with or without your family, if you're on a a soul journey and you go alone, that's great. If you have uh uh a partner to take with you, if you got kids to take, that's even even better. So just sharing the experiences of life that not everything is the way it is where where you live. And there's other cultures, there's other languages, there's uh a lot to experience. And I obviously those experiences are what we're gonna remember. We're not gonna remember this podcast, you know, on our deathbed. What we're gonna remember is the people that we've worked with, the things that we've done in cooperation and unity with other people, and the effect and and the love that we've shared with other human beings. And I guess I should include the rest of the planet and all the wonderful life forms that are there, you know, our our doggies and our kitty cats at home, all the way up to the monkeys in the jungle of Costa Rica. It's it's all it's all beauty that we can admire and appreciate. And those sunsets on the west side of the of the continent are stupendous, just as the sunrise on uh the east coast is is glorious. So uh it's easier to watch the sunset, so you don't have to get up so early. But uh the sunrises are also beautiful. Experiential, partaking of nature, learning other cultures, being with people, and um, you know, visiting some uh intentional communities. There's a lot of intentional community building going on right now across the world. So those are some things just to think about.

SPEAKER_00 54:31

One of my favorite things about Costa Rica when I visited was how happy the people were. The simplicity of life there, that they were so happy, the happiest people.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

Yeah, I know I I found that to be true in India as well. When I went there in 1976 for the first time, um, I got sick. Like you're not used to these the culture and the food and everything's so different. And and it, you know, the cleanliness was a little tough for Western people to understand. After the first six months, I think I was on a bus somewhere in South India traveling, and you know, people had their chickens and they had their animals with them and their children. And it was just a cacophony of laughter and music and joy. And, you know, I'm sure that, you know, one of my travelers' checks was more money than they had amongst them, but they were joyful and they were happy. And, you know, as we've already said a few times on this podcast, that it's you're not going to take it with you anyway. So let's let's be joyful and happy as we traverse this life. Let's do it the right way.

SPEAKER_00 55:36

Well, thank you very much, Gary. I appreciate having you on. And um, as always, words of wisdom and lessons.

SPEAKER_01 55:44

Well, thank you, Caroline. I appreciate your time. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 55:47

Take care.