EvolutionFM Transcript: How To Become An Agentic Sage - (Brian Whetten)

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Brian Whetten is a Silicon Valley prodigy turned spiritual strategist who’s quietly been transforming how we think about success, power, and meaning. After earning a PhD, launching tech ventures, and burning out twice. By 30, he didn’t just pivot, he dove headfirst into six years of immersive inner work. What emerged was a unique roadmap to help high-performing entrepreneurs and coaches not only “win” at life, but do so with integrity and purpose.

In this riveting conversation, Brian shares why most people get stuck in the painful gap between high agency and high consciousness and how spiritual awareness alone isn’t enough. His real-world coaching examples expose the trap of self-promotion, the myth of hustle, and why most conscious businesses are set up to fail. But then he drops the key on how to expand leadership fast enough to match your rising power.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:00.824)

Brian, what's up, man? It's great to see you.

Brian (00:03.656)

Great to see you.

Scott Britton (00:05.486)

I have been looking forward to this conversation for probably about six weeks. So I'm so excited this day is here. And maybe just as a little bit of a background, what connected us was this image of a graph that basically showed an access. There you go. You got it right there. An access of agency versus consciousness. Right. And it was, I think I first saw this from our mutual friend, Tom Morgan.

Both of us have spent our own, a good chunk of our own journey trying to navigate that path of combining, you know, not just being a monk in the mountains, not just being a hustle bro that is getting a lot done, but doing it from a place of low consciousness. And I think there's a lot of people out there that are exploring this. And so I think today I want to talk about that journey to that top right quadrant of high agency and high consciousness, which

which has been branded as agentic sage in the original image. just that's the exploration for today. And I'm excited to talk about this with you.

I actually have this image and I know a lot of people are on YouTube watching this, so I'm just going to do a quick screen share so people can just know what we're talking about. 

Scott Britton (02:00.738)

So this is our lovely high consciousness, high agency image that connected us.

Brian (02:08.358)

Yeah. Yep. And you drew the red line and posted that I was like, yes, that's it. That's the problem is why is it so hard to get to that upper right? And that's that was the conversation you and I have been in for a couple months now.

Scott Britton (02:22.732)

Yeah, so that and that's exactly right. And I have my own my own thoughts on this and my own experience. mean, it really has been a seven year journey for me of navigating that. But I'd like I'd like to hear from you, you know, why the heck? Where why? Let's just frame it up. Like, why do we think this is hard in the first place?

Brian (02:43.656)

Well, actually, so let me do as my story then, because I've followed this path over, you know, today I turned 55 years old today. Um, and thank you. So I've been, I've been on that red line and I started as a nerd in the Midwest cornfields of Illinois. Um, you know, just trying to get ahead and climb the ladder and, uh, find, figure out why all the pretty girls didn't want to date me and what do I need to do to fix that? And

Scott Britton (02:51.693)

Happy birthday.

Brian (03:13.512)

Climbed, know over Achiever Mountain to that agentic fool stage where you know Silicon Valley Berkeley PhD two full burnouts by 30 and that that two full burnouts by 30 would be the fool the the agentic fool piece of it I'm just hitting my head against the wall over and over again and then with my second burnout I'm like, okay I need to learn something here and Ended up doing six years of full-time personal spiritual development work

And coming out of that, like, okay, I found the secrets of life. I need to share them with everyone. I am here to raise the consciousness of the planet. Do do do. And found it insanely more difficult than I ever would have expected. And so even from that upper left quadrant, trying to get to the right to actually build a coaching practice that made money and meaning with integrity, trying to help other people do that.

Scott Britton (03:53.679)

You

Scott Britton (04:00.992)

Amen.

Brian (04:12.7)

was an incredible, it's 20 years now since I started my coaching practice full-time professionally. my wife and I, my wife, Nicole and I spent 15 years of that teaching what we most need to learn, which is how do you build a coaching practice with full integrity? And really hard. We figured it out, we codified it to such a level that we could just like, here you go, here's the step-by-step instructions.

but people couldn't follow the instructions without doing some tremendous level of inner work. And so that was my experience for me. It was the experience for the hundreds or thousands of people we've coached along the way. Um, there's just this really deep wall that I want to talk about, but what's the wall? Why is it so hard? Why do we just keep hitting our heads against it over and over again? Why does this seem to happen for everybody? And how do we work through that?

Scott Britton (05:09.612)

Yeah, I mean, that's, think, I think that's the million dollar question. And, you know, where my mind event, where my mind goes is like, is there even an option to go around the wall? And this really gets into what do you believe about reality and the purpose and what it is? And I have fricking tried to go around the wall and not go through this stuff. And life just doesn't let me, you know? And so I don't, I think this is like,

getting in the territory of natural law.

Brian (05:39.624)

This is physics. This is like quantum mechanics level, gravity level physics. This isn't wish my way across the wall. No, this is why do balls roll downhill?

Scott Britton (05:52.928)

I agree, I agree. So what is your opinion of kind of the journey and why that wall exists?

Brian (06:01.884)

Yep. So I pulled some slides together. Let me walk through a few of these and in getting to that. So you read Yes, Yes, I'll Know. And in that book, I described the same picture in a slightly different way. I'm going to try to describe the picture a few different ways here. The one we started with the four quadrants. So I talked about two dimensions of life. There's the ladder of consciousness and the road to success. Okay. And those are agency.

which is the the road to success versus Consciousness or awareness Right and like I know you love David Hawkins. For example, that's a great map of consciousness Can Wilbur's map some paths of consciousness? So a of people trying to find what does that ladder look like? How do we measure it? and so it's clear like that's one dimension and then there's the more materialistic dimension and The the original picture we started with could sound a little bit

technical or arrogant with some of the labels that was put on it. I was talking with Nicole about this and she's like, honey, slow it down. Let's, let's, you know, speak language that works for people. And so she actually suggested relabeling the four boxes. The first one is playing the game. How do you play the game? How do you just do what you're told, be your part in society, climb the mountain, good grades.

Scott Britton (07:05.794)

Totally.

Brian (07:28.498)

then at some point you become, hopefully, relatively small people get here, to the place where it feels like you're winning the game. And both you and I have had enough experiences of raising money and doing crazy things. We've had tastes of what it's like to win the game. And then what usually happens is that red line turns and you're starting to try to go out, but you go left. And we end up finding different ways of escaping the game.

And it actually, that spiritual bypass is a lifting off the planet and waking up to more of what's really true, but in a way that somehow loses a lot of our agency and our power in the world. And so again, what is that? Why do we go from winning the game to escaping the game? And then the, the Agents of Sage quadrant is really people who are managing to change the game or evolve the game that are growing the game. And that is relatively rare.

And so the question of how do we do that? And I 25 years now, reverse engineering the industry, right? You name it. I've tried it, read it, you know, studied it, apprenticed under it, trying to figure out not just what works, but why does it work? Okay. And so we're going to distill that 25 years here into a few core things of like, okay,

Went through I said, okay everybody I can find who's changing the game Somebody who's really doing it right, you know, Stephen Covey Scott pack our teachers Ron and Mary Holnick at the University of Santa Monica Long list of people that were were role models for Nicole and I How did they do it?

Scott Britton (09:11.564)

And you know, I also want to underscore because there's a lot of people out there that are like, well, who's changing the game? They're going to point to Bezos. They're going to point to Musk. They're going to point to people that are kind of operating on the material plane. But you, you and your coaching work, I mean, I've heard you talk about people that are getting 10 to a hundred X results of everybody else in their field. And these people aren't spiritual teachers.

or wisdom teachers like you just described. So I want to make sure that this, you know, this change in the game applies not just to people in spiritual land, but also professionals who are kicking ass at whatever they're doing in their field.

Brian (09:45.159)

Yes.

Brian (09:51.912)

And that's a great point because that's actually the other set of reverse engineering I've been doing was I started with or we Nicole I started with all of the more spiritual side of things but then in our coaching we stumbled by accident into clients that were Already changing the game in that upper right quadrant without really having figured out How they were doing it or really owning that that's what they were doing. They just were doing what they did and Doing it

way, way, way better than anybody else in their field and not in like crazy technology space where, you know, it's easy, relatively speaking, to make a billion dollars with a new idea and, and running real hard. We're doing commoditized industries. So, one in water bottles and made hundreds of millions of dollars for himself. one in, self-made billionaire in toys, for children.

another in retail redevelopment or taking oftentimes inner-city projects and redeveloping them and and doing in a way that people just can't understand how they manage to pull it off and So over and over again, I found these these very successful entrepreneurs who aren't seeking the limelight You're never gonna hear them, you know jumping up and down on Twitter and proclaiming how great they are They're just quietly creating value, but they're doing it in that upper right quadrant

And so again, how did they get there? And that's what some of these I want to I want to tease apart today.

Scott Britton (11:24.844)

I love that. And you know, just to make this concrete, because I think you brought up a really good point where as you move from that bottom right quadrant of high agency to starting to get on an awareness path, I just wanted to describe a little bit what that can feel like because it's very frustrating. I remember there were years where, you know, I was just always a dial, super dialed in person, right? Completely optimized. And then I found myself on a spiritual path.

And there were days where I couldn't send an email. There were experiences where I was like, I can't do basic things. It just feels so, it feels like I'm in sludge. And it was so confusing to me. And I, I mean, it was befuddling. And I'm talking multiple years of that. And,

Brian (12:03.4)

Yes.

Brian (12:06.93)

Yes.

Scott Britton (12:20.824)

If you haven't really gone through that, that can sound pretty off, but I mean, it just seems like almost like a rite of passage to varying degrees that people have to go through as they make this kind of jump from quadrant to quadrant. And one of the things that I would just share that I find so interesting about your work is that you seem to try to minimize that.

Brian (12:37.521)

Yes.

Scott Britton (12:48.012)

what that feeling is like for people that are already agentic to go to the top right without having to go become a monk or take a year long spiritual sabbatical or just slog through the mud on their own and figure try asking themselves every day why the hell life has gotten so hard.

Brian (12:55.09)

Yep. Yep.

Brian (13:03.644)

Yep. That is the core of what we've developed a certain level of competency in the hard way with a lot of pain and suffering and trial and error and failure over 25 years where we found fairly reliable pathways through the wall and particularly for high agentic, successful people to move up in consciousness without having to become a monk. Yes. So it is possible and

And again, let's, let's tease apart that, but before we jump to the solutions, we got to really understand the diagnosis. We have to really get the wall and what it is and why it's there. before we can talk about how to move through it. So let's go to the three examples from your group from founder sat saying, we were talking about like the conscious entrepreneurs, spiritually aware coaches, and then, really high net worth entrepreneurs who've won the game to level of like financial dependence or even generational wealth.

And I those are just three fantastic examples of like looking at the wall from different, different directions. So like, if we start with conscious entrepreneurs, the way that like, seems like if we add more consciousness to our business, that should make things easier and more successful. And yet most of the time it makes things harder, more dramatic, way more emotional and less successful. What are some of the patterns you've seen of that, you know, for yourself?

Scott Britton (14:26.286)

Yeah, definitely. Well, I think that there's a tendency for a founder to have a spiritual awakening or going on an ayahuasca or going on an ayahuasca trip or something like that and come back and, you know, to your point, like, I got the answers, right. And all of a sudden, we're going to start meetings by connecting our hearts. And everyone around them is kind of like, what the hell are we doing? Right? This isn't what I signed up for. And so

I think that there's absolutely a pattern of trying to like insert your consciousness into a container that has not opted into that. And that being very disorienting and confusing for the people around them who signed up for something else. What I've also seen is, and I was having a conversation with my friend Tracy recently who started a company called choose. was a Silicon Valley catering company grew to 300 people.

She was on the in the middle of her journey while on it. And she found that all of a sudden managers had to become therapists, right by integrating like they had like a red, yellow, green spotlight of like, how are you feeling and people start talking more about their feelings and was like, this is going to be great. And then all of a sudden, it was like everything came became about feelings instead of performance. And and that it was like,

Brian (15:31.346)

Yeah. Yep.

Brian (15:48.274)

Yes.

Scott Britton (15:51.106)

well, now we've shifted to feelings over performance. And again, how do we do both? And so those are some of the main things that I've, two of the main things that I've seen with this that can be quite challenging.

Brian (15:55.048)

Yes.

Brian (15:59.4)

Absolutely. And what's interesting, just if you keep going, if you if you spend any time like in the social enterprise space, people are basically trying to take nonprofits, but do it in a for-profit way. So they're really integrating money and meaning. Those are some of the most dysfunctional, highly dramatic, emotionally charged organizations I've ever seen most of the time. So even when you get a group of people who have buy-in and they want to play the game at a higher consciousness level, they still hit the wall.

And so again, it's like this gravity thing of like, there's so much talk and effort that's been made in the last 10, 20 years around conscious entrepreneurship, conscious business. How do we do purpose-driven business? How do we do money and meaning? I'm there, right? I'm 25 years in that question. And yet, man, it is hard at first. And the naive approaches just tend to backfire spectacular.

Scott Britton (16:53.964)

Yeah, and I think one of the big challenges is there's not a shared definition of what consciousness is, right? I think, you know, to just be very blunt, like, there's someone, there's someone like me that's like, this is about self realization, it's about opening the heart. And then there's somebody else at a company that thinks it's about DI. There's somebody else at a company that thinks it's about saving plastic bottles out of the ocean, right? There's just like all of these

different definitions and that makes things incredibly messy.

Brian (17:27.952)

It does. Though, even if you strip it back, so just to go that and take it even further, so we define spirituality as and meaning as synonyms. So something is meaningful, it's spiritual, it's spiritual, it's meaningful. And so that consciousness axis, one of the most reliable measurements of that axis is in meaning and purpose. And so as you bring in purpose and profits together, money and meaning,

That's another way of drawing those two axes, the ladder of consciousness and the road to success. And again, even if we get everybody on the same page with the same purpose, trying to integrate purpose up and profits right causes all hell to break loose reliably.

Scott Britton (18:12.162)

Why do you think that is?

Brian (18:13.884)

So again, we're going to get to it. want to, let's do another example first, which is taking that same problem from another direction, which is the spiritually aligned coaches.

Scott Britton (18:22.038)

And I would expand this to just say spiritually aligned builders and business owners. what I've seen with that group is someone goes on a spiritual journey, all of a sudden it becomes incredibly hard to be inauthentic and to just do things as a means to an end. So for example, when I was in agentic fool land hustling, it was like, I'm just gonna write stuff for the algorithm.

Right. And I'm going to get followers and I'm going to grow and I'm going to like, you know, do whatever it takes to win. Right. And you get rewarded. Right. Like it works. And then all of a sudden you have all these, you know, whether it's a coach or someone selling some type of new product, they're like, okay, we need to get clients. Like we need to market ourselves. We need to go online and start building an audience. And it's, there's just like an ickiness now to just doing things.

that just as a means to an end, especially when it's out of integrity. I remember for a good year or two, I couldn't even go on X because I'm like, this entire platform is a giant performance of people writing threads about shit that doesn't matter about how Steve Jobs grew up or whatever, to just try to get followers. And this just doesn't resonate at all, right? But

Brian (19:25.714)

Yes.

Brian (19:36.893)

Yes.

Scott Britton (19:47.82)

you're seeing all those people building a big business and making money and succeeding. And so you're in this kind of question of like, how do I do this without being a douche? You know, like, how do I how do I do this without with while being an integrity and not feeling the ick to grow my business?

Brian (19:57.819)

Holy

Brian (20:03.836)

Yep. Yep. So spiritually aligned coaches, virtually where, builders, know, coaches, counselors, healers, whatever we're talking about, whatever form, when you try to add money to that consciousness, like marketing feels icky because it has to be about inauthentic self promotion in order to make money. And that feels antithetical to who you are and what you're trying to do. When you get to selling clients, everything I learned about selling,

was the opposite of what worked in coaching. And I had to unlearn, you know, everything I knew from Silicon Valley and completely reinvent it because everything was based on manipulation. How do you close the deal? Right. And if you look, I coached quite a few of the leaders in the coaching and self-help space over the years in different ways, got to see behind the curtains. And a dirty secret is that most of the people, not all, but most of the quote unquote leaders in the space,

who appear to have a huge following and making a ton of money. Like a typical scenario is they're grossing six, $700,000 a year, but they're netting like a hundred, 150 and they're working 90 hours a week. Okay. Because they're having to just grind so hard and their expenses are so much because they're, they're having to feed this marketing engine and their team and everything. And they're having to, to do all this stuff that feels inauthentic and

And I found very few people who actually were winning that game that actually felt good about

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