A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome to another inspiring episode of Stellar Life! We’re diving deep into the realms of self-empowerment, mental resilience, and personal transformation with our guest, Peter Sage. 

Peter is a renowned serial entrepreneur, author, and public speaker who has built over 20 companies and worked alongside notable figures like Kofi Annan and Richard Branson.

In this episode, Peter shares his philosophy on being the star of your own movie, the power of leveraging mental strategies akin to Aikido, and his transformative experiences during a six-month incarceration. Despite the chaos of the outside world, including his intense legal battle with Hewlett Packard and time spent in a hostile prison environment, Peter’s outlook on life remains unwaveringly positive. He emphasizes the importance of controlling one’s own narrative, distinguishing between fear and real danger, and channeling energy into creating the life you desire.

From his innovative approach to personal growth in challenging circumstances to his belief in the universe’s plan, Peter’s insights are both profound and actionable. We’ll also explore how media influences public perception and the importance of consuming it mindfully to maintain personal empowerment. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the show!

In This Episode

• [02:39] – Peter Sage recounts his background and mentions The Inside Track, a book originally comprised of 11 private letters he penned from prison to his coaching students.
• [05:30] – Peter describes the legal battle with Hewlett Packard (HP) over a $12 million deal, which escalated to a contempt of court application.
• [14:46] – Peter discusses the difference between fear and danger.
• [22:26] – Reflecting on his life after prison, Peter expresses deep gratitude for the experience and the lessons it imparted.
• [25:09] – Orion opens up about her own current challenges living in Israel during a time of political and social unrest.
• [28:43] – Peter advises you to remember that you are the star of your own movie and to focus on being a beacon of hope and possibility.
• [43:45] – Peter recalls his daily rituals while in prison, including waking up early, meditating, and writing letters to his students.
• [46:27] – Peter offers his top tips for living a stellar life.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hi, Peter. Welcome to the Stellar Life podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It’s an honor and a pleasure.

Pleasure’s mine. I’m really happy to see what we can do to contribute to the listeners today. I’m excited about where we’re going. I was really excited when I got the invite, and I’m glad to be here.

Awesome. Thank you. Before we begin, can you share a little bit about yourself?

The first thing I always say is that no matter what bio cherry points, people hype up. I’m just a normal guy who spends a lot of time studying certain things. You have to be in the slow learners club like me not to be pretty good at what you do if you spent 33 years actually focusing on it. That, for me, was understanding human behavior, personal growth, and entrepreneurship. That’s kind of what the three have fused together as. I dropped out of school at 16. I’ve got no formal qualifications. I got a PhD in results, and essentially, I’ve been unemployed for nearly three and a half decades. I started my first business at 17 and kind of went from there. I failed a lot, won a lot, tried a lot, lost a lot, and had a lot of fun.

Life is not a comfort-centric experience; it's a growth-centric one. Embrace the growth, and you'll find true empowerment. Share on X

That’s amazing. I want to start with your story and your book. Why did you decide to write it and share something like that with the world?

People are listening. A little bit of context—it was never actually a book. It was actually not written as a book. It was written as eleven private letters that I sent from prison to my private coaching students. Having found myself inside prison for a six-month sentence as the only non-criminal in the prison, meaning I’ve never been arrested or accused of a crime, I was not found guilty of anything. There was no trial. I came out six months later, still with no criminal record. I would have actually come out sooner if I was a criminal because I’d been eligible for parole, but because I wasn’t eligible for parole, because I didn’t have a parole officer and I’d never committed a crime.

If people are scratching their heads on that, then I’ll sort of close the loop. It was a civil matter. It was essentially a litigation that I was arguing with a multi-billion dollar company that had a lot better, deeper pockets and lawyers than I could afford. They threw a contempt of court application at me, saying I’d breached a court order, which I hadn’t. I thought I proved I hadn’t. But it tends to be the people with the deepest pockets winning court because who can hire the best storytellers? I learned a valuable lesson. I found myself in a civil, non-criminal prison, going to jail for contempt of court for six months, which turned out to be an incredible adventure.

That’s amazing. Would you do it again? Like, would you contemplate the judge again, or would you be?

If I can shine a little bright light in a dark place and help somebody else, I’ve got to surrender to the purpose that I’m here for.

I learned a lot about how the legal system works. It’s not that the backstory is that relevant, but now we’re arguing about a $12 million deal that we’ve done seven years before. Well, I’d ordered $12 million worth of goods. I’d paid for them in full. I’d resold them for a small margin, and seven years later, they knocked on my door. This is Hewlett Packard (HP) suing me for 17 million, saying that that was the difference between what I sold it for and retail, and they didn’t give me permission to resell it.

You didn’t give me a contract saying I couldn’t. I mean, if I own legal title and I’m paid in full, I can set fire to it if I want. I’m not bound by any restrictions. They didn’t like that because some of their distributors were buying cheaper from me, and they wanted to teach me a lesson. I just saw it as financial bullying. And I said, “No, I’m not going to be bullied.” That’s when they threw the contempt of court to put pressure on me. At the end of the day, to answer your question, would I compromise my values by not having the integrity I felt I was demonstrating by not bowing to financial pressure? That has two sides to it.

If it were an integrity principle, then I would absolutely do the same. If it was a business decision, that’s another question. Because they knew it would cost me 200 grand to defend this thing, and they offered to settle for 100 grand. From a business decision, it would have been easier to pay 100k rather than actually end up being 300,000 in debt, plus losing everything, going to jail, losing my business, losing my wedding, and everything. Would I have done it again? I’d have probably picked my battles.

When it comes to trusting the universe, I knew that I was in. If I stood with what I believed to be true and I wasn’t hurting anyone, and nobody had suffered, they wouldn’t admit how much money they made on the $12 million I gave them. Because if they admit to making a profit, how can they sue me for a loss? It was all a scam. And HP has been in the press a lot recently for other allegations. If we have a look at it, what is the lesson here? You can’t control what you can’t control, and once you’ve made a decision, you can’t undo the past.

You can change a decision in the moment that affects moving forward. Once, I found myself in jail, which I never saw coming; now, I thought the judge would laugh it out of court in a day. Obviously, it doesn’t work out that way. But once the decision was made, the judge said, “Boom, you’re going away.” At that point, it’s about how fast I accept what’s actually happened rather than resist what’s actually happened because resisting what’s happened already is stupid. It’s a waste of energy.

But we do it all the time.

Of course, we do. I wish it was different. Well, it isn’t different. Make a decision now to stop resisting what’s different and channel that energy into changing what’s current so you can have what’s different in the future. As to how you want it, it’s pretty simple, but people don’t do that. Looking back, the people that have read that book that was never meant to be a book.

As I said, it was eleven private letters. It was after I came out that my students, who I’d written to every two weeks, said, “What you shared with us was gold. It helped us in our own lives. Watching what you were doing in jail, how you were helping the prisoners, how you were stopping suicides, how you were getting people off drugs in the most dangerous, violent environment you could imagine, and changing the system from the inside out (which I later won an award for), when we saw how you were doing that in real-time, and you were sharing the techniques, you were sharing the thought processes; you were sharing the context behind what you were trying to do, that changed. That helped us more than following you around the world for the last two years on stage and in seminars. You have to share these letters with the public.” It was never meant to be public information. It was that you’re my students; some of you are advanced students. That’s why I was giving advanced information.

They said it would help a lot of people. That’s my hop-on. I’m like, “Okay, so we just collated the eleven letters I wrote. No editing apart from spelling mistakes.” I called it The Inside Track. It’s changed the lives of pretty much everyone that’s read the book.

It was one of the most unique, incredible books I’ve read, and I’m pretty amazed at how quickly you were able to accept where you are, how fast you were able to get into that acceptance of where you are and change the intention of from, “Oh, poor me,” which is not the intention. That suffering of, “What just happened?” to “I’m going to help everybody and shift this place.” How did that work? How does your brain work?

You’ve heard about the terminal overnight success. What happens behind that? Well, it took me 25 years to learn how to be an overnight success in situations like that. It’s not just I decided, “Oh, well, let’s turn this into an adventure.” I’d been teaching and studying human behavior, positive psychology, and understanding how to deal with adversity for a long time. When it looked like it was going south, my fiance at the time turned around to me and said, “This isn’t going the way we thought it was gonna go. You could even go away here. What would happen if you do?” And I’m like, “I’m not expecting that to happen, but if it does, and that’s where the universe wants to send me, I’ve got to follow.” 

Accept the circumstances you can't change, then channel your energy into creating the outcomes you desire. That’s the essence of resilience. Share on X

Why? Because if I spend a lot of time over the last couple of decades plus helping people who are looking for help, that’s a pretty good audience. But sometimes, the real people who could benefit from what I share aren’t looking for help.

They don’t even know it’s available. And if I’m able to shine a little bright light in a dark place like Pentonville, the Victorian prison I was in, and be able to help somebody else, even if it’s one person, I’ve got to surrender to the purpose that I’m here for, not cherry pick just because I want to be on stage. And one of the examples I give is, if you’re a professional actor, let’s pick a character everybody knows. 

Tom Cruise is playing Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible. And there are parts of that script where he’s on a beach having a cocktail with some model, doing whatever he’s doing. It’s in Tahiti, Hawaii. It’s a nice scene. There are also scenes where he’s potentially trapped under the Arctic ice fighting the bad guys. Well, if you’ve got to flip a coin and say which scene I would rather be in, then Hawaii has got my vote. However, in his role as a professional actor, his job is to show up and act in every single scene to make the movie as good as he can.

Ah, that’s so powerful.

And there’s going to be times he’s going to be away from the family, trapped under the ice with stuntmen and frogmen and goodness knows what, and have to redo a scene that’s physically very uncomfortable, but it’s for the movie. You don’t get to just do the beach scenes with the Bond girls. As for me, I wrote to my students in the first letter, as you can see, and I’m like, “Guys, don’t worry about me. I’m simply on location for six months, filming the prison scene of my amazing movie.” And my job is to show up as a professional actor, not b*tch about the fact I don’t like this particular scene in my movie. Does that make sense?

Yes. Were you scared?

Talking statistically, if you look at the home office figures, the most violent prison in not only England, not only the UK but most of Europe. And it is not a nice place. If you see Prison Break, think of it a little bit like that, with a much smaller exercise yard.

I should watch it just to get the idea.

Blood on the floor is a daily occurrence. Violence is an epidemic. Attempted murders are at least once a week. Just before I got there, it was all over the news about some guy in Bentonville who had just been stabbed to death in a gang war. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to invite your girlfriend’s parents for dinner. If it was a hotel, it wouldn’t do well on Tripadvisor. 

Those were the times I was scared. There were definitely times that I was alert a lot of time. But there’s a difference between fear and danger. Most people don’t understand that. Fear is an evolutionary response that’s designed to serve one purpose, and that is to point your attention in the direction of something physically dangerous. That’s what fear is. And for hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, it served a very useful purpose. 

Violence is an epidemic.

“I’m not sure if that snake is poisonous. I better be wary. I don’t know what that noise is outside the cave. I’m on alert.” What we do today is we make up fears that were never designed to be fears. Most people now fear the credit card bill. They fear the boss and what he’s going to give them. They fear their annual report at school, or whatever it may be—psychological fears. We realize that fear serves one useful purpose: to point your attention away from what you are doing and garner it towards a potentially physical threat. Other than that, fear serves absolutely no useful purpose.

Fear does not play one useful role in your life other than that purpose. And again, people mix fear and danger. People may even say, “Well, hang on, but fear is quite useful for not walking down a dark alley at night.” Well, no, intelligence is useful for not walking down a dark alley at night. The fear stops you from going on holiday in a war zone. No, being common sense stops you from going on holiday in a war zone. 

The higher the emotional reaction to fear, because you’re not keeping it in check to focus on danger, but you’re just getting carried away by the fear, the less critical thinking you have, that’s just psychological, biological, and neurological facts. I was very wary in prison about not getting scared because the moment I got scared, I lost my ability to think. That doesn’t mean to say that I was “Mister Courage and bravado.” No, I was doing it as a survival mechanism to stop me from becoming a victim.

Absolutely. Also, the animals that we are sense fear in each other. We sense insecurity.

Oh, definitely. You saw a pecking order in there where people that. Who’s going to get extorted? Who’s going to get bullied? Now, I’m not a small guy. I’m six foot three. I weigh 185 pounds. But I’m not a fighter. Nobody wants to be a fighter in that scenario. Why? Because there’s always a bigger animal in the jungle. I make no mistake, that’s the jungle in there. There’s no way the tough guy image or the bravado image is going to keep you safe because someone will want to alter the pecking order. The energy I focused on was more of, if you look at the four primary archetypes of the human personality, as Douglas Gillette and Robert Moore outlined, you’ve got the sovereign, the lover, the warrior, and the magician.

The magician’s energy was really what I relied on. If I had to resort to physical violence, which I never did, I would consider that if my warrior had to step up, which was capable of stepping up if I had to, then I would have considered that a catastrophic failure of my magician. I could talk a lot faster than most people. But to really hit the nail on your question here, which is, did I feel scared? The reason I feel that I never felt in danger was because I felt I was there for a reason bigger than me. I felt the universe was taking care of me. I felt it was looking after, guiding, and protecting me. Why? Because I was there to help. I was there to serve. I was there to try to make a difference.

If I’m working in conjunction with bringing light into the darkness, if there is any nonphysical support, it’s going to be on my side if that’s the mission it’s tasking me for. That was my belief. I never once got into a fight. The only time I got threatened with violence was one of my early cellmates who was psychotic and on antipsychotic medication. I was trying to help him in several ways. He was depressed because of his family. His wife wasn’t visiting. She blamed him for leaving the family without income. He was overweight. He was addicted to watching daytime TV in the cell, especially the news.

You can imagine the psychological profile. The guy was much bigger than me. He was six foot four, weighed 240 pounds, and was just an animal oaf. He made Shrek look. I don’t say that from judgment; I say that from observation. I was in a tiny cell with him for ten days.

The higher the emotional reaction to fear, the less critical thinking you have.

We got on fairly well to start with. I got him on a fitness thing. I wrote a letter for him to copy in his handwriting to write to his wife, who then actually wrote back to him and visited for the first time as a result. But you can only do so much. It got to a point where he would bang on the door from midnight to 2 AM, shouting profanity at the guards, picking up the chair in the cellar, smashing it against the door, threatening the guards, daring the guards to come and whatever. I’m on the bunk bed, trying to sleep. You caught him at the wrong moment. That’s when they turned around and said, “Listen, you’re not going to be able to make a lot more noise if I smash the TV in your face. Shut the.”

That’s the time I thought I’d probably done enough, and I’ve done all I can to help this guy. The next day, I spoke to one of the guards and the prison officers and explained the situation. They actually moved me to a new cell. It was literally three days later I saw through the little bars in the window the riot police went into his cell and restrained him. Four of them with shields and batons, too, because he’d had a psychotic episode. They carried him off to what I can only hope is a psycho-evaluation ward where he could get some proper help.

That’s a lot to handle. You’re a very strong guy. But do you feel like there is some post-trauma from being there, witnessing and being with people like that, threatening to kill you in this environment?

Oh, wow. I’ve actually never been asked the question that I think I suffer from any PTSD because it’s never even crossed my mind, honestly. If you ask people how they got on at school, I mean, it’s not everybody’s favorite time of their life, but there are some good times and some tough times—times you got bullied, failed the test, put in detention. But there are a lot of great times you have with your mates and everything else. It was just that adventure. I see prison like that I have in all the most amazing times. I really did. 

Looking back, I remember the adventure I was lucky enough to be guided on. Were there tough times? Were there times when I was in detention? Were there times when I felt threatened by bullies in the playground? Yes. But overall, I’m utterly grateful for the opportunity to test my skills and ability in a real-world environment. And part of it, I saw that again. In the first letter, I told my students what I believed I was experiencing and called it a graduation event.

You have two different levels. You’ve got what I call BLTs, not bacon, lettuce, or tomato. It is a ‘basic life test.’ Life will always test you to see if you just intellectually know something or if you’re able to actually live it. Because knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing. It’s okay if you know everything on your driving test, but if you go out and crash your car every five minutes, it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re a relationship expert, expect to have relationship issues so you can demonstrate what you teach. If you’re a health expert, expect to attract a health challenge so that you can actually practice what you preach.

See if you’re genuine or you’re just intellectually toying with yourself. You’ve been studying patients, and you’ve been talking to your therapist about non-judgment, and somebody cuts you up in traffic. It’s a basic life test of whether you’re going to flip them off, get upset or let it go and say, “They clearly need the road more than I do. Let’s send them some love.” They’re basic life tests. A graduation event is a little more serious. That’s like the end of the year to see if you go to the next class. Bentonville was definitely a graduation event. I’m really grateful for it.

The reason I feel that I never felt in danger was because I felt the universe was taking care of me.

I feel like I’m going through a test right now in my life where I’ve been a coach and hypnotherapist, teaching people how to use all the subconscious mind stuff, how to be better, and how to be healthier. Right now, we are in Israel at a very, very weird time. First, it’s Israel after October 7, and everything here is very shaky and different, and people are crying to get the hostage back. 

There was a demonstration, and tens and hundreds of thousands of people everywhere were just screaming to bring them back and make a deal. No matter what, just let all the terrorists go and just bring the hostage back. There is a lot of stress and division in the country. Plus, when we got here, there was a promise from Iraq to send rockets. And every apartment or house here has either a bomb shelter or a room where you go when there are sirens.

I came here, and the first thing I did was get cans and water. I put some stuff in the sealed room because there was a big threat that they were going to bomb where I am right now, which is Tel Aviv. There is still war in the north. Every day, we hear about either hostages murdered or soldiers getting killed. There is a threat from seven fronts. There is a worldwide antisemitism that is on the rise like crazy.

It feels quite shaky and unsafe. For the first two or three weeks here, I felt very unsettled, very tight, and very angry. Like, “Why am I here? What am I doing here?” I love what you said about how we need to go through those places. There is a reason for me, for my husband, like a soul calling to come here exactly where everybody wants to leave the country, exactly where there is a country, world strike, exactly where it does not make sense to live a very comfortable life in beautiful Miami and come here at a time like this. 

Every challenge is a basic life test; when you face significant trials head-on, they become your graduation events in the school of life. Share on X

But somehow, it just happened, and we found ourselves here. I think it’s exactly what you said. I’m here to disconnect from the fear and the mass psychosis, which is hard for me because I’m very empathetic. I can feel people and the environment very deeply. I can increase my light so I can be here and be a light for others. I want to learn from you. How can I do this better here?

Well, first of all, thank you so much for sharing that. I’ll be completely honest. The last time I turned on the news or flipped to read a newspaper was about 18 years ago.

Good for you.

I have zero understanding of what you just said, but I have total empathy for what you must be experiencing. I come back to the metaphor I use a lot with my students, which is that you star in a movie. She’s the movie of your life. I know you star in that movie because you’re the only one that’s in every single scene of that movie. Even Siamese twins dream differently. You are the only person. You are the star. There are no co-stars in your movie. 

The vast majority of people in your movie are nothing more than film extras.

They’re a supporting cast at best—husband, partner, sibling, child, best friend, business partner—people who appear in regular scenes. But the vast majority of people in your movie are nothing more than film extras in your movie. The definition of a film extra is somebody you’re no longer thinking about when they’re not in your current scene, which means 99% of the people you’ll ever meet. Plus, there are film extras in your movie.

Like what Dolores Cannon is talking about, she calls it backdrop people.

There you go. The challenge with that is that if we forget we’re the star of our movie, we tend to get sucked into feeling like an unpaid film extra in some big-budget disaster movie that’s being shot around us. That robs us of our power to star. It puts us on the back foot with fear. It disconnects us from being able to create our reality, and it really then puts us into a different narrative. Now, most people are filmmakers in their movies trying to be stars, but they’re too busy being worried about what other people think of them. 

It’s suffering from what I call GOOP: good opinion of other people. You realize that the mistake a lot of people make is that when they see themselves as the star of the movie, they think everybody else sees them as the star of their movie. But of course, everybody else isn’t starring in your movie and starring in their own movie, which means, by definition, you only play one of two roles in everybody else’s movie. At best, you’re a supporting cast in your husband’s or kids’ movies, whatever. But the vast majority of people have the ability to influence your state of mind, whether that’s through the media, whether that’s through mass psychosis. Well, that’s through whatever it may be, online opinion, anti-social media, as I call it.

That’s a good name for it.

The reality is we, as the stars of our movies, forget that we are nothing more than a film extra in everybody else’s movies. While maybe a handful of supporting cast, everybody you read about on the news, everybody you look at online, everybody, which is filmmakers in their move, which means that the second that we’re not in their scene, they’re no longer thinking about us. And unfortunately, most people don’t care enough about you to bother to give an opinion. Why? 

Because they’re too busy being worried about what they think we’re thinking of them. Everybody’s walking around in this bubble of self-importance, thinking, “Oh, I wonder what people are thinking of me in my movie,” not realizing that everybody else isn’t thinking about them. They’re walking around in their own bubbles, thinking, “I wonder what everybody’s thinking of me and my movie.” 

When that bubble bursts and you actually wake up, you can claim your power back and not buy into whatever is being put on the news. See, trying to convince people there is a massive uprising in global antisemitism, which is the first I’ve heard of it, is going to allow you to train your mind to spot where that is and self-justify. Now, I’m not saying there is a rise. I’m giving you an understanding of how your brain works.

If we forget we’re the star of our movie, we tend to get sucked into feeling like an unpaid film extra in some big-budget disaster movie.

Obviously, everything is influenced by the media. I mean, there is, but obviously, everything gets ten times when you are watching the news or looking at riots.

If you go back to the most powerful empire that controlled the earth in recorded history, it wasn’t the Ottomans, it wasn’t the Persians, it wasn’t even the Romans. The British Empire used to boast that the sun never set on the British Empire. We had everything from most of North America, Australia, and India. How come a tiny little country with a population of about 60 million people, or a lot less back then, was able to rule so much of the world? 

It was because the British navy had access to certain gates in the ocean where they could take advantage and understand the trade winds. If you knew where those winds and currents met, you could act as gatekeepers. They use that to full effect.

Now, I say that because, in modern society, I don’t think it’s any secret since people woke up in 2020 when we realized we didn’t have independent governments; we had one government, and there are a small group of people who like to call themselves the elites that control the vast majority of what goes on in this planet. The reason for that is very similar to the British controlling the small gates in the ocean; they control five different things. 

The first four are not really in order and sequence of importance, but the fifth one is. Those five include the money, central banks, and the Federal Reserve. Governments don’t own the money. People don’t own the money. It’s a private corporation called central banks and the Federal Reserve. They control the money supply.

They control through big pharma, the health industry, which isn’t the health industry; it’s the disease perpetuation industry. We know that. They also control the oil. Oil is a very tightly controlled gang. If you control oil, you control a lot of things. Then we have food. Most of the food now is all owned by a small number of large conglomerates. And very few things exist outside of the clutches of Monsado, especially in the US. You can’t even plant your own crops unless they’re GM.

The first thing you want to do to improve mental health is to turn off the news, delete your social accounts, or at least scroll on your terms.

Those four are big gates in the ocean. However, the fifth one is the most important because if you control this, you control the minds of the public, and that is the media. Everything you see, hear, or think in the media, if you think it’s news, you’re in Disneyland. It is a carefully selected slice of information that has been chosen through strategic objectives to craft a narrative and imprint images in the minds of the public so that they can be told or taught what to think.

That’s why it’s called programming.

100%. You can be a filmmaker in the big-budget disaster movie. How do you change that? By taking back your power. The first thing you want to do, you want to improve mental health, turn off the damn news, delete your social accounts, or at least scroll on your terms. Not on their terms, but that is immediately going to empower you to live a better life. I’d never heard of COVID until one of my students mentioned it on some Q and A call that we were doing.

My response was it doesn’t exist in my world. I took 35 flights during COVID. I never wore a mask in any airports. I’ve never taken any juice. It didn’t affect me. People say, “Why?” Because I’m starring in my own movie. Not that I say that to brag or try to give an ego stroke. I’m past that. I say it to remind people that if you are indoctrinated into a certain way of thinking, certainly submissively, you are going to give away your power, and you have every right to star in your movie.

I’m not on about fighting force with force. Why did the British Empire fall? I had to do predominantly with one guy who weighed about the same as an ashtray. His name was Gandhi. He was like one unarmed man that you could sneeze and blow over defeated 1 million armed British soldiers without firing a shot. Why? Because he understood the difference between power versus force. If you want a masterclass, look up the book by David Hawkins.

I have a lot of good books in my home, and I feel good that I have them. I look at the title as if I’m so smart. I have that book in my home. I should definitely read it.

Honored you read some of mine. It feels good, actually.

Yours was incredible.

Yes, I appreciate it. But Gandhi played the power route. He’s so fast, non-violence. See, power beats force over time, every time. Force is temporary. It’ll always crumble. We see that in the empires of old. We’re seeing what’s happening right now. But force only has one card to play, which is why I tell my students, “Don’t worry about all of the B’s that’s going on wherever you’re reporting it.” Some of my students say that in England right now, but I don’t live there. But, they’re saying England is a shambles. This new prime minister has become authoritarian. 

It’s not my movie; I don’t watch the news. But I’m like, “You do understand that it’s predictable?” Force only has one card to play. It’s a one-trick pony. Force can only play more force. The hand will keep squeezing tighter and tighter and tighter until it breaks its own hand.

Wow, that’s powerful. I like that metaphor.

Power stands firm in truth. Power stands firm in love. Power isn’t trying to control. Power doesn’t need to be controlled. In fact, the very essence of true power is the moment you recognize you don’t need it. Then, you can’t be pushed, pulled, cajoled, manipulated, or programmed. Now you’re starring in your own movie.

I used to take Aikido a long time ago. It’s like that. You use somebody else’s power. You just move out of the way, and they fall.

Power stands firm in truth. Power stands firm in love.

My mother was a martial arts instructor who did Aikido for many years. You’re using somebody else’s force that you’re turning into power for your own by showing them essentially flipping their force back on themselves—principles of Akita. We’re doing almost what I would call mental Akita. You flip the B’s from all of the media and the news, and you empower yourself, not by sucking up more of it. That’s trying to fight. That’s why, Mother Teresa, “I’ll never go to an anti-war rally. Invite me to a pro-peace rally.” Because you drop the frequency of your frequency into what it is. You’re fighting to match the frequency.

Yes, I agree.

Being able to just stand your ground. That’s why I come back to the same thing when you’re starring in your own movie. Life is amazing, and my life was amazing in prison. It really was. There were a lot of tough times. Sometimes, I cried. Sometimes, I faced so much uncertainty and loss that I had to dig deep to find levels of faith and trust the universe that would turn around. What’s happened since then? You asked me right at the very beginning, would I do it again? Well, I trust the universe again every single time.

Oh, that’s good.

The number of people who have read that book has chosen to go on and do one of my coaching programs because they see the value they get. They see that what I was demonstrating was real; they make a difference in helping their family just by reading one of the chapters of the book. What could happen if they spent several months going through some of my highest-level teaching, like the students I wrote to? 

If you do an audit there, you’ll see that since coming out of jail at a third of a million in debt with zero credit rating, having lost everything that $25 to $30 million later. People have come and supported me and gone through the programs because of what I wrote in prison, which was never intended to sell programs. It was written to try to help students and people feel that.

Prison is full of a lot of good people who’ve made bad choices, but it’s not full of bad people.

What did you learn in prison that you think you’ll never learn anywhere else?

Well, as I say, it’s definitely experiential when it comes to the lesson. I learned a lot about that environment, which I’d never had. Even watching the odd film here and there wouldn’t even get close. But I learned that prison is not full of bad people. Prison is full of a lot of good people who’ve made bad choices, but it’s not full of bad people. Now, there are some people in there that definitely have belonged to stay there until they’ve learned some lessons.

But a lot of the people I met were people who’d actually really been let down by society and the system that they believed in. I learned that you can find good anywhere. I learned that I don’t care how low you feel in the 7th letter, where I talk about how I meet somebody in a lineup, and I’ve got ten minutes to stop him from committing suicide for good. How do you do that permanently, not just in the moment? You can change anybody at the moment, but when they go back to their cell, the same thing they were depressed about, that they can’t change on the outside, is still the same thing they were depressed about. 

They still can’t change on the outside. How do you stop those thoughts of suicide from reoccurring? Especially if you stress test it and think it’s genuine that they’re going to act on it rather than just use it as a vehicle for connection or sympathy or a cry for help. I show you how I do that. I judge. This is a very serious case, and I’ve got ten minutes before I don’t see this guy again. What do you do? How do you do that? Well, I spent a couple of decades in high-level therapeutic intervention. I understand how to make that happen. 

I’m not a therapist. You came to me because I’ve got certificates on my wall, which means I’m qualified to take your money every week or every month for the next five years, and you still have the same issues. You just feel better in between couch settings. I don’t do that. I want to empower people so that they can design me out of the equation at the first opportunity. I learned that you can never control what you can’t control. There’s always a bigger plan. Nobody’s beyond the ability for you to send them love.

That’s so pretty. I just had a conversation with a girlfriend. I took my little one to a playdate, and we had this type of conversation about how the only thing we could control was ourselves, and everything was a reflection of us. It’s just a different way of thinking about what you said about being a star in your own movie. That’s wonderful. 

I want to ask you, like, for me, right now, I’m having a lot of beautiful moments, a lot of beautiful things that we are experiencing here within this crazy stress. There’s no doubt this is a stressful environment. How can I shine my light brighter? How can I call in my magician to help lift others?

Remember what’s real. What you say on the news isn’t real. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying it isn’t real in your movie, right? If you imagine the Amazon at night. Well, I’ll tell you. Everything is going on in the Amazon at night. But you’ve got your conscious awareness, that little sliver of light, that little flashlight that you get to point and choose what you want to point your sliver of light at. You can say, “Oh, my God, there’s a snake eating a rat.” Or you can say, “Oh, wow, look at that Hummingbird being born.” I’m not discounting that snakes don’t eat rats. 

You can never control what you can’t control.

I’m saying that you’re in charge of your flashlight. Where you choose to point is going to have a massive impact on the quality of your movie. At the end of the day, that’s all you’re going to experience. How can you shine your light? Make sure that you’re focused on remembering. You’re the star of your movie, and you’re here to serve.

You’re here to add value, you’re here to grow, you’re here to contribute. You’re here to understand that life is a growth-centric experience, not a comfort-centric experience. Understand that there’s a huge difference between fear and danger. If you’re living in fear, it’s not going to serve you. Fear is useful until you recognize physical danger. Other than that, it serves no useful purpose. How can you inspire other people? By being a beacon of hope and possibility, not a message of why they can’t.

All of the things that we know and being authentic because you’re not tied to the good opinion of others. You’re able to speak freely from the heart without fear of disconnecting your umbilical cord from the people you most want the connection from or you’re scared of rejection from. That level of authentic life is how you can inspire others to do the same. If we do that, then there’s a lot brighter future for humanity ahead.

Nice. Do you have daily rituals you did while in prison that helped you?

Absolutely. For a start, I always got up early. People in prison don’t get up early, right? There’s no reason to. I maintain that discipline. I’m a 5 AM guy now. I had to be careful because I had a cellmate, and I didn’t want to wake them up, but I would get up, meditate, or read on my bed. Fitness in the self.

You can inspire other people by being a beacon of hope and possibility, not a message of why they can’t.

If I couldn’t get out, I would discipline myself to write letters to my students, especially if I’d just done something like an intervention, like with the suicide intervention in chapter seven or the violence intervention in chapter four, where you got to stop violence about to kick off because it’s about to explode and the dogs are ready. How do you step into that and diffuse the situation? 

As soon as I’d done things like that, I wanted to get straight back to the cell to write down so I could remember without the mind filling in the blanks. So there’s a lot of discipline around that. Discipline around staying true to myself, practicing meditation, practicing heart math, holding a space for other prisoners, sending love to the other cells, visualizing myself at a high level of coherence, and just seeing like a light from my heart going out in all the different directions to the hearts of the other people in the cells. People may say, “Well, that sounds nice.” Did it have any effect? Well, yes, actually it did.

D wing, which was the wing I was on, was quite violent. Violence reduced shortly after I got there the day that I left. I went back and looked this up because some of the prisoners that I then met up with when they came out afterward were some of the people I became friends with and helped. One of them says, “Oh, did you hear what happened the day you left?” I say, “Oh my God, D wing erupted.”

I went and looked at the figures before or while I was there. The government statistics for violence, which has to be reported after that, showed a 22% decrease, a 30% increase from arriving to leaving. This is no surprise. We’ve seen many documented experiments where they’ve got 500 meditators in New York, and crime has plummeted just because they’ve been meditating on peace. Can you impact people non-physically? Of course, you can—anyone who doesn’t admit or can understand that now has just been programmed to be a materialist.

The purpose of life is to be authentic, to grow, and to contribute.

I do that, too. When I’m coherent and have good intentions, I work with energy and send good intentions, almost like future pacing, planning what this event is going to be like and how people are going to get along. Everybody’s going to have a good time. I do believe it makes a difference. What are your three top tips for living a stellar life?

The first is to be authentic. People think the purpose of life is to be happy. The purpose of life is not to be happy. It doesn’t mean you can’t be happy. That’s like saying the purpose of school should be to be happy. It’s not the purpose of school. It doesn’t mean he can’t be happy in school. But it’s not his purpose. The purpose of life is to be authentic, grow, and contribute.

Number two, recognize the difference between fear and danger. Most people live in psychological fear of dangers that don’t exist. 

Third thing, for a stellar life, make sure that you’re in charge of your own programming. We don’t get to vote on whether or not we get programmed. We’re programmable by design as part of the human makeup, from being born with mirror neurons to absorbing imprints from parents until we’re seven to people who have an unconscious competence of being part of the crowd. But if you can choose your own programming, that’s the control that you have. If you don’t choose your programming, somebody else will choose it for you. You’re going to be just an extra in the big-budget disaster movie. It doesn’t do well for your acting career.

Awesome. Where can people find you, study with you, and get your book?

My website is petersage.com. Or go on any of my social channels—@therealpetersage. I’m always putting out content. I’m always doing things to try to help people. I’m doing a five-day challenge on how to manifest and work with the scientific rule set of the elites. Other than that, I’m pretty easy to find.

When you choose to focus your flashlight of awareness on the positive, you illuminate a path to a stellar life. Share on X

Awesome. Thank you. And before we say goodbye, is there any message or anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Never accept other people’s lesser opinions of you.

Oh, that’s good.

Nobody’s got the right to tell you you can’t do it. And if they do, you have the right not to listen.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation. I really enjoyed you. I really appreciate you, your message, and your wisdom here today. Thank you.

Listeners, remember to be authentic, recognize the difference between fear and danger, and make sure that you are in charge of your own programming and have a stellar life. This is Orion. Till next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}Be the star of your movie. Empower yourself by focusing on your personal journey and not being overly concerned with the opinions of others.

{✓}Actively disengage from negative media and utilize social platforms mindfully. This practice preserves your mental clarity and fosters empowerment.

{✓}Channel your mental energy towards growth and constructive endeavors. Shine a light on your potential and dreams rather than being bogged down by negatives and fear.

{✓}Focus on actions that promote peace rather than those that resist conflict. Adopting this approach can be transformative in both personal and professional realms.

{✓}Maintain faith in a greater plan, even during the most trying times. Trusting the universe cultivates resilience and sustains hope.

{✓}Learn to differentiate between actual danger and psychological fear. Use critical thinking to navigate your decisions instead of letting anxiety cloud your judgment.

{✓}Uphold your truth and love, irrespective of external judgments. Authenticity not only builds genuine influence but also inspires others.

{✓}Establish disciplined daily practices such as rising early, meditating, and engaging in reflective reading. These habits ground you and drive personal advancement.

{✓}Refuse to let others’ opinions define your potential. Confidently believe in and author your own narrative.

{✓}Visit Peter Sage’s official website at petersage.com and sign up for his newsletter or upcoming personal development challenges. 

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About Peter Sage

Peter Sage is a serial entrepreneur, author, master trainer, international educator, philosopher and public speaker. He started, founded and built over 20 companies and has shared the stage with Kofi Anan, Sir Richard Branson, and Bill Clinton. His client list includes several governments, including members of the Royalty, Google, and NASA.

 

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