How do you build a new operating system for the mind - Mark Williamson (COO of Masterclass)

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. Today's interview with Mark Williamson, who is the COO of Masterclass, was a very, very interesting one. Throughout the two years that I've been doing this podcast, I've been randomly reaching out to people on Twitter and bringing them onto the show and then them opening up things that they've never really talked about with anybody else. And this one with Mark is particularly like that. He, a couple weeks before I reached out to him, had a very powerful meditation experience, or maybe a very ordinary meditation experience where he disidentified with the ego, which is a common goal that people have been practicing for many, many years are looking for. And Mark had only come to this from Sam Harris's app, listening to podcasts, and then all of a sudden sits down for meditation and has this experience where he just stops identifying with the ego. And then I reach out to him, not knowing any of this a couple weeks later, and he says yes. And then he comes on the show and then I go into Masterclass, which didn't even know they had an office in San Francisco, and went over to interview him and we have an hour and 30 minute long conversation. Usually I try to keep my podcast to about 45 minutes, but we went all the way to an hour and a half because it was so interesting. It actually reminds me of my first episode, the first episode I published with Jeremy Riney, and of just like how I run into these people who have these experiences and then immediately afterwards I interview them and get the timely nature of these experiences down recorded. And so I'm really grateful for this opportunity. It's why I love doing this podcast, that I can benefit, and hopefully my listeners can benefit from these profound experiences of people who are creative and are searching for the truth or have had the truth just kind of brought to them in various ways. And so I'm really hopeful that you enjoy this episode and that you get a lot of value out of it. If you do, please find us on itunes, Stitcher, Spotify, by searching for Crazy Wisdom. And if you do like this interview, it would be extremely helpful if you could leave us a review on itunes. And yeah, I'm really hopeful that you like this. And I do want to let you guys know I'm running breathwork sessions, about four or five breathwork sessions on Zoom, totally distributed for about 10 minutes for each breathwork session. I've been geeking out on the science behind breathwork and most of these techniques, they're. They're not going to change your life, but they will allow you to basically calm down enough so that you can see how you can change your own life. That's the value that they played for me. And also they can help you regulate your autonomic nervous system. We talk about this a little bit in the interview, but your stress response happens whenever you have an internal perceived stress or external perceived stress and your body starts to release chemicals, hormones that have changes on your body. This is all happening autonomically. And breath is also happening autonomically, meaning that you don't have control over it unless you then take control. And so breath work is a way that we can take control and essentially stress the nervous system in a particular way way in order to rebalance it so that these stressors become less overwhelming to our body and our actual physical body. So I want to invite anybody who has found this conversation to be of interest to come to these breathwork sessions that I'm hosting four or five times a day on Zoom. If you are interested in that, please find me on Twitter stewartalsop I I I and you can DM me your email and I'll add you to the email list. Again, that's ewartalsop I I I on Twitter. And yeah, I hope you guys find it of value and come breathe with me throughout the day. Have a great day. So welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. My guest here is Mark Williamson. He is the COO of Masterclass and I'm really excited to have you on. Welcome to the show.