how to upgrade your brain's OS

0:00'Cause a lot of times as humans we get to a point where we must shed a skin or we will continue to suffer. We must shed. We have to shed. We have to update the operating system. You can't be in 2026 running Windows 95. It's not going to work. So that means we need to know how to keep improving and keep updating that operating system, because again, Viktor Frankl, he talks about that gap, and that gap is the conscious gap that he talks about. What I want to talk about is the unconscious gap, the gap that is going automatically. You are now experiencing the Nectar of Time.

0:47So the renowned Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away a few years ago, is a famous author. He wrote a book that you may have heard of. It's called Slaughterhouse-Five. And there's a beautiful quote from that book that goes something like this: "When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever." Well, we know that

1:39time is multi-dimensional. We know that there is a way of looking at the world that is nonlinear. We obviously are prisoners of the present. We can't live in the past. We can't live in the future. But of course, that is a very scientific statement, and that's not a real practical statement, because I live in the past. I'm sure you have lived in the past, or you live in the past, or you live in the future, right? Because what is living in the past? Living in the past is ruminating. Living in the past is having a memory. Living in the past is thinking about what could have been. And despite having those thoughts in the present moment, we are in essence living

2:27in the past. This is why Eckhart Tolle wrote his whole book, The Power of Now. Of course, we can live in the past and we can live in the future. A lot of times we are motivated by what is to come in the future, on a personal level and on a societal level. On a personal level it's, "Hey, you know, I want to have that house. I want to buy that house by the water. I want to have a view, and I wake up every morning, I want to open the curtains and have the sun rays on my face. And I want to be in walking distance to the beach." And we're thinking about this and we're visualizing. In fact, a lot of times when we're manifesting, we're actually visualizing the future, and we want to be in the future, and that's not really a negative thing necessarily. Sometimes it's very important. We know that athletes

3:15continuously visualize their success before it happens, and there's many cases. And on the level of a society, we might visualize the future if you're involved in technology. You might visualize a world with AI, and that allows you to make investments, and that allows you to connect with other companies and do deals. I mean, we're seeing the deals these days with OpenAI and Nvidia and Microsoft, and all of these companies are coming together to build out that future. So are they thinking in the moment, or are they thinking of the future? From a religious standpoint, there's a lot of people that are awaiting the return of Christ. They're awaiting the return of Jesus.

4:05There are a lot of people that are awaiting some world in the future, the afterlife, Dante's Inferno or Paradiso, depending on how good you were as a person. So my place here is not to judge any of that, but it's just to say that all of these moments are equally real. And whether we live in the past or we live in the future, I don't know that it really matters as much as our interpretation of those memories and those visions and those feelings that we have. In the podcast that I just finished, it's all about

4:55different pathways in life. And a lot of these pathways are derived from our motivations that come from childhood, that come from compensations and validations that we're looking for. You know, you have to get the Ferrari, and you can't just have the Ferrari. It has to be wrapped in neon, right? All of these are derived from our perception: our perception of who we are, our perception of us relative to the world. And what's important to note is that we have a brain that is essentially an operating system, that is essentially an operating system filter. Computer is ultimately input and output, right? And our brain is a very advanced computer. When we

5:46think about what we like or what we don't like, or from a basic standpoint, if we think about whether something is hot or something is cold, that goes through the operating system. And as much as it feels instant for us, that if you put your hand on a hot stove it's going to burn your hand, there is actually a latency. There is actually a delay from the stimulus and then the response. And this is something Viktor Frankl talks about in Man's Search for Meaning, that there's a gap between the stimulus and the response on every level of thought, right? So you could think about this from touching a stove, or you can think about this from someone cutting you off in

6:34traffic, and you could think about this as getting your heart broken. Now, Viktor Frankl, we've all heard this before. I imagine it's quite a popular commentary from him. You know, he talks about how we have that opportunity, that gap, to essentially create our own interpretation of how we should react. So someone cuts you off in traffic, you can decide: am I going to get upset, or am I going to handle this in a calm, chill, relaxed way? It's up to us to decide. We have the stimulus, but we get to decide the response. And we have that one little gap to make the difference. Now, that's not what I wanted to talk

7:22about. I want to talk about that operating system. I want to talk about the interpretation machine. Not the conscious part, but the unconscious part. Because a lot of times as humans, we get to a point where we must shed a skin or we will continue to suffer. We must shed. We have to shed. We have to update the operating system. You can't be in 2026 running Windows 95. It's not going to work. It's going to be too slow. You're going to get bad results. Blah, blah, blah. So that means we need to know how to keep improving and keep updating that operating system

8:11because again, Viktor Frankl, he talks about that gap, and that gap is the conscious gap that he talks about. What I want to talk about is the unconscious gap, the gap that is going automatically. It's going automatically because we've trained it over years and years and years of learning, of trauma, of experiences, of being left out, of being popular, of being unpopular, whatever it is, of the job you had, of the community that you grew up in. There's many ways where this information seeps in, and like plaque, it gets stuck. It's like your teeth, right? You get that plaque. You go to the

8:59dentist, they tell you the plaque has been on your teeth. You know, you need to do a better job cleaning it up, keeping your teeth healthy. There is plaque that can accumulate in our minds that can affect performance in every area of our life, and they create these boundaries. And the problem with these boundaries is you cannot really truly think your way out of it. It's like a snake eating its own tail. It's very difficult for the computer with a bug to unbug itself, to fix itself. There has to be new code that's pushed to fix the bug. So I want to share a little excerpt from the book that I discuss in my podcast, and you should check that out

9:48if you like this video, and if you like this quote I'm about to share. "Because memory is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together, a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it's the filter between us and reality. You think you're tasting this wine, hearing the words that I'm saying in the present, but there's no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory. So by the time you know you're experiencing something, it's already in the past. It's already a memory. Just what your brain does to interpret a

10:36"simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then they're processed by your brain at different speeds. So your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly and lets you experience them together as a simultaneous event about half a second after what actually happened. We think we're perceiving the world." This is the important part, guys. "We think we're perceiving the world directly and immediately. But everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction."

11:25Ladies and gentlemen, this is not some simulation theory. This is a matter of fact, scientifically. The neurochemistry, neurobiology of our brain does exactly that. It creates that little delay to process everything. So the I, the you that is watching and experiencing this video, is currently interpreting it with its own filters, with its own prediction model. You know, a lot of LLMs these days, large language models, are essentially prediction models. They're trying to figure out what is the next bit of information to deliver, right? So if you send a photo and you say, "This is a picture of a dog. Can you

12:12"tell me what dog breed it is?" it's making a prediction, right? When you ask it, "Hey, can you write me an essay on Shakespeare?" it's making a prediction of the best possible essay that it could write on Shakespeare. Okay? And our brains are these prediction models. And so I've asked myself, you know, is my brain making the right predictions? Is it making the right calculations? Now, of course, there's no real way to know unless you test it. But if you're here and you're watching this video, you're obviously here because for some reason, not everything is perfect in your life. Okay, that reason is, by the way, just being a human

13:00being, and being on Earth, nothing is always perfect, which means we always have to grow. There's always more to interpret. The prediction model can always be better. There is no perfect model, but there are improved models, and then there are models that do not get improved. So we want to improve how we think. I think we want to improve this filter, and it's very important to consciously sit and make sure that we're not, again, like the models do, hallucinating, that we're not thinking the wrong things. And so now we get to the how. How do we actually go about fixing these bugs that we might have

13:51in our operating system? Well, first we have to observe. We have to observe our life, observe reactions and see where we might be slipping up. And of course, if we can just look at the results as objectively as we can and say, "How much of this result was me? How much of this result was circumstance, was environment?" and really have an honest conversation about that. I think that is one really good way to at least sort of achieve an audit of where we're at, where we're at with this operating system that we have. But I would say the number one way to fix that operating system is

14:42one word. It's just one word. That's the number one way to fix your operating system. It's the equivalent of compound interest. You know, we always hear about compound interest. That is the path to financial freedom. Of course, over a period of time, your money grows exponentially. You know, compounding is just this incredible feature of life. And it just so happens to work really well with money, but it also just so happens to work really well with our minds. And so yes, what I'm proposing is that there is a way to generate that same wealth-building,

15:29life-building, growth-building effect that we see everywhere else in life, to have that same compounding interest on your brain. And so what is it? Curiosity. Curiosity. That's how you get compounding interest for your brain, and how to fix your operating system is curiosity. Curious about where you're wrong, curious about your convictions, curious about other people's convictions. To have curiosity is the superpower of the current paradigm that we're in, the current world that we're in. And I don't mean

16:17an ADHD variant of curiosity where you're interested in every cute, shiny, glittery object. That's not what I'm talking about. It's easy to see a social media reel about the Bahamas and be curious about it. I mean, it's easy to be curious, see an attractive person. It's easy to be curious when things are easy, right? It's difficult to be curious about the things that make us uncomfortable. It's difficult to do that audit on ourselves and then look at each component of our lives and be curious about that, and be relentlessly curious about that. And I get it. It's difficult. We don't want to put our faults under the microscope. We don't want to put our

17:03decisions that we've made under the microscope. And the longer you've committed and the longer you've made a decision, the more difficult it is to put it under scrutiny. It's painful. You know, if you were in a religious group, if you were in a group or a team or a company where you all thought a certain way, and then slowly, slowly you started to ask questions that didn't jive with the other people there, whether it's a religion or, you know, a company or a mission, whatever it is, a team, a sports team, you know, it's difficult to look in the mirror and say, "What have I done with my life for all of these years, when I was maybe thinking

17:53"the wrong thoughts? When I was maybe putting myself in a bad situation?" You know, what do they say? You can take a plant that's dying in one garden, in one bed of soil, and you could put it in another bed of soil, and then it's going to flourish because it's a different environment. There's different surroundings. There's different influences. So we have to be very mindful of that. And so to wrap up this idea, it's how can we understand how much of our operating system is interpretation, is perception? You know, how much of it is that? How much can we actually control?

18:42And yes, it's scary to look in the mirror and say, "Hey, I've been working with a faulty operating system." But it's only scary if you want it to be scary. You can look at it and say, "Hey, Apple pushes a new operating system every year. When was the last time I pushed out a new operating system for myself?" Right? So it's one thing to know that, hey, I'm going on a long run and I feel suffering and I feel pain, and I'm going to use the Viktor Frankl method, and I'm going to say, you know what, I feel that pain, but I'm not going to let it bother me. I'm going to keep going. Right? The gap between stimulus and response. But it's another thing to actually say, why am I running? Where am I even going?

19:32I think it's a really important question to ask, and the answer is bespoke. It's tailored. It's customized. It's a thumbprint for you and you only. Only you can figure out what that right answer is. But hopefully this was a good prompt to get you thinking in that direction. Thanks again for listening. If you like this kind of content, please subscribe, like the video, comment your thoughts on it, tell me what you like, tell me what you didn't like, and of course share it, and listen to the longer-form content as well. This has been Nectar of Time, and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you.