Know Thyself is a community supporting you to KNOW the true nature of yourself and the world around you, THRIVE in your health, wealth, and relationships – ultimately empowering you to CREATE and share your true self with the world.
Each week André Duqum interviews experts in their field; ranging from spiritual educators to cutting edge scientists, heart-led creatives & more on topics such as the true nature of ‘Self’, “what is reality?,” and exploring the fundamental pillars we all need to unlock our fullest potential.
Contributing to birthing a more beautiful world, one episode at a time.
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E214 - Tom Bilyeu: Humanity Is Splitting into 4 Futures… Choose Wisely
Season 1 · Episode 214
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • Duration 02:39:14
My guest today is Tom Bilyeu, the entrepreneur behind Quest Nutrition who went on to build Impact Theory into one of the most watched long form interview channels in the world. Tom is now building a procedurally generated video game called Kyzen, and in recent years his content has shifted away from personal development and toward economics, artificial intelligence, and the systems that quietly shape how we live. I wanted to sit with him inside that shift, to understand what pulled him away from the mindset conversation he had mastered and toward questions about money, power, and the trajectory of intelligence itself.
What We Dive Into:
1. Tom credits his success to a simple loop: predict an outcome, run the experiment, and stay honest about what actually happened. He treats being wrong as useful data rather than a threat to his identity, which lets him adjust quickly instead of defending a position that clearly isn't working anymore.
2. Tom argues that meaning isn't discovered but handed to us by evolution as an empty box we get to fill. For him that box holds his wife and his work, and he believes people struggle most when whatever filled the box, a job, a role, a relationship, disappears and nothing takes its place.
3. Tom's core financial message is that not owning assets quietly erodes your purchasing power through inflation, whether you notice it or not. He believes the escape route is available to almost anyone, but most people never take the step of investing consistently over decades instead of waiting for certainty.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
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___________
00:00 Intro
01:50 The Evolution of the Show
05:02 Between What Was and What's Next
08:53 The Spark of Divinity and What Tom Is Building
13:52 Nature, Nurture, and Leverage
15:49 The Physics of Progress
19:35 Facing Ego and Inadequacy
24:08 Feeling Most Alive
25:58 A New Virtual World
27:36 The Coming Bifurcation of Civilization
36:52 Superintelligence and Universal Abundance
40:27 Four Futures and How Soon
50:59 Simulation Theory and Consciousness
1:04:13 Why Something Rather Than Nothing
1:10:17 Letting Go of Certainty
1:21:39 A Communion of Subjects
1:30:22 Meaning in a Disenchanted Age
1:40:42 Who Is Tom Without His Ambition
1:42:10 Rewriting Value in a Post-Scarcity World
1:45:55 How the Money System Is Rigged
1:59:15 Is a Crash Coming
2:02:22 A Message to the West and P(doom)
2:09:57 Why Tom Came On the Show
2:12:15 Rewiring at the Root and What's Sacred
2:18:25 The Movie of Your Life and Your Blind Spot
E213 - Matthew Hussey: The Patterns Blocking You From Love (& What To Do)
Season 1 · Episode 213
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 • Duration 02:35:14
Matthew Hussey is back on the show, and this conversation picks up right where our last one left off, except he's grown a lot since then. Matthew built his early career on a simple idea: create more opportunity and you'll make better romantic choices. Over time he realized abundance alone doesn't fix anything. The real work lives underneath, in the unconscious patterns and emotional reflexes that decide who we choose and how we behave once we have them. That discovery pushed his focus toward emotional regulation, and it's the thread running through everything we talk about today.
What We Dive Into:
1. Matthew built his early career on the idea that more romantic opportunity leads to better choices. He later realized abundance does not override the unconscious patterns formed by our earliest relationships. Real change comes from understanding those patterns, not expanding the pool of options.
2. When someone does not text back for hours and a whole day unravels, the reaction is rarely about the message itself. Matthew describes triggers as reflexive states shaped by earlier wounds, not conscious choices. Curiosity and self-compassion, not shame, create room to respond differently.
3. Matthew traces his readiness for commitment to a relationship built on certainty and standards at once: his wife made clear she was giving it an honest try and expected the same. That let him stop fearing the future and start showing up fully, since the decision no longer sat on him alone.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself
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E212 - Dr. Shefali: How To Raise Conscious Children (It Starts With You)
Season 1 · Episode 212
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 • Duration 01:56:58
I sat down with Dr. Shefali, clinical psychologist trained at Columbia and the voice behind the Conscious Parenting Movement for over two decades, to explore what it really means to parent from awareness instead of ego. We talk about the illusion of the perfect parent, why children are our greatest mirrors, and how the wounds we carry from our own childhoods get passed down unless we do the work to see them clearly. Dr. Shefali doesn't offer a script. She offers a practice of humility, one that asks us to look at ourselves before we look at our kids.
What We Dive Into:
1. Dr. Shefali explains that most parenting struggles trace back to ego, the desire to control, to be right, to see your child as an extension of your own unmet dreams. Real conscious parenting means constantly questioning whether your actions come from your child's essence or your own unresolved story.
2. Without rites of passage or male mentors, boys are left to figure out masculinity through porn and the manosphere. Dr. Shefali argues that testosterone, purpose, and physical challenge need healthy outlets, and that community, not isolation, is what turns raw masculine energy into something protective and grounded.
3. Dr. Shefali describes how social media exploits children's developing brains, especially girls', feeding insecurity and manufacturing endless standards to chase. She calls it algorithmic abduction, a process that outsources parenting itself and leaves children disconnected from their own inner voice.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself
https://www.im8health.com/knowthyself
E211 - John Wineland: Love, Safety & Desire - What Your Wounds Are Deciding for You
Season 1 · Episode 211
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 • Duration 01:53:30
John Wineland has spent nearly twenty years teaching people how to love more deeply, and in this conversation he lays out why intimacy has become one of the most demanding spiritual practices available to us. We talk about why relationships surface our oldest wounds, why the partner we choose so often mirrors the exact pattern we grew up in, and why that mirroring is not a mistake but an invitation to heal. John also opens up about his daughter Claire, who passed away eight years ago, and what her life and death taught him about grief, presence, and unconditional love.
What We Dive Into:
1. John explains that whatever part of you remains unhealed keeps transmitting into the world, and it draws a partner with the opposite wound so you can replay your childhood dynamic together. He frames this pattern as an opportunity rather than a flaw, since the relationship that triggers you most is often showing you exactly what needs attention.
2. Years of unspoken fear shape how we stand, breathe, and hold tension, so real change requires more than insight alone. John describes training the nervous system through practices like breathwork and qigong so the body can stay open in moments that would normally trigger defense, attack, or withdrawal, which is where lasting change actually happens.
3. Reflecting on his daughter Claire, John shares that there is no end to grief because there is no end to love. He describes honoring grief as an act of self love rather than something to rush past, and encourages anyone facing loss to give that grief real space instead of staying busy to avoid feeling it.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself
Use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide
E210 - Dr. David Spiegel: #1 Hypnotism Expert, “Wake Up From The Trance of Your Life”
Season 1 · Episode 210
Tuesday, September 1, 2026 • Duration 01:29:50
Dr. David Spiegel is the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, the co-founder of the hypnosis app Reveri, and one of the world's leading clinical researchers on hypnosis. He has worked with over 7,000 patients across 50 years, and in this conversation he opened with something I did not expect: he tested my hypnotizability live on camera. I scored a nine out of ten. What followed was one of the most genuinely surprising conversations about the mind I have had on this show.
What We Dive Into:
1. The self you walk around with is not a fixed structure. Dr. Spiegel calls it a convenient assumption, something the brain constructs to simplify experience. Hypnosis reveals this by demonstrating how quickly and completely a person can shift, often in a single session.
2. Memories are not neutral recordings. They are laid down and retrieved from brain regions that manage affect, which means the emotion and the memory are inseparable. Working with a memory hypnotically allows you to enter it, update its emotional meaning, and change how it lives in you.
3. The same capacity that lets a child survive abuse by mentally leaving their body can, in adulthood, become a habitual distance from experience. Understanding whether your detachment is a protective skill or an old survival pattern still running is one of the more honest questions this conversation surfaces.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself
Try LMNT & get a free sample pack
https://www.timeline.com/KNOWTHYSELF
E209 – Rizwan Virk: Are We Living in a Simulation? (It's Deeper Than You Think)
Season 1 · Episode 209
Tuesday, August 25, 2026 • Duration 02:34:44
Rizwan Virk is an MIT-trained computer scientist, video game pioneer, and bestselling author of The Simulation Hypothesis. His work sits at a rare intersection: quantum physics, Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games, all pointing toward the same unsettling and strangely liberating conclusion. In this conversation, we explore not the nihilistic version of simulation theory, but the one that actually gives life more meaning rather than less.
What We Dive Into:
1. The simulation Rizwan describes is not one where you are code running on a server. You are the soul outside the game, choosing an avatar and entering by choice. The body is the character. The player is something more.
2. Synchronicities, hunches, recurring patterns, these are not coincidences. Rizwan frames them as messages from a deeper intelligence, perhaps a future self, a guide, or the part of you watching the game from outside. The practice is learning to read them rather than dismiss them.
3. In a well-designed game, difficulty scales to keep you engaged and growing. Rizwan applies the same logic to life: the quests that keep returning are the ones not yet completed, and completing them is what the game is actually for.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.im8health.com/knowthyself
code KNOWTHYSELF for an exclusive offer
https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself
Try LMNT & get a free sample pack
___________
E208 - Dr. Robert Lustig: What Modern Food Is Doing to Your Sense of Self
Season 1 · Episode 208
Tuesday, August 18, 2026 • Duration 01:50:53
Dr. Robert Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, pediatrician, and bestselling author who has spent 45 years watching children get sicker despite his best efforts to stop it. His work connects the dots between ultra-processed food, mitochondrial dysfunction, dopamine hijacking, and the chronic stress epidemic in a way that is impossible to dismiss. In this conversation, we explore what he calls the hostage brain, what happens to a nervous system under sustained biochemical assault, and why so much of what we call personal failure is actually a systems problem.
What We Dive Into:
1. When chronic pain, emotional or physical, goes unresolved, the brain reaches for anything that spikes dopamine to quiet it. Over time, tolerance builds and neurons die. Lustig's point is that this is not a personal weakness. The food, the screens, and the stress have conspired to put nearly all of us in some version of this state.
2. Dopamine drives wanting. Serotonin drives contentment. The loneliness epidemic is not simply a social problem but a neurochemical one. Cortisol reduces serotonin, dopamine antagonizes it, and ultra-processed food depletes the tryptophan needed to make it.
3. Lustig draws a clear line between primary needs, love, sleep, real food, and secondary desires, status, power, accumulation. Meeting the basics first is both the simplest and most radical act available.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself
Use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide
https://www.oneskin.co/KNOWTHYSELF
Use code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off OneSkin
E207 - Jim George: Stillness Expert: “How To Not Miss Your Life”
Season 1 · Episode 207
Tuesday, August 11, 2026 • Duration 02:10:51
Jim George is a stillness coach, former animator, and one of the first guests ever to appear on this podcast. He has spent nearly 50 years developing what he calls practical spirituality, a way of working with the mind that requires no doctrine, no dogma, and no special belief system. What it does require is the willingness to get quiet enough to see what is actually there. In this conversation, we return to the most essential territory: the cost of mental noise, the nature of the ego, and what it genuinely means to be present for your own life.
What We Dive Into:
1. The noise in the mind is not neutral. Every moment spent in a self-generated narrative about the past or future is a moment you were not actually there. At the end of a life of that, Jim says, there is a strange vacuum.
2. The drive for status was not a character flaw. It was, quite literally, a matter of life and death for our ancestors. Understanding that gives you room to stop being run by it. When you see the mechanism clearly, competition can begin to evolve into something closer to cooperation, which Jim argues is the actual path forward for the species.
3. Gratitude is not a feeling you perform. It is focused attention on what already is, and it shifts your neurochemistry from dopamine-driven wanting toward something more stable.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.im8health.com/knowthyself
code KNOWTHYSELF for an exclusive offer
https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself
Try LMNT & get a free sample pack
E206 - Jahnavi Harrison: Living a Life of Devotion & Embracing Your Voice
Season 1 · Episode 206
Tuesday, August 4, 2026 • Duration 01:54:27
Jahnavi Harrison is a Grammy-nominated artist, musician, and practitioner of Bhakti Yoga who has spent her life exploring sound as a path to the divine. Raised at Bhaktivedanta Manor in England, she grew up inside one of the world's most dedicated devotional communities, and in this conversation we trace how that formation shaped her relationship with voice, identity, approval, and what it means to offer your life as a prayer.
What We Dive Into:
1. Most of us were told at some point to be quiet, to sound better, or to wait until we were good enough. That conditioning runs deep. Reclaiming the voice, whether through kirtan, song, or simply speaking truthfully, is one of the most direct paths back to a self that stopped performing and started expressing.
2. Bhakti is not a feeling you arrive at and maintain. It is a daily offering, something you return to moment by moment, especially when you have drifted. Jahnavi's framing is simple: make space for prayer in whatever form feels alive to you, and that space will become a source of nourishment that compounds over time.
3. The desire to be accepted can masquerade as discernment, as wisdom, even as calling. Jahnavi traces how much of her own journey involved slowly distinguishing the voice of genuine inner knowing from the much louder voice that simply wanted to be liked. That distinction is not resolved once. It is worked on for life.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com
✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
https://www.timeline.com/KNOWTHYSELF
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E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination
Season 1 · Episode 205
Tuesday, July 28, 2026 • Duration 02:11:55
Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness. His central claim is both unsettling and liberating: we do not passively receive reality, we actively generate it. The world that appears when you open your eyes is not a transparent window onto what is actually out there. It is the brain's best guess, a controlled hallucination, built from the inside out.
What We Dive Into:
1. Your brain is not reading out the world like a camera. It is making constant predictions about what is out there and updating them with sensory signals. What you perceive is much more a product of those internal predictions than of the raw sensory data coming in. In that sense, all perception is a form of hallucination, just one that happens to be grounded in reality.
2. Just as the brain generates a model of the external world, it generates a model of the self. The feeling of being a continuous, stable "I" is another best guess, not a fixed essence waiting to be discovered. This is both humbling and freeing, because a constructed self can be examined and updated in ways a fixed one cannot.
3. As AI systems grow more sophisticated, they will increasingly appear to have inner lives. Anil draws a sharp line between intelligence and consciousness, arguing that current AI lacks the biological, embodied, self-regulating properties that we believe underlie genuine experience. Confusing performance for presence is not just a philosophical error. It shapes regulation, design, and how we treat these systems.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
✨MORE FROM DR. SHEFALI↳New Raising Conscious Sons / Daughters Books: https://www.drshefali.com/raisingconscious-daughters-sons/↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctorshefali/↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ @doctorshefali ↳https://www.drshefali.com
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