Spirit · 18 episodes
Intuition & Consciousness for entrepreneurs
Ask a dozen guests where good decisions actually come from and almost none of them say 'spreadsheets alone.' They describe something that shows up below the neck, in the gut, in a felt sense of resonance or coherence, and they treat it as data, not decoration. Dean Radin has the lab results and the PEAR studies. Deborah Rozman has the heart-rate-variability charts. Others get there through breathwork, mushrooms, hypnosis, or a near-death experience. Different doors, same room.
They don't agree on mechanism, and they don't pretend to. Radin frames it as probabilistic influence measurable with random number generators. Rozman frames it as heart-brain electromagnetic coherence. Niraj Naik gets there through intermittent hypoxia and breath holds. Caroline Cory and the Journeymen Collective get there through altered states — blindfolded perception, psilocybin journeys — that Cambridge researchers have compared directly to psychedelic experience. Sara Gilbert and Jordan Harcourt-Hughes just call it trust, or resonance, and let it stay a little unexplained. Nobody here is claiming intuition replaces analysis. The recurring claim is narrower and more useful: intuition is a real input that most high performers have trained themselves to ignore, and ignoring it has a cost.
The cost shows up as burnout, imposter syndrome, and decisions that look rational on paper and wrong in the body. Multiple guests independently land on the same fix: build the capacity to notice the signal before you act on it, and don't confuse a calm nervous system with a slow one. Coherence, several point out, can happen at high arousal too — this isn't an argument for meditating your ambition away.
What holds across every conversation
- •Treat breath-hold practices as a trainable tool: 60-90 second holds create intermittent hypoxia that forces mitochondrial renewal, not just relaxation.
- •Don't equate coherence with calm — you can be coherent and fully activated, which is what high-stakes performance actually requires.
- •Pair intuitive hits with a logical explanation before acting on them in a business context; verbalize the gut call so others can evaluate it too.
- •If you keep getting the same 'signal' (a feeling, a repeated thought, a resonance) across unrelated decisions, weight it as data, not noise.
- •Watch your repeated self-talk and mantras literally, not metaphorically — several guests argue words said on loop shape behavior and outcomes more than words said once.
- •Before adding a big altered-state practice (breathwork, psychedelics, hypnosis), build in the integration time; the state itself isn't the point, what you do with it after is.
Breath, hypoxia, and natural altered states
How controlled breathing and oxygen restriction produce measurable, drug-like shifts in consciousness without any substance involved.
“So intermittent hypoxia is the magic of breathwork. When you hold your breath for 60 to 90 seconds, you invoke a positive state, a positive stress on the body, and it creates an adaptive change to having less oxygen in the body.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 9:45· listen →
“When you hold your breath, right, for a long enough time, we create intermittent hypoxia and you reduce the oxygen supply to that mitochondria. You will make that mitochondria wake up and go, oh my God, I'm running out of oxygen. I need to do a spring clean.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 13:00· listen →
“The responses were as profound or more profound than the kind of psychedelic insights you get, um, like oneness, connection, feeling like you've been channeled by God and all that stuff, as you would from a big dose of psychedelics.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 15:31· listen →
“When you hold it to as long as I was saying, intermittent hypoxia, you produce ADOSE. ADOSE standing for anandamide, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. So this makes you feel naturally high.”
Niraj Naik on Breathwork, Hypoxia & Natural Highs · 30:37· listen →
The science behind psi and intention
Decades of controlled experiments on precognition, remote viewing, and mind-matter interaction, and what they suggest about intuition as a real, unevenly distributed skill.
“Probably the longest running series was at Princeton University. It was called the PEAR Lab, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. So they used the same random number generator for a sequence of experiments over 12 years... When you look at the results, the cumulative results over the 12 years, it's very clear that probabilistically people can push the system in those— in that way.”
Dr. Dean Radin: Consciousness, Psi Science & Intuition · 25:53· listen →
“From our everyday experience, we are clearly separate. Everything in our experience is constantly reminding of that. From a quantum perspective, separation is an illusion. Everything is connected all the time, not just through space but through time as well.”
Dr. Dean Radin: Consciousness, Psi Science & Intuition · 22:44· listen →
“Yeah. So in the 1970s, a former colleague did an experiment with executives at different companies. And so he used as one of the variables of interest, the degree of profit in the company. He gave all of them a precognition test. And he found a significant positive correlation between profit in the company and how well they did on the precognition test.”
Dr. Dean Radin: Consciousness, Psi Science & Intuition · 37:43· listen →
“So for those who don't know, haven't seen the film, working with scientists, you create baselines and you do it over time and you repeat it and we have controls. So we did do that. But of course, in the film, we show the part. And so what was fascinating was when we work with the DNA, the idea, the intention was to increase the electrical conductivity.”
Consciousness, Intention & Healing with Caroline Cory · 11:58· listen →
“Her name is Nicola Farmer. She's amazing. So she works specifically with kids. And I saw the masks are completely darkened. Like there's, there's no way you can see any. In fact, you use them to sleep, to have complete darkness. There's no hole, there's no cheating. It is, the mask is 100% dark.”
Consciousness, Intention & Healing with Caroline Cory · 16:06· listen →
Heart coherence over pure headspace
Why the heart's electrical rhythm, not just the brain, governs clarity, executive function, and how a room reads you.
“So we call it heart coherence, heart-brain coherence, and there's been over 500 research papers now published on it since it was first published in the American Journal of Cardiology by independent researchers. So it's, it's a real key state for us to get a handle on our moods, emotions, and our health and well-being.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 2:26· listen →
“High-performance states, you don't want everybody around the board table just in this relaxed state. You want them present, aware, accessing all their faculties. That's what coherence provides, is that presence.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 20:37· listen →
“The heart's smart. And because you look at it, you go, wait, this makes more common sense. And then very often the heart's intuition is, bag it, let it go, don't make it such a big deal.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 25:20· listen →
“You do influence it unconsciously, you know? And I think one of the best examples to illustrate that, though, well, the physiology is the heart with every beat is putting out electromagnetic field. And your feelings and moods are vibrating as frequencies through that field.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 26:54· listen →
“The heart isn't some squishy, mushy, sentimental place. You know, that is emotionalism. The heart is power and clarity and charisma. And it expresses clarity and kindness and love.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 44:44· listen →
Trusting the body over pure logic
Guests describe intuition as an expansion of ordinary senses, not a mystical add-on, and argue for pairing it with logic rather than replacing either.
“I think we forget how often we get stuck in our logical mind because the logical mindset is just the natural landscape in terms of how we work in business and our 9-to-5 life. And I think we forget that's not the only way of being. We have another way of living which is far more intuitive.”
Jordan Harcourt-Hughes: Intuition, Resonance & Creativity · 2:07· listen →
“Resonance for me is what vibrates truthfully in my body. So for me, if I resonate with something, I'm connecting with it holistically... and it is an intuitive feeling because it isn't based on one thing or the other.”
Jordan Harcourt-Hughes: Intuition, Resonance & Creativity · 14:58· listen →
“Everyone's living above the neck, but trust is below the neck. So we all live here and we think that our body's useful purpose is just to carry our head around. But all the magic and all the knowing and the intuition and the gut feeling, it's below the neck. So can we trust that a little bit more?”
Sara Gilbert: Intuition, Language & Leading with Courage · 5:42· listen →
“The way that I like to put it is follow your gut, follow the intuition, but verbalize it with logic.”
Sara Gilbert: Intuition, Language & Leading with Courage · 8:51· listen →
“Intuition is simply an expansion of all of your physical senses. Sight, smell, taste, hearing, knowing— our brain— feeling— skin. So it's what we've done is over thousands of years diminished our capacity to read energy and to receive information from anything except our core senses.”
Teresa Wornstaff: Using Intuition to Grow Your Business · 12:58· listen →
Psychedelics, mushrooms, and deep reset
Structured psilocybin journeys and near-death experience as forced resets that strip away habitual patterns and reorder priorities.
“The mushroom is a bit of a house cleaning mechanism that helps you to make decisions and choices to move forward. So the vessel, the human vessel, is sort of like stronger and cleaner as you move forward in decision making.”
Conscious Leadership Through Psychedelic Journeys · 13:07· listen →
“The worst thing that can happen is you're gonna cry. The worst thing that can happen is that you're gonna feel some of the pain that you haven't processed because our culture hasn't actually taught us how to do that.”
Conscious Leadership Through Psychedelic Journeys · 21:29· listen →
“It's not a vacation, it's not a retreat. There's nothing to retreat from. We often talk about it's let, lean, learn. You let go of what you're meant to let go of. You lean into the challenges that show up and you learn from it.”
Conscious Leadership Through Psychedelic Journeys · 30:44· listen →
“Did I want to come back? And I was like, no, like this, this is amazing, this feeling. And I heard voices that told me that I needed to go back, that I had children and that I had a purpose.”
Ashley Black: Necessity, Near-Death & High Vibration Living · 4:11· listen →
“You have to jump, you have to elevate, right? The whole idea is to solve the problem from a place that it wasn't created.”
Ashley Black: Necessity, Near-Death & High Vibration Living · 31:23· listen →
Words, thought, and manifested outcomes
Several guests argue that repeated language and belief physically shape outcomes — not as wishful thinking, but as a mechanism worth taking seriously.
“If you don't remember anything else about what I've said, remember that, that you have to watch what you say. Because if you say it just one time, uh, and whatever, it just kind of comes and goes. But if it's a mantra, something that you say over and over and over again, it sets up reality through those sine and cosine ways to make that come true. So you have to really watch exactly what you say, uh, because otherwise it will come true.”
Don Estes: How Words and Waveforms Shape Reality · 13:37· listen →
“It really all boils down to the fact that the universe is a quantum universe and it goes way beyond just frequency and phase and amplitude, and it all becomes quantum-oriented... everything is, uh, related to like a black hole. And in the center of the black hole is a singularity, and that singularity has all of the potentials that could happen in that particular circumstance.”
Don Estes: How Words and Waveforms Shape Reality · 14:58· listen →
“Remember, every thought system is founded on the cornerstone of what you think you are. A soul that fervently believes it is separate from God will create a building of thought based on that faith, and her mind will show her that she is right, even if it is not true. Ask the mind to show you the truth, it will. Ask it for anything else, and it will do it for you.”
The Spiritual Is Scientific with Rev. Tony Senf · 30:31· listen →
“If I have the thought I'm going to be successful, I get to live a life of someday I'm going to be successful. That's not success. But if I live the life I am successful, because if I am successful, then the physical world, my physical life has to reflect that back to me.”
The Spiritual Is Scientific with Rev. Tony Senf · 31:57· listen →
The companion guide
Reading about intuition & consciousness is one thing. Changing it is another.
John’s companion guide turns what these conversations cover into something you can actually work through.