Sekani: Hello everyone. Welcome to Conversations with Sekani, a podcast for people in their 20s who are trying to figure out life and not get lost along the way. Today’s guest is John Bliss, a writer, thinker, entrepreneur, and lifelong student of some of life’s biggest questions. John describes himself as a skeptic and an individualist, someone who disrupts easy answers and challenges assumptions that many of us accept without question. With a background in history, engineering, business, art, and philosophy, John spent over 13 years writing his book, The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow, exploring questions about meaning, identity, society, and what it means to live a good life. John, welcome to Conversations with Sekani. It’s a pleasure to have you on.

John Bliss: Thank you, Joy. Thank you.

Sekani: John, can you take us back to your childhood? What kind of kid were you, and what first sparked your curiosity about life and ideas?

John Bliss: That’s an interesting start. I was the son of a college basketball coach. What that meant was that winning and losing was really important—it was everything. As a child I saw my father working so hard with his team to win these basketball games. Sometimes they’d lose by one point after putting so much into it, or sometimes they’d win. I remember the losses more because it’s easier to remember your losses. From that, I learned that life is a game, or at least that’s how I chose to approach life. I see it as a game.

As a child I was a strange kid. That’s all I can really say. I was just different. I did my own thing. I remember my mother often telling me, “Why can’t you just be like the other children?” I didn’t know how. I just didn’t know how to do it. That’s all I can really tell you about my childhood.

Sekani: Thank you for telling us that. Looking back, what belief did you hold in your 20s that you later had to change your mind about?

John Bliss: That’s pretty easy. One thing I see—I don’t know if this is a problem in Africa, but certainly in the United States—is that young people, especially because of things they heard from their parents, believe they’re no good. They believe they can never accomplish anything, that they’re stupid, inconsequential, and ultimately not worthy of being loved. When I was young I certainly believed all of those things about myself: that I was an absolute loser who would never have money, never be successful, never be loved. That’s what I believed in my early 20s. Over the years I realized that was all crap.

Since I mentioned this, is this something people in Africa feel when they’re young too? Is this common to humanity in general?

Sekani: I think it’s a humanity thing, actually.

John Bliss: One thing I learned—or rather, I read a book called Feeling Good by David Burns, a cognitive therapist—and he had this technique that I used, which was one of my first breakthroughs. You make a list of all the bad things you hear yourself say about yourself. For me I would write: “I am stupid. I will never be successful. I’m inconsequential. I am ugly. No one will ever love me.” Those might be the five things I could think of at the moment. Next to each of those statements you write, “Is that really true?” “Am I stupid?” Well, I was really good in school, and I don’t think people who are good in school are stupid, so no, I’m not stupid. “Will I ever be loved?” Well, I did have girlfriends, and they loved me, so I guess that’s not true.

I went through all of these different things I said about myself and reasoned whether they were really true. None of them were. The next step is that when you hear that voice—when you make a mistake, drop something in front of everyone, and they all laugh at you—you might say, “Oh, I’m so stupid.” That’s the voice that may come into your mind. You just have to say, “No, I’m not stupid. Remember, I did really good in school.” If you do that third step every time you hear one of those negative voices and counter it with what you wrote down, those voices go away forever. That was the first big step I took. I totally lost all of that.

Sekani: While you were talking, I was thinking about some of the limiting beliefs that I personally had to let go of. One of them was that I was told ever since I was young that in my family we cannot be successful entrepreneurs. We could work a 9-to-5 or do any other thing apart from owning a business. I held on to that until I got to a point where I asked myself, “Why? Why do you believe this, and have you tried it out to see if it would work?” So I started a business, and it was successful. Then I figured out why I was told this: my mom had started a business and it didn’t go well, so she just assumed we were not meant to have a business in this family, and she kept saying it until I started to believe it. Later on I had to challenge that idea. I do not think this is real. It’s left for us as humans to write it down and ask ourselves, “Is this true?” Thank you, John, for that.

John Bliss: It’s so true. It’s like we’re born with these brand-new computers as brains, and then we install all this software. What is the software? It’s the social conditioning—what our families told us, our teachers, and everything else. They told us all these things, and a lot of them aren’t really true and aren’t useful either. They hold us back. It’s really important to question all of them and decide for yourself: “What do I want to be?” And really focus on that. That’s just what you did. Absolutely.

Sekani: Thank you, John. Now I want us to touch on exploring life and meaning. You eventually built and sold a business. What did entrepreneurship teach you about people and success?

John Bliss: There’s so much there. One thing is, I don’t think that being an entrepreneur is for everyone. Most people are scared. This kind of goes back to our earlier conversation: I felt—and I still feel—that you could walk into any room of a hundred people and probably 95 of them are scared or have very little self-confidence. That’s just the way it is. Once you are fearless and have self-confidence, you own the room. Not only do you own the room, you own life. You’re like a wolf among sheep. It’s all about developing your self-confidence and becoming fearless.I don’t think most people can be an entrepreneur. I know a lot of people say that most can. I don’t believe that, because most people are full of fear. During my entire time as a business owner—for about 25 years—I have to say I was really scared maybe 15 or 20 of those years. So maybe you can have fear and still do it, but you will be tormented. I saw business as managed suffering, because if you have payroll and you have to pay people the way I did, you have to pay them whether you have money or not. At least in the United States it’s against the law not to pay your employees. What if I have no money? What am I going to do? You still have to pay them or you’re breaking the law. So what happens is we have to take out a loan. What happens if you can’t pay the loan and business still goes bad? You can lose everything you own. That fear always hung over my head.

I think most people are addicted to comfort. If you’re willing to move outside of that, let comfort go, and be adventurous and courageous—you may have fear inside, but act fearless—then you can really succeed. But most of us want comfort, and that is the real problem.

I just read a book—I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of it—but it described how what holds people back is their love of comfort. We get stuck in these comfort bubbles. It often happens to entrepreneurs as well, including myself. After a while you start out hungry and work hard. Let’s say you’re fearless: you try things, you fail; you try, you fail; you try, you succeed. Then at some point you get to a level of comfort where money is coming in. It always comes in. I always make it. In fact, I have enough money. Maybe I don’t need to continue working hard, and I don’t need to even try hard things and possibly risk losing it all. Why? I’m comfortable. A lot of business people stop being hungry and stop growing. I was one of those, by the way. Comfort is the thing that holds us back from really moving forward—this need of comfort and fear of discomfort.

One other thing I should say about business: your business is going to do really well sometimes and then do really bad. There’s this endless progression: it gets good, then it gets bad, then it gets good, then it gets bad. That’s how it is. When things are good, just remember they will get bad again. When they’re bad, you need to remember they will get good again. It’s just a cycle, and you have to be able to endure that.

Sekani: There’s this saying: “This too shall pass.”

John Bliss: I say that to myself. Yes. Absolutely.

Sekani: People think when they say “this too shall pass,” they always just apply it to negative things. When something negative is happening they’ll say, “This too shall pass.” But we need to understand that it’s both positive and negative.

John Bliss: That’s right. That’s absolutely right.

Sekani: Good things could be happening, and then it will pass, and then something bad. Just know that whatever is happening is short-term. You just have to build your mind and prepare for the future. Things might be rosy now; that doesn’t mean it will be rosy later. So you could just prepare for later, and when it becomes not rosy you won’t be too surprised because you’re already well prepared for it. Whatever situation you’re in, just know that this too shall pass.

John Bliss: Absolutely.

Sekani: John, I want us to talk about what you’re doing today. First of all, what message are you trying to communicate through The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow?

John Bliss: The book is of two parts. It’s 13 essays. The first half of the book pretty much questions a lot of the things we take for granted—that fake conditioning or false software that we put into the brand-new computers that are our minds. It questions them.

For example, is logic always the right way to go? Is it always good to be logical? Actually, it is not. If you’re totally logical, then you would treat people like things. The only thing is your goal. If someone’s in your way, what’s logical? If no one’s going to notice or catch you, then maybe you should just murder them. That’s logical if you’re not going to be caught. That is really not the way to proceed in life. There’s another way of thinking, which is that all life is sacred. That really should be where our thinking starts from. Logic brought us Hitler’s Final Solution. It brought us eugenics. It brought us slavery. It’s logical, but it isn’t right.

Other things I question, for example, science. Science can measure things that we can perceive through our senses and our instruments, but everything else science has, for the most part, just said doesn’t exist. What is love? Well, it’s a chemical reaction. Is that really what love is? There’s a whole world out there that science cannot perceive, does not understand, cannot grasp, and it just says it doesn’t exist. That’s not really true.

Religions: I believe most religions were originated by people who really communicated with God. But you can’t communicate what you experienced. You can’t put it into words. It cheapens it and makes it sound stupid. The people around them who started the religions are organizers. They’re not holy people, not prophets, not gods or avatars. They’re organizers. They set up these systems: “This is the doctrine that you have to believe. These are the sacraments. This is a pope. This is a bishop.” Whatever they come up with. Christ never talked about popes. He didn’t talk about the seven sacraments, purgatory, and limbo. Other people came up with that stuff.That’s the first half of the book: questioning a lot of the ideas that we have taken for granted and based on these assumptions. Based on these assumptions we come up with conclusions—“This is what life’s about”—and then we live based on these ideas of what life’s about. But what if they’re wrong? The assumptions are wrong, so the conclusions should be wrong. Next thing you know, you’re 80 years old, getting ready to die, and you lived a life in the wrong direction, going for things that were totally unimportant, and you wasted your life.The second half of the book really focuses on at least what I believe is really true: that the individual—you and me—we’re really not that important in the long term. A lot of people don’t like to hear that, but you and I are both going to be dead in 80 years. A hundred years, maybe 120 years from now, no one will remember us. Everything that we accomplished will probably be forgotten. This book I wrote, which I think is great—well, it’ll be out of print. Maybe all the copies that existed might all be gone by then. That’s just how it is. We aren’t that important. But we live as if we are extremely important. It’s not about us. What it really is about is the human race itself. We are all just a part of humanity itself.

For example, if I was running a marathon and I really wanted to get to the end of the race, but I got blisters on my feet and kept running, and the blisters rubbed and ripped off so the skin that was part of my body got ripped off my feet, but I still ran the race because I wanted to finish— from the skin’s point of view this was an awful thing. “Look, because we ran this marathon, a lot of us got massacred. We got murdered. It was terrible.” But it wasn’t about the skin cells. It was about the human who was running the marathon and trying to accomplish their goal. In the same way, you can look at us humans. We’re like those individual skin cells. Not really important. We come, we go. What matters is humanity. That’s kind of what the second half of the book is about.

Sekani: I would actually love to check out the book, and I think I would highly recommend it to anyone. Before I ask this next question: you’ve had mystical experiences, and you practice dream analysis. How have those experiences influenced your thinking?

John Bliss: A lot. I listen to my dreams. As I tell people, I do what I’m told. There’s so much—it’s hard to describe it in so little time. Our unconscious minds are really what make most of our decisions. We like to think that when we do marketing, or when you’re trying to sell something, you can make an argument and they’ll buy it because of what you said: “Oh, it’s the least expensive. I worked with these companies.” That’s not what sells. What sells is that the person you’re talking to might like you, or they might trust you. That’s what sells. They will use your arguments as a justification to their boss: “Yeah, they have all these customers, and it’s less expensive.” Then the boss might approve it. But people generally make their decisions emotionally, or it comes from their unconscious mind.I think that’s true just in life, not just buying. We make our decisions about what we’re going to do unconsciously. Most of us don’t have a clear connection to our unconscious mind. Instead, we’re too busy with our cell phones and with the mass media and all this other stuff, and we’re not listening. So we end up making decisions for more conscious reasons and end up ignoring what’s really supposed to be driving us, which is our unconscious minds.

One way to really get back to the root of who we are is through listening to your dreams. That means I write them down in the mornings when I have them, and I try to interpret them as best I can. I often get a lot of really good meaning out of that and make my decisions based on that.

Sekani: What about people who can’t even remember what they dreamt about?

John Bliss: It’s easy to do, actually. You just have to ask yourself before you go to sleep, “I want to remember. Can you please let me remember my dream?” When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you need to do is write it down. Or you can record them. There are little apps on your phone, and you can just speak into it: “Last night I was at some healing resort that was somehow situated in a place where there were seven different states, and they all had borders next to each other in one little spot, and that’s where the resort was, and I was there.” Now, what does it mean? That one I didn’t even try to interpret. I have no idea what that one was about.

But you can ask yourself, “Please, will you give me that? Will you do this for me?” And usually the unconscious mind will answer. The more you listen to it, the more it will be available to you. Most people have been ignoring it all this time, so it’s not going to treat you very well at first—it will ignore you back. But if you start saying, “Please, come into my life. Talk to me. Tell me what I need to know,” it will start to talk to you, and it will build trust with you. The more you write down your dreams and try to listen to it and act upon it, then it will feed you more. That all works.

Can I tell you where my book is? I’m an American from the United States, and I don’t know how exchange rates are with your clientele, but my guess is that my book would be super expensive for you all to buy. I have it for free if you want it for free. I don’t need your money. If you go to my website, it’s called skeptikapress.com—S-K-E-P-T-I-K-A press. skeptikapress.com. You can download the book for free. It’s a PDF. I don’t need money. I just want people to read the book. skeptikapress.com.

Sekani: I was actually checking it out while you were saying it. I will put the link in the show notes so it’s easily accessible for listeners. Thank you, John. Finally for today, I want you to talk to someone out there, specifically younger adults, because that is the sole purpose of my podcast: to give advice to the young ones. Many people in their 20s feel pressure to follow a certain path. What would you want them to know about that, and what would you say to them?

John Bliss: A few things. One is, when you’re scared of something—like you’re thinking, “I might want to try this,” but you’re scared, or maybe a lawyer has sent you a letter and they want to sue you and you’re scared to open the letter—the best thing to do when you have fear is to run at it. In other words, open the letter. If they say you have to do these things, do those things. If you’re scared of trying new opportunities, go and do it. You’ll find that the thing you were scared of wasn’t even one-third as much as you thought it was. Just realize that when you run at what you’re scared of, you’ll find the other side of it was empty. There was nothing there. And when you get through it, you feel so much better. That would be one.

Another one would be to try what I said earlier: list all those things that you hear when you have this negative self-talk. Write all that stuff down and challenge them all. You can overcome those pretty fast. I overcame them in one day, and it was really plaguing me. I really believed I was crap—I was just the worst loser in the world and would never be successful—and I managed to be successful. That was my first step.

One other thing I would suggest: if you can watch Tony Robbins, anything on YouTube by Tony Robbins, watch it. If you could do it every day—just spend five minutes watching Tony Robbins—that will transform your life, and that will make you into a giant killer for sure.

Sekani: Tony Robbins. Thank you, John. I think this has been deeply insightful. Personally, I’ve learned a lot, and I believe my listeners will do the same. Finally, before you go, where can listeners learn more about you and also connect with you?

John Bliss: That would be skeptikapress.com. There’s a form if you want to write to me. I’ll write back. I’ll talk to anyone. That’s probably the best place. skeptikapress.com. That way I will actually be able to respond.

Sekani: skeptikapress.com. I will update it in the show notes. To my listeners, thanks for tuning in to Conversations with Sekani. If this episode sparked something in you, just as it did in me, make sure to share it with someone who you think might need this. And also subscribe so you don’t miss out on new episodes. Once again, thank you, John, and do have a wonderful day ahead of you.

John Bliss: Thank you, Joy.