The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best Of 2019: Part I

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Welcome to the 7th annual Best of the RRP Anthology — our way of taking a moment to reflect on the year, express gratitude and give thanks for taking this journey with us. To be honest, I didn’t think we could top 2018 -- but we did. It’s been an incredible year. I'm deeply indebted to all my extraordinary guests. And unbelievably proud of the library we dedicated ourselves to creating over the last twelve months. To prepare for the year ahead, it’s critical to pause. To reflect back. Celebrate the victories. Take inventory of the missteps. And visualize the goals you wish to self-actualize in the months ahead. I believe in this process. And I feel strongly that 2020 holds the potential energy manifest your aspirations. It is in this spirit that we created a tradition of closing each year with a look in the rear view with a 2-episode compilation of clips excerpted from many of year's best guests. Consider these next two shows as a love letter. My way of saying thank you. I see you. I believe in you. And I believe in the power we all have to do, be and live better. To step into our best, most authentic selves. And in turn, share freely what we have learned in service of others. For long-time listeners, the next two episodes are intended to launch you into 2020 with renewed vigor and intention. Lean in to the wisdom. Leverage it to clarify your 2020 goals. If you're newer to the show, my hope is that this anthology will prime you to peruse the back catalog and check out episodes you may have missed. Links to the full episodes excerpted in this anthology can be found in the below show notes. You can watch it all go down on YouTube (with the exception of the Gemma Newman, Jack Dorsey and Kevin Smith excerpts, episodes that we did not film) Here's to an extraordinary 2020. Join me, and let's make it the best year ever -- together. Enjoy! Rich

My take on it is I like to put out positive energy and I like to be able to maintain a compassionate approach to this because people try these diets because they want results and they feel frustrated with what they've currently got. I remember myself, I did low carb for a while thinking it was best for me and I got results and I looked good and so I thought well of course this is the way forward. So I can completely understand where people are coming from with regard to this. And the same with keto, like people go on keto diets to get results or to feel better. And I'm not going to be in a position where I deny people's personal experience, but I am going to be in a position where I share information, both on long

term health and short term health outcomes so that they can then hopefully come to a decision based on rationality over what someone told them once on the internet. That's Dr. Gemma Newman, just one of the amazing guest clips to come in part one of our annual Best of 2019 edition of the Rich Roll podcast. The Rich Roll podcast. Greetings, podcast people of planet Earth. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas to those of you out there who celebrate that. Welcome or welcome back. For those new to the show, this is the podcast where I do my

very best to have deep and meaningful, long-form conversations that matter with the world's best and brightest across all categories of well-being, education, and positive paradigm-breaking culture change. To be honest, I didn't think I could top 2018, but suffice it to say, it has been an amazing year. I am so proud of the content that me and my team has worked so hard to create and share over the last 12 months. And I think a really important part of the process of preparing for the year to come to getting your head and your heart properly aligned to tackle 2020 is that it's critical to pause and to reflect back, to celebrate your victories, to take stock and inventory of where you were last December and begin the process of visualizing, preparing, and setting goals and aspirations to self-actualize

who you would like to be 12 months from now. I believe in this process. In my experience, we are all more capable than we tend to believe. And I feel strongly that whatever aspiration you hold for yourself, that 2020 holds the potential energy to make it happen. In that spirit, it's been an annual tradition here at the RRP to end each year with a look back at the previous 12 months of the show with a two-parter compilation of clips

excerpted from many of the year's best guests, sort of a refresher course for the avid fans and an anthology or digest for those newer to the show. Anyway, these next two shows are basically my love letter to all of you, my way of saying thank you. I recognize you. I appreciate you. I believe in positive change. I believe in you. And I believe in the power we all have to do better, to be better, to live better, to step into our best, most authentic selves and

help others around you to do the same. So let's just dive in. To blast you into 2020 with some motivation and hard truths, why not begin this episode with one of the most unique, remarkable, and inspirational humans you're ever going to come across. I promise you, the man, the myth, former Navy SEAL turned hardcore ultra athlete, author of the mega hit book, Can't Hurt Me, and motivational force of nature, David Goggins in this excerpt from episode 413. My whole thing is, whenever I'm weak at something, whenever I'm scared of something, I master it. I was a weak-minded person, so I mastered my mind. And in mastering my mind,

I mastered the human mind. And I realized why I no longer judge people, why I no longer put people on a pedestal, because we're all fucked up our own way. We all have demons. Some people hide them better than other people. So I know we all have them. By me knowing that, I know that most alpha males are very fragile, very fragile. They never want to see another person harder than them, especially in that kind of realm. The ego attachment to that is very strong. The ego will fuck you up every time.

Ego is serious. So if I can hurt your ego, I got you. So by me having such a fragile ego growing up, all this was my advantage. I was doing a live autopsy on how fucked up I was. I was like, hey, this fucks me up. I better fuck some other people up too. So I started using all these different tools and tactics to get in instructors' heads.

And taking souls, that's where it happened, man. We're Wednesday, freezing fucking cold. Everybody's jackhammering. Everybody's just wanting to get through it now. Jackhammering is when you just can't stop shivering. You can't stop shivering. You're sitting there, this uncontrollably jackhammering. And the instructors take great pride in watching you suffer.

They do. In a sick way, it's kind of funny. You were there once as a student. Now you're an instructor. But I knew, how would I be thinking if I was an instructor? I would love seeing this sadistic shit go on. But what wouldn't I like to see? I would hate to see some guys just looking like this is just another fucking day on the fucking beach and go fuck yourself.

I would hate to see that. Because they don't want to think like when they did it, they were harder. They were harder. Everybody's harder. So I say, you know what, man? It's time. I can't fight you. You guys can fuck me up all day long.

That's your job. And I love your job. I love what you guys are doing. You all, I can't fight you. You guys can fuck me up all day long. That's your job and I love your job. I love what you guys are doing. You guys are making us better. But now, I want to take the tactical advantage and I want to start

fucking with you. So I got my boat crew, Bill Brown. I had Chris Kyle on my boat crew. Right. American Sniper. I had a couple

of hardcore motherfuckers and everybody right now is kind of like in their own world. Let's just get through this, man. I can't wait until Friday so we can graduate and hope we can get going.

I said, let's go ahead and have some fun. I said, we're going to start fucking with these guys. So the evolution here was we just got through with med check. We're stripped down to nothing, and they're checking us out, making sure we're good, checking for pneumonia, checking for fucked up knees. My knees are all jacked up, but they're giving me shots and shit. And I was like the boat crew leader of boat crew two. So I'm in the front of the boat and i tell our guys this we're going to do the boat was like on our heads so it was we're supposed

to lift the boats up above our head that's all you gotta do but when you're this weak you're this fragile you're this tired the boat's heavy so there's a thing you can do when you do boat presses you can get the boat and like just toss it up Toss it up and catch it. And that shows like you're jacked up. So everybody's holding the boat and they're shaking and the boat's starting to come down on their head and all the boat crews are all lined up and they're fucked up. And I'm looking at that and I turn around and my boat crew says, hey guys,

it's time to fucking take some souls. And they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? I said, see all these fucking instructors out here all in their fucking jackets and drinking coffee and laughing and smiling and shit? I want their fucking faces to go straight up fucking numb. So we're going to do this. We're going to start boat pressing this motherfucker.

Just take my lead. Trust me. You'll get energy from it. We start throwing this boat up in the fucking air, catching it, throwing it up in the air, and we start yelling, can't hurt fucking boat crew too. We're yelling our fucking ass off, and we're doing it. And they make a stop like like what the fuck like stop i look at these instructors and their faces literally look like someone like just like took their soul out i know what their minds were like they were thinking

about themselves like what the fuck just happened man i know me on wednesday i couldn't have done that how are they doing it so the rest of time going through hell week it was like we just you owned it we owned it right boat crew too we won every single race we were just dominating and um it was uh it was a strong boat crew and that's where taking souls is. There's a few taking soul stories, but that's one of them. Scheduling it in. So I like this idea of taking this inventory tool and applying it to how you're spending your time throughout the day. I talk about this a lot. You went into detail in this challenge about, look, man, if you actually write down how you're spending your time throughout the day over a seven-day period, you're going to, I mean, it's crazy because I thought I

was being pretty efficient with my time and I've done this. And it's just amazing how much time is wasted that you're not even consciously aware. It's unreal how much time you waste during the day. And most of it is on these fucking computers, phones, Instagramming back and forth, whatever the fuck you call this shit nowadays, tweeting and texting and shit. We waste so much time on our little gadgets. It's unreal. And we talk about we have no time. If you really take, you have to take your day and write down this one day. Everything you do, write that down.

And you're like, my God, I am wasting so much time on frivolous bullshit. It's not even funny. I mean, if it doesn't infuriate you, it should. Because there's so much time. I can't get it in. Look at your schedule. You just wasted seven hours today on bullshit. I mean, and you don't have an hour a day to try to get something in for yourself?

I guarantee everybody can find an hour. Then it becomes about willingness. Yeah. Because most people just, they're not willing to get up that early or to make those sacrifices required. So it's a function of how badly do you want to change your life and what are you willing to endure to craft that life that you aspire to have, or do you just want to talk about it? Yeah. I mean, it's fucking miserable. It is miserable. I mean, to get up every day or five days a week, whatever, when it's snowing, shiny,

not shiny, not comfortable, and to go in the gym and work out when you don't want to go to the gym, it is not fun. Well, and we're in a culture that is driving everybody towards this idea that happiness is purchased through luxury, comfort, and ease. And the truth could not be more different from that reality. That if you want to find peace with yourself, self-understanding, self-knowledge, self-esteem, all of these things are going to be found only through sacrifice, getting uncomfortable, re-evaluating what your normal is, and putting yourself in situations that you don't want to fucking do.

Yes. And we want it very fast. If you don't see results in the first two days or the first week, I'm done. That's the mentality of most people. Their struggle is too real. We're not patient. mentality of most people. Their struggle is too real. We're not patient. In a world where you can Google the best restaurants around me right now, no one is patient. And for you to lose weight, for you to stop drinking, whatever the hell you're going through, it takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of pitfalls, a lot of plateaus. You're going to hit so many fucking plateaus. If you don't know how to get around that plateau, it's not going to happen fast. Yeah. Everybody wants the hack.

Yeah. Everybody wants the hack. There is no hack, man. There's no hack. So what do you think is the biggest stumbling block that most people face with this kind of journey? Honestly, is they have the woe is me mentality. It's too hard. Life isn't fair. These things in life are not easy for me. You look to your left and you look to your right and you start to judge yourself

off other people. Like if you're a female, well, she's skinny and she doesn't work out as hard as I do. And everything starts to corrupt your mind. You start to look around too much at other people and what they're doing. And that starts to corrupt your own dialogue. We are judging ourselves against too many fucking people. You have to judge yourself against yourself. And that's the one thing I started learning, man. This isn't a race against me and Rich Roll. This is a race against David Goggins and David Goggins alone. And once you can silence all that bullshit, all the outside interference and things that are attracting your mind to everything, you can then start to grow in realizing, I'm stressed out for no reason. You got to go to war with yourself before there's peace.

That's what I say in the book. That's what you say in the book. You must go to war with yourself before you find peace. So I'm trying to give you tools on how to do that. And I'm not considering a smile and be happy about it. It's a hard journey. It's a real journey. It's a journey that's going to take you way outside of being comfortable. If you want to be great, you want to be the baddest motherfucker ever at what you do, you're going to be misunderstood by everybody because you're going to be so

fucking obsessed and so driven to get there. That's what it takes. That's the truth. It takes every second of your fucking life. Anybody says balance? Yeah, balance is important for a lot of fucking people. It is. But if you want to fucking go to that edge where people do not like you, don't understand

you, question everything you fucking do, you've arrived. When you are misunderstood to the point where fucking people think you're psycho and you're nuts and you're this and that, why are you in the fucking gym at 1 o'clock in the fucking morning? You just got through doing an op for fucking 13, 14 hours at the ranger school, man, at the gym. What is wrong? You will never understand what is wrong with me. And that's why I'm so fucking glad you don't,

because I'm in the right fucking spot. When people don't understand you anymore, you're in that spot of obsession and drive where people are like, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? I don't want to talk to you, man, because you're not going to get it. You're not going to get it. Boom. Don't want you to get it. Yeah. Don't want you to get it. Yeah, it's powerful, man. I'll give you that, man. It's all about mindset. Yeah. That's it, man.

You have to change the dialogue within your head. And one thing I guarantee you, there's some stat out there about January 1. All that kindling that you started, all that motivation, usually burn out by about 10 to 12 days later. So let's see how far you can take that shit. Let's see if you can get it. That is a challenge from Goggins to you. Usually it's 10 to 12 days,

man. People always come to me, man. Hey, I want a workout program. I no longer give them anymore. Cause you can waste my fucking time. Cause I know most people out there. Once that fucking one alarm clock goes off the wrong time of the day, I'm not going to the gym.

Right. Or they get the workout program, but then they're like, hey, they hit you up again. What kind of watch do I need to get? That's right. What kind of shoes? That's right. Just keep coming. Keep coming, man.

Every day goes by without anything going on. Keep coming. Go to the store, buy a pair of shoes, and Merry Christmas. Have fun with that shit. Call me after you lose some fucking weight running your ass in the dirt, and then we'll work on some other shit. Next up is an exploration of faith with the delightfully unusual, heavily tattooed, former drug addict turned iconoclastic Lutheran pastor and three-time New York Times bestselling

author Nadia Bowles Weber in this clip from episode 428. Well, I met my now ex-husband and I'd never heard of Lutherans except for, I guess, maybe Garrison Keillor. Like I had never, I didn't know what a Lutheran was. And so, he sort of introduced me to more progressive form of Christianity. And I was just fascinated that that even existed. And we moved out to California and I very begrudgingly started going to this Lutheran church that had this gay pastor and going to this adult confirmation class at night. And I just soaked it up. I had no idea that you could believe those things. None.

So, it was like the thing I still loved, which was Jesus, plus stuff that seemed just real and genuine and easy to believe because I already knew it was true. Like when they said we're simultaneously sinner and saint, I'm like, fuck, man, that explains a lot. That's super helpful. Thanks, guys. And then what compels you to go to divinity school and become a pastor? There were two things. The first time I had that hit of, oh, I think I have like, quote, a calling, was when my friend PJ committed suicide. And he was a comic and also in recovery. And I had not been to divinity school or seminary at this point. But when PJ died, our friends just turned to me and were like, well, you could do the funeral,

right? And just literally because I was the only religious person in my friend group, the only thing that qualified me. And I said, okay. And it was at the Comedy Works in downtown Denver and it was packed and I was giving a zoology. And I just looked out and there were all these academics and comics and queers and recovering alcoholics. And I just looked out and there were all these like academics and comics and queers and recovering alcoholics. And I just thought, oh, man, these people do not have a pastor. And then I went, oh, shit. It's going to have to be you. Oh, damn, you know? So, that was my first hit about that.

And there was a sense of being called. Yeah. I felt called to be a pastor to my people, not to fit in some box that the institutional church has for if that's a job you want. You know what I mean? Those are two different things. Right. Like you could minister to these people in a way that no one else that you knew could. Yeah. Yeah. I think that we need load-bearing structures, you know, and that's what religion, it's, this is the first time we've had cultures that weren't religious, like in human history. So there was a way in which religion was a load-bearing structure in terms of understanding who we were, understanding morality, having a symbol system for imaging the divine, for marking the year together. There's a function that religion has played throughout human history that I feel like even though the institutions of religion have hurt a lot of people, I just think it's just not time to dispense with that idea entirely. And it's a really recent idea in human history that you can just choose your own symbol system.

That's new. Well, the foundations of religion are crumbled, you know, and there's a crisis of trust in those structures and those institutions. Which I think is why people are like, well, I feel like I can, I like to listen to Nadia. Well, I think it's just because I really do try to be very forthcoming with my shortcomings and with things I've gotten wrong or shit I don't know. You know, there's not the curtain so much. There's nothing you're gonna like find out that's good.

Like at one point I was like- But that's also like something that you learn in AA, right? Totally. To, like, own those flaws. And, you know, find the empowerment and the vulnerability. And to not actually have shame about it. I mean, that's the thing is, like, I believe in the power of grace so strongly that I have no shame in admitting why I need it. So then people feel like they can trust what I'm saying.

Also like self-incrimination is like my go-to rhetorical move. And that allows me to be more hearable to people because I'm not standing above them. You can connect with you. And listen, I've heard you speak. It's very, you know, it's not just, it's an incredible experience to hear you speak. And I can feel myself connected to the message that you're putting out there.

And it makes me reflect back on my experience as a young person going to church and just sitting in these pews thinking, what am I doing here? I can't relate to any of this. I don't understand what they're talking about. I'm falling asleep. Why is that guy swinging that rope with the terrible smelling stuff? Were you Catholic? And he's dressed up. No, I went to an Episcopalian elementary school. I just found the whole thing totally bizarre and

I was confused about what I was supposed to get out of it. It wasn't that I was traumatized by it. I just didn't understand it and I didn't understand why everyone felt compelled to go. Like I was getting nothing out of this. Have you reverted to any of it in times of crisis at all? Not in an organizational structured kind of way. No, but I mean personally. Yeah, in a non-denominational kind of spiritual way. Yeah. I found God in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and my spiritual growth has taken me through an exploration of many different types of faith and experiences and practices and teachers

and the like. And I haven't settled into one particular perspective on that, but I've learned from all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing that Esther said, and I'm just quoting smarter women than myself, but she said that it's easy. One of the things that religion offers is that in times of crisis and of pain, when we're collapsing, there's something to hold us. Like, it's easy to come up with rituals and practices and stuff in times of birth or weddings, but when shit hits the fan, there's something there to hold you, that there are these sort of rituals or prayers that have been worn smooth by generations of the faithful in a way that can kind of bring us comfort when you can't just create your own thing on the spot when you're in a position of crisis and pain. I thought that was beautiful. But can you have that connection without the baggage that comes with the institution?

That's the question. No, that's literally the question right now. I mean, when I left Christianity for a decade, I couldn't have anything to do with it after I left the church I was raised in. So, when people say, like, look, a lot of us have to leave for reasons of self-preservation, like, I get that. I never judge it, but I think that there is a path to integrating our religious upbringings rather than rejecting, that eventually there's that kind of work that can be done too. Even if it's just, you know, there's this prayer my grandmother said when I was going to sleep every night that's still really meaningful, and I'm going to integrate that into my life, you know? every night that's still really meaningful. And I'm going to integrate that into my life, you know, that that that's a part of wellness to me to be able to do that. So I've been just sort of inviting people into considering what that might look like. And it doesn't have to be a betrayal of the part of you that needed to reject it for good reason to say, yeah, but it's still formed who I am on some level, and I want to make friends with that part of me. Yeah.

You know? Say something to the person who's listening who doesn't have a connection with faith or perhaps like lost their connection with faith in whatever tradition they find themselves in. in whatever tradition they find themselves in. What is it about faith and connection that you find to be so important as part of the human condition? And how can that person find their way back to a place of incorporating that into their life? Well, in a way, it's not like a super popular sentiment, but I just, I don't feel like I'm enough in a sense that I do think having a

power that's more than just me and accessing that has transformed my life and that that's possible and available for anyone regardless of what they believe or what sort of faith they have, that there are things that accessing, like having a connection to our source and to the divine allows us to undergo a certain type of healing and transformation that would be very difficult for us to do just on our own as individuals.

So that's the power of it to me. And there are things like people who are raised religious and had to leave, sometimes there are still like hymns that are dear to them or prayers their grandmother said or whatever. And I think just finding those things and integrating them back into our lives on our own terms can be really healing. And it's like this spiritual reclamation project. And it's okay to do that. It's who you are and it's fine because your symbol system forms you in a way that's hard to escape. So making friends with it on your own terms as an adult can be, yeah, it can be healing.

Rates of depression, loneliness, and addiction have reached epidemic proportions. Journalist and author Johan Hari has a powerful and perhaps controversial take excerpted from episode 416, suggesting everything we think we know about what contributes to these malignancies just might be wrong. For him, the path forward is all about connection. It's important for us to think about this. So there's extremely strong scientific evidence that there are three kinds of cause of depression and anxiety and to some degree they play out in in fact all forms of um mental and emotional problems so there's biological causes like your genes like real brain changes that happen when you become

depressed that can make it somewhat harder to get out those are real right there are people who deny them they are definitely wrong the evidence is very clear on that there are psychological causes which are how you think about yourself and there are social causes which are how we live together and these are all real but what we've done is we've largely as a culture told a story that focuses exclusively on the biology right think about what my doctor told me there's just a problem in your brain. The problem with that, well, the first problem with that is it's not true, right?

But the second problem with that is what it tells people is your distress doesn't mean anything. It's like a glitch in a computer program. And someone who really helped me to think a bit differently about this, I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield, who's a wonderful man and he happened to be in cambodia in 2001 when they introduced chemical antidepressants for the first time to

for the people in that country and the local doctors the cambodian doctors had never heard of these drugs so they were like what are they and he explained and they said oh we don't need them we've already got antidepressants and he said what do you mean he thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy like st john's water or something instead they told him a story there was a farmer in their community who one day stood on a landmine and got his leg blown off he worked in the rice fields so they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields after i forget what it was some months but apparently it's very painful to work underwater him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields after, I forget what it was, some months.

But apparently it's very painful to work underwater with an artificial leg. I'm guessing it was traumatic for obvious reasons. The guy started to cry all day, didn't want to get out of bed, developed classic depression. They said to Dr. Summerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And he said, what? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense. They figured if they bought him a cow he could become a dairy farmer he wouldn't be in

this position that was screwing him up so much so they bought him a cow with a couple of weeks his crying stopped within a month his depression was gone they said to dr summerfield so that cow that was an antidepressant that's what you mean right now if you've been raised to think about this the way we have that sounds like a joke i went to my doctor for an antidepressant, he gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not crazy, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is practical

love and support from the people around you to get those deeper needs met it's a very different way of talking about these problems that explains to people their pain is a signal it means something it evolved for a reason it's telling you your needs aren't being met or some other things obviously reference to a biology there's some you know psychological event that occurred that you haven't really fully processed or worked through there's some there's some hitch in your operating system that that requires redress and so i wouldn't say i wouldn't call it hitch an operating system i would say experiencing grief in the law in the loss of a loved one or something like like yes there are natural reactions.

We've kind of been told we should just get over that kind of stuff rather than really just embrace them for what they are because that is what it is to be human, and that's certainly fine. And to stigmatize that or to kind of pathologize that is certainly wrong. But there are messages, there are wake-up calls. Yeah, there're signals. Yeah, exactly. Basically, you need to do that. And I think to go back to the cultural piece,

if someone's grieving the loss of a loved one and they're uncomfortable sitting with that grief, we have a system that's set up to help you and say, you don't need to feel this way. Like, take this pill, right? Because we've gotten to a place where it's almost understood that we never need to feel bored or uncomfortable or ill at ease, right? That we can just medicate all of that. And implicit in that is this idea that we should all be happy all the time. I think people are right to want to be happy and satisfied in their lives. The question is, it's a deeper thing I think you're getting at, which is,

so let's think about grief, for example. There was this thing that happened in the 1970s that I think is really revealing. So in the 1970s that i think is really revealing so in the 1970s the apa the american psychiatric association who are the obviously the main body of psychiatrists in the us and psychologists decided to do a kind of basic kind of obvious thing they decided they were going to standardize how depression was diagnosed across the us so up to then doctors were just basically deciding for themselves what depression meant. So the APA drew up a simple checklist of 10 symptoms. Kind of obvious things, crying a lot, you know, you could guess them. And they took this list of 10 symptoms and they send it to doctors all over the United States

and they say, if your patient shows more than five of these 10 symptoms for more than two weeks, diagnose them as mentally ill and do what you can. So they send this out. But within a quite short period afterwards, psychiatrists start to come back and go, we've got a bit of a problem here. If we use this checklist in the way you're telling us to, we're going to have to diagnose every grieving person in the United States as depressed because these are also the symptoms of grief. And the APA got together and they said they said well that's not what we meant clearly we didn't intend that so they invented something that became known as the grief loophole where they said okay if your patients come to you and they've got more than five of these 10 symptoms for more than two

weeks diagnose them as mentally ill unless someone they love has died in the last year in which case it doesn't count they're not the only exception they're not crazy well exactly so they started doing this but this began to beg the question hang on a minute why is someone you love dying what we're saying is what we're meant to tell doctors and tell people is so if you feel this way it's just a problem in your brain that just needs to be drugged into submission except there is one circumstance in life where it's an understandable response well why is that the only circumstance why if my mother dies i'm allowed to feel like that but not if i lose my job why not if i become homeless why not if i'm stuck in a job i hate for the next 40 years right but what that does is a wonderful woman called um dr joanne cassia torre who's the leading expert

on traumatic grief in the united states has redone amazing work on this, asking, well, once you acknowledge that depression can be largely a response to life, that just challenges the whole system we've built. The system we've built is not designed to talk about context. It's not designed to talk about how do we sit with you and hold you and love you and help you change your life, right? As she puts it, we just don't understand pain in this culture. We've developed a bizarre way of talking about pain. It's so bizarre that I did an interview recently on a radio show where I was talking about, we were talking before in a similar way to the way we were talking before about

loneliness causing depression. And the interviewer said to me, well, this is an extremely controversial theory. And I thought, how did we get to the point where it was regarded as controversial to point out the most banal and obvious thing, which is if you're lonely, you're going to be much more likely to be acutely unhappy. So I think the grief exception debate reveals something really deep about how we have misunderstood pain and so joanne dr cassia torre who'd be a great person for you to talk to and give an intro to she's an extraordinary woman and her baby died during birth her daughter cheyenne and she was devastated and she was horrified to be um to see how many other grieving parents were very rapidly being diagnosed as mentally ill and, and, and drugged, right? Because the APA was so uncomfortable with this debate about the grief loophole, they just got rid of it. It doesn't exist anymore, right? So now you can be diagnosed almost

immediately after your child dies. In fact, 9% of parents who lose a baby in the United States are diagnosed and drugged in the first 48 hours, right? And as Dr. Cassia Toye puts it, states are diagnosed and drugged in the first 48 hours, right? And as Dr. Cassia Toye puts it, we grieve because we've loved, right? Grief is a testament to our love. It's not a glitch, it's not a pathology, it's a profound form of love. If someone you love dies, it is natural and necessary to grieve. If interrupt that process if you pathologize the pain if you say you know it's a sign of so for example one of joanne's clients she now treats people with who've gone through terrible traumatic grief you know one of her parents one of the parents she worked with um mentioned to a psychiatrist that she when she would lie there at night, she would sometimes hear her son's voice talking to her.

Not in a distressing way, in fact, soothed her. Entirely natural form of grieving. She was diagnosed as psychotic and prescribed loads of antipsychotics. You can see, ironically, what a crazy system there is that's telling us we're crazy for having perfectly natural human responses. Killian Jornet is inarguably the greatest mountain runner of all time and just might be the world's greatest endurance athlete, period.

For him, it's not about podiums or records or wins. It's all about adventure, exploration and living outside your comfort zone. They say never meet your heroes, but I got to tell you, I'm very glad I met this one. So here's Killian from episode 417. We do an activity that we know that it's possibly like we can die there in the mountain. And it's nothing that we look, we are not doing that because we are close to death, but because we are alive when we're doing that is the possibility of an accident.

And when you have some close calls, it can be like, yeah, some friends that they die by your side, or it can be like some accidents but all the times uh i think it's funny that when you start to do uh mountaineering like you are afraid about your capacities because you don't know yourself but you see the mountain as something solid that it's uh it's, it's like a ball or it's something. And more you go into the mountains, less you are afraid about yourself, and you know better your capacities,

your technique, your experience. But you see that the mountain is moving and it's dangerous there that you don't see, but they are there, so you are more afraid about the mountain, so it's this thing that, it's many things that you cannot control. Like you can think logically, but then it avalanches come where it's supposed to not or like some rock fallings and things. And you need to accept in a way that that's part of it,

that it's many things we can control, but it's some of them that is not possible to do. Yeah. I mean, I look at you as somebody who, despite all of your accomplishments, you know, is very humble. Like you have a very healthy relationship with humility and not to project, but I would imagine that comes from an appreciation and respect for nature. Like you're never going to beat the mountain, right? And if you don't have a respect and a healthy level of humility when you're attempting these challenges

and you're putting yourself at great peril. So it keeps you like sort of right-sized about everything. Yeah, I think conquering mountains is a very, very ironic word. I think like we are not conquering mountains, like we can conquer ourselves. And the mountain is where we is this big mirror where we see ourselves but, but we can never pretend to, to be fighting against the mountain or

to be fighting against nature because, first of all, because we are part of it. Like, we are part of the nature. So seeing it's important to, to pass there lightly. So we can only see our footsteps, but we like leaving no trace is not only like about leaving rubbish, but it's also about like being accepted by the mountain or being try, yeah, kind of like being there, but trying to don't aggress the mountain. And I think on a way, I don't think that if you don't aggress the mountain,

it will respect you more, but at least it keeps you aware of like, okay, you are really, really really nothing you are very very small even if you are like and especially because sports it's so much about ego and how the sport is organized like you win a race and you are in a top of a podium that it's like it's something very artificial like why you are better because you run faster than the guy that is second and the one is third or the one is last one. So we'd really like building kind of this egocentric mindset, how Sporo is organized so you can think and it's easy to believe that you are someone good or that you are better than others. And especially in mountains

that's very dangerous and and at the end like it will put uh in your side like uh yeah you are nothing right yeah we are so much about we want to leave a legacy or we want to to be remembered or we want to do something important and then the end nothing we do it's important like it's yeah it's it's nothing and i think when you realize that we are not important and what we do is not important then you realize how wonderful it is yeah we get so much with like inertia it it takes a lot of people today i think like we it's we tend to do what it's the simple thing the simple thing and and to try to do what's easy and what it's supposed to be and we don't take time to to find what we want to do and not what we are supposed to do take time to find what we want to do and not what we are supposed to do.

But then like when you find that that's what you want to do and to find that the balance on that is much like, it's just the life is much better. Like everything around is much better. But yeah, I suppose it just like, it needs to, it needs some courage or it needs some like seeing sometime, okay, I don't want to that and to be able to say no, i don't know uh things that they are supposed to drive you through uh through success but then like how you how you count success is very different yeah yeah so what is living outside the comfort zone taught you like this this ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable like how is that a teacher for you and what can be learned from that well i think it teaches you

it's mostly decision taking uh like how to how to take decisions uh how you take the decisions in the in the zone like to be always exposed like to not be sure about what's going on and to be able to be really rational on seeing very fast what are the different consequences on each decision you are taking at that period. I think that you can apply on life and you can apply on everything else. And yeah, it's, I think it's to be really cold blood, but to be cold blood to follow your emotions. And that's kind of contradictory.

But then like, you need to listen to your emotion or to listen to your, to yourself, to see where you want to go, what's the lifestyle you want to have, what's the things you want to achieve. And that, that need to be your emotion that decides this, but then the decision taking through there, it needs to be really like, uh, uh, rational. Yeah. What, uh, what, what scares you the most? Um, well, uh, many things I would say like, uh, uh, of course, like, uh, when going out, like, uh, dying or like, uh, having like a big accident things like that but um i think uh what scares me in more general is like where where are we going like uh the the world like uh now we see like all the environmental problems and especially when you are in in uh in these, like with a lot of glaciers, like you can see day by day, almost how we changing.

So on this way, like where are we going as the planet? And that's something that it's scurrying. Yeah, and I think that, and where a society, like all the problems between humans that we have, all the, yeah, it's a lot of conflicts, human conflicts too. And I think that's more scary than like dying. The future of humanity.

Yeah, future of, yeah, humanity, but humanity like we are one space, more of the planet, so also the planet too, yeah. The planet too. Well, the planet would be fine without us. Yeah, no, that's for sure. It would be much better off, actually. Yeah, that's for sure, yeah. No question about that.

As somebody who's seen much more of it than I, you can attest to that, I would imagine. What's driving all of this? Like, where does the motivation come from? Like, where is the muse? Like what's behind the curtain here that's propelling you? Is it a sense of wanting to be the best version of who you are? Is it a search for excellence or perfection?

Is it just connecting with nature? Like what is the driving impulse for you? I think the driving impulse is happiness, simply. It's like to be happy. And that's an easy answer, but it's a deep answer too because where I find happiness is on knowing myself, challenging myself, and seeing who I am, where I can go, and experiencing different things. I think it's a lot about experience and experiencing places, nature, views.

Like I've run in places that they are beautiful, and that's what motivates me to go to one place or another is to why to go there it's to to see the views from that point and see the the beauty of the nature it's is one big motivation and if i can combine that with uh with an inner challenge that it can be be able like to put the question, I'm able to progress. And like, I think achievement on the sense of like doing things that you think that they are not possible for you before,

like all the effort you put to be able to change these status from impossible to possible. change these status from impossible to possible. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find

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And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, support and empower you to find the ideal level of care providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it.

Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com.

All right, people, how we doing? Are we good? Good, because next up is the plant power doctor herself, the great, the delightful Gemma Newman, MD. In this excerpt from episode 449, recorded during our Italy retreat in May, she drops relatable pearls that take the confusion out of eating right and making lifestyle changes with staying power. right and making lifestyle changes with staying power. My take on it is I like to put out positive energy and I like to be able to maintain a compassionate approach to this because people try these diets because they want results and

they feel frustrated with what they've currently got. And oftentimes when, you know, I remember myself, I did low carb for a while thinking it was best for me, and I got results, and I looked good, and so I thought, well, of course, this is the way forward, so I can completely understand where people are coming from with regard to this, and the same with keto, like people go on keto diets to get results or to feel better, and I'm not going to be in a position where I deny people's personal experience, but I am going to be in a position where I deny people's personal experience but I am going to be in a position where I share information both on long-term health and short-term health outcomes

so that they can then hopefully come to a decision based on rationality over um over what someone told them once on the internet so the internet I think is fantastic. I do honestly, when, when patients come up to me and said, Oh, I Googled this, I'm really sorry. I know you won't like it. I know I shouldn't. I think actually, no, I'm really glad that you did because it shows me you have an inquisitive mind. You want to learn and you know, we can discuss this and you can hopefully find some answers that are going to suit your long-term health and wellbeing. So I don't get involved with the diet wars, but I do like to disseminate positive information. And I think when people are ready and willing to receive that information, then they'll come and they'll read it and hopefully they will accept it.

And I'll be honest, I think most doctors don't go on PubMed and read past the abstracts. This is partly why we have a big problem is that people who have medical credentials don't necessarily read the whole paper or they may misrepresent the paper. So all I can say is based on the evidence that I have read from mechanistic data, from cellular longevity, from epidemiology, making plants the basis of your diet is key for microbial health and beyond. So I think it's interesting because when people do well, for example, on the ketogenic diet, I don't want to discount their experience. So I think to myself, well, why is it that they are doing well at this point? And what's interesting to me is that a lot of it does seem to stem from gut health. So if somebody has something like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or a leaky gut then it's

going to be very difficult for them to tolerate these healthy vibrant foods that are so common in a plant-based diet and so maybe they do feel a little bit better to start with but of course if they then try to eat these healthy foods in the future then they've made their underlying issue worse and so my aim in speaking with patients is always to come at it with empathy and compassion like what has made you do this way of eating and how do you feel now and then take it from there and gut healing i think is one of the major um things that that people need to do when they when they are starting on this journey if they've got gastrointestinal issues and things like quercetin and glutamate and restore gut health by the fabulous Dr. Zach Bush,

as well as, you know, gradually reintroducing FODMAP foods, fermentable foods that are tremendously healthy but may cause initial bloating or discomfort. So it really depends on where they're coming from and where they're at. Bottom line is a plant-based diet is the only one that's been proven to reverse heart disease. And it's been proven to be very beneficial for people suffering from a variety of different cancers. And we have great mechanistic data to show why that might be possible. So, um, I have every confidence in, in recommending a predominantly plant-based diet. Um, and then what they do with that, it's up to them. But, um,. But yeah, in terms of things like keto,

part of the reason that they might be feeling good on it initially is because it's quite an effective way of regenerating mitochondria that are a little bit tired and worn out by the PGC1 alpha pathway. So you think to yourself, well, how else can you regenerate your mitochondria? And there's plenty of ways of doing that that don't involve high meat consumption. In fact, if you are eating a lot of meat on a keto diet you're probably doing it wrong because you're getting too much protein when you should be having more in the way of fats actually so what are the other ways of doing that where you can do high intensity interval training

for example you could have an intermittent fasting time restricted feeding and i mentioned quercetin which is a plant-based nutrient that you can get from a number of plant foods and also in supplement form. Even jumping in the ocean, having a cold plunge is another way of doing it. Having a massage. There's so many ways of activating the mitochondria that you don't have to do a ketogenic diet to do that. So it's just about kind of helping people understand why they've got a benefit and how else could they do so without risking their long-term health. In fact, that's what I would encourage people to do. Anyone that's listening right now, if you've been thinking about a plant-based diet, if you've been wondering about a plant-based diet and you're not sure what the first step to take is, we've obviously covered a lot of ground today,

but this could be your chance to make one change, just one thing that you can do tomorrow that could change your daily habit. And if you can keep doing that for a few days and then maybe make one more change, that's the beginning of a new reality for you. So maybe have a think, is there one thing that you could do today or tomorrow that would make a difference to your daily routine that you could commit to doing, that you could maybe tell your spouse about or maybe a friend so that they can keep you accountable and start you off on your fantastic abundant health journey that's so inspiring you're very optimistic you've got to stay optimistic are you

truly you know when i look when i kind of like take a take a look from 10 000 feet down on planet earth it's easy to to despair of how we're treating the planet and to see the declining health of our population there are tools like we've just been talking about today that can transform all of that that are accessible and very doable and yet sometimes i feel like, I don't know, are we going to win this war? How do you look at that? I like to think of it as a journey of enlightenment for humanity rather than a war, because otherwise it does get kind of depressing. But if we think of it as a journey of enlightenment we know instinctively that staying close to nature is super important for our health and for the health of our children and we know

seeing that one species is dying every 20 minutes we know we're in the middle of something serious and that something has to be done but overwhelm is not the emotion with which to face this hope and gratitude and love are the emotions with which to face this. So stay positive. Make a change for yourself. Tell others about your change. Feel good. And hopefully the message will spread. Mic drop.

I would say that there is a very big difference between inspirational gurus who sling a bunch of BS and those that have the credibility and the life experience to back it up. Tom Bilyeu is the latter. show, Impact Theory, breaks free of the matrix to deliver the goods on embracing struggle, changing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and accessing the hidden potential that resides within us all. So when someone comes to you and says, oh my God, look what you've built. It's so inspiring, but I don't know what my purpose is. I don't know what makes me passionate. I'm not sure which direction to take. Like, what is the counsel? I'm sure you feel this question all the time.

Like, what is your counsel to that individual? So first and foremost, go play, go discover, like wander around, go to a different country, like encounter enough stuff that you see what actually gives you that spark of interest. Don't expect a spark of passion. It doesn't happen like that. You're going to be interested by something,

and that something will be maybe a little more interesting than the next thing. That thing, now go down the process of really engaging with it. Like, go full in. So if you were traveling around India, and you went and taught a week-long math class, and you were like, I've never been this fulfilled in my life, move to India and teach in the slums for a year. And even that-

Or how about just when you go back home, maybe start tutoring kids. Like you don't have to revolutionize your life overnight, but if you start bringing greater expression to that impulse, it will lead you in a trajectory that you can't foresee in that moment. Super powerful answer. So I'm a thousand percent with that. Engaging with it, whatever face that takes, but really spending time with it, really doing it. Then if it turns into a full-blown fascination where you're

like, I really dig this, then we're going to go down the process of gaining mastery. Only in the process of gaining mastery will you find passion so to me passion comes out of it's kind of like love i don't believe that love it needs a different word unrequited love is a very different neurological state than reciprocal love so if you have unrequited love to me that's something you really like i love singing but i'm shit at it so i have unrequited love i love singing but singing does not love me back. Now I could go down the process of gaining mastery. And then I may find that I have a real passion for it because part of it's going to become, oh, I'm gaining this skill. And this skill of singing

allows me to have an emotional impact, not only on myself, but on other people. I can make them feel good. I can change their mood. I can tell a story, whatever it is that you want to do with the music. But when you're able to do that and you're truly good at it and it has the outcome that you desire, then it can become a passion. But to get a passion, you've got to fight through just ridiculous amounts of boredom, fatigue, everything to truly become good enough at it that it's a skill that has utility. So when it came to do I buy an island and retire or do I double down, it came down to what will make me love my life the most. And the It came down to what will make me love my life the most. And the reality is the thing that would make me love my life the most, because it would

still be fun to just go home and be with my wife. But the thing that will make me love my life the most is to do the things that are fulfilling. And I think fulfillment has a very specific universal formula. And that formula is work your ass off to get very good at something that you care deeply about that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people. That's it. You got to have all of it. Technique. Literally. Yes.

Rich, it is literally technique. Yeah. And people, they don't think about that. Explain what that is for people that don't know. So it's this ancient Greek notion of fulfillment, basically. And the fact that it's coming from that word, techni, like to get good at something and something that's hard. So the way that I explain it to people is people think of like doing something like going and ladling soup at a soup kitchen, which may be the right place to start. But ultimately you're going to realize anyone can do this. And so I haven't earned

something special that allows me to serve myself in humanity. So part of it is working your ass off to get a set of skills that have real value. And my whole thing, this may be the biggest problem we face as a society. People don't remember that skills have utility. They let you do something. You don't learn to build a house to impress your parents. You learn to build a house so people can live in the house you build. And once people understand that, like, holy shit, you're building this house so somebody can live

in it, build a home in it, have a family, be sheltered from storms, like, fuck, it's a real thing, man. And so all of that effort and energy you went into, I have the chills right now, is so you can create that moment for yourself, for other people. It is something so much more than going to architecture school, which maybe you went to because your parents wanted that and they were architects. And so you do that thing for that and you forget that the whole reason you became an architect was to build houses. And so once people realize, oh, I'm putting all of this time and energy to build these things because they let me do something. What do I want to do? What do I want to give? What do I want to create? When you look at skills from that perspective, it is like,

it is being a superhero. It is being a superhero. You're going to collect these abilities. These abilities actually let you do something. The fact that Superman can fly allows him to save people, allows him to do things other people can't do. We all have this opportunity to become capable of the extraordinary, to be able to do things other people can't do. And that feels so good. The thing is though,

the thing that's unique about you is that you were able to come to this realization and develop a level of maturity and self-awareness without having to go to the, you know, play it out at the Lamborghini dealership, right? Because most people who would come into that kind of wealth would go and have that experience for a period of time only to discover, you know, what you just expressed, but on the other side of it. So why were you able to do that? Why were you able to avoid that experience and circumvent it? They say a fool never learns. A smart man learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

Far too often I've been a fool and have repeated mistakes over and over and over. But I really do try to be smart. I'm not usually as wise as I would like to be and just find that I learn things the hard way, but I really do learn them. So pain for me is a tremendous instructor, maybe because I hate it so much and just want to move away from it. But thankfully, I don't run from it. I figure out what I did that made me feel that pain, whether it's what I value myself for or whether it's just, hey, bad skill set, you need to address it. But thankfully I don't run from it. I figure out what I did that made me feel that pain, whether it's what I value myself for, or whether it's just, Hey, bad skillset, you need to address it and then actually addressing it. So I think that everything in life comes down to what your own value system is. So what's your identity? What are your beliefs? What are your values? What are your habits? What are your routines? When you figured those out that like, if you just gave

me a sheet that told me what those were about somebody, I would tell you what the outcome of their life is going to be. And for me, implementation, being willing to face the fears, the anxieties, the unknown, the need to stare at my inadequacies so I can figure out what skills I actually need in order to go and do something, because implementation is really a question of skill set. So that's why motivation ultimately is going to let you down. It's like you may be motivated to go do something, but let me walk you through exactly what will happen. You're motivated to try this thing, which you don't know how to do, and you suck at it. And so you go do that thing,

you suck. It hurts your ego because your ego is tied up in being right, being good, being talented, worthy, all those like permanent set states that people don't realize are malleable. And so they get stuck in that. It damages their self-esteem. So they want to run in the opposite direction. Psychological immune system kicks in, reminds them that that was stupid anyway. Why were they worried about even trying that?

And so they back off. And any one time doing that, it's not a big deal. It's just that people do that over and over and over and over and over. And my thing is that's such a predictable pattern in humanity. it's like, what do you have to do to counteract that? And the thing you have to do is emotionally reward yourself

for being willing to take the steps. So, okay, I know I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna suck at it, it's gonna hurt, it's gonna hurt my self-esteem. And so what do I need to do to make sure that I don't trip up over that in a way that makes me turn and run in the opposite direction? Number one, stop valuing myself for being good at something and start valuing myself for being willing to learn.

What does it feel like to shoulder the responsibility for improving the health of global conversation on one of the world's biggest social networks? In this excerpt from episode 430, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey expounds, including thoughts on solitude and self-care in my attempt to better understand the human behind the curtain. We tuned into something that was interesting, that was intriguing, that we didn't know what it was going to become. And in the same light,

people figured out how to game it too. And that's where we are. Right, this living, breathing organism, right? That could also become a virus. Yes, absolutely. It could be at least the path. Or have a pathogen. Yeah, at least the pathways and the vectors

that it provides can carry both positive and negative attributes. And, you know, like any tool, you can figure it out in a way such that you can use the vectors to be more destructive and to be distracting and to divide, which I think is antithetical to the base technology. But it doesn't mean that we should assume that it'll just work itself out. We have to actively maintain and and garden this conversation.

And the challenge is no one's done it at this scale before, so we have to learn it. We have to learn it in real time. And part of the conversations like this is like, I want to share that I'm learning it in real time. We're learning it in real time, and we're going to make a ton of mistakes along the way, but we're going to do it in public. And we're gonna make a ton of mistakes along the way, but we're going to do it in public

and we're going to admit when we're wrong. And we just haven't done enough of that in the past. On this idea of doing it in public, failing and succeeding in the public eye, how do you, just as a human being, deal with the reaction that comes with every single thing that you tweet? Like, do you, like, do you put a lot of thought into what you're putting out into the world? Do you not read your app mention? Like, how do you, like, knowing that every, every time you tweet something,

at least with respect to what's going on at Twitter, that you're going to get, like, there's going to be a certain percentage of people that are going to want to say not nice things. Like, how do you insulate yourself? Like, how do you see that and take it to get, like there's going to be a certain percentage of people that are going to want to say not nice things. Like, how do you insulate yourself? How do you see that and take it to heart, but also protect your own, you know, emotional wellbeing? Yeah, I mean, this is where the meditation practice has helped me a lot. It's just not constantly allowing myself

to be reactive to whatever comes in front of me. This is the less control I have over my own well-being and space and mindset, the less effective I am in fixing our issues. I get my sense of spirituality through connection. And what Twitter represents is spiritual to me. Like tapping into the consciousness the you know the the the larger organism um whether it be you know the the planet the universe the the

social consciousness is what is what is what drives me and it's the it's the answer i like to get at you know and the question that i like to ask and um so that's where i feel like the flow and it's the it's the answer i like to get at you know and the question that i like to ask and um so that's where i feel like the flow and that's where i feel most alive is when i i feel like i can tap into that and like you know um i go down to big sur a lot and big sur like we look at this amazing fortune here in san cisco being able to travel two and a half hours away and go to this place that you immediately feel is mystical because of the redwood trees and this dynamic coast that goes down a thousand feet to the ocean where you see whales and you just feel this connection and this wisdom. And I think that's so powerful and such an important reminder.

Like today is my day where I don't, you know, Saturday is my day where I don't think about work at all with the exception of this conversation. But it's at a different level. level. I just clear the day completely to walk outside or to go down to Big Sur or to be with my best friends. I have dinner with them ideally once a week and just laugh and have some wine together. And they just had a baby. So that's a whole nother new sense of joy. And I need a lot of that balance because that that is my my spiritual connection at the moment it's just like feeling that that connection in as tangible way as possible and you you know you mentioned you know my my path of like you know thinking about designing jeans and botanical illustration and i took a thousand hours of massage therapy along my path of becoming

an engineer and a CEO because I grew up writing programs and it's so damn abstract. You're so much in your head and you're not using your hands. And every time I realized I'm just like, my dreams were me programming my dreams. It was just such a weird experience where I would have this dream where I was programming the next part of my dream. And it was so lucid, but it wasn't grounded. So I would always shift towards something that I loved, like botanical illustration and just drawing, or something that would solve a need because I was developing carpal tunnel and I didn't just want to get a massage. I wanted to learn the why behind it

and the mechanics behind it so I could fix myself. And, but all these variations, these side passes, forks in the road have always brought me back to building technology and added depth and enrich building that technology because it's just where I feel my creativity missed. Yeah. I can't help but think that there's this weird meta parallel

between like your own personal path towards broadening your consciousness and raising your awareness and growing as a human being and the kind of hive consciousness that is Twitter and the commitment to kind of raising the vibration of that, like the interplay between those, I think is super interesting. Yeah, I think in that sense, like, you know, back to our conversation around meditation,

the observation is not just that we are external observers, but we are part of the system. The very act of observing is changing the system as well. of observing is changing the system as well. And we have a responsibility to really reflect the essentialness of humanity and being that reflection on the world for all the good and all the bad. I mean, there's a lot of power to seeing, you know, how people think in ways that make us feel great and also things that are super uncomfortable because we need to be able to acknowledge those things.

We need to be able to acknowledge in person or to have a conversation about it. And there's no other path towards evolution and making something better unless we can talk about it. And we're back. Now we're going to grapple with the hard problem of trying to better understand one of the great captivating mysteries of the universe, the scientific and philosophic nature of consciousness. How does it arise? Where exactly does it exist and why? Our steward for this deep dive, excerpted from episode 460, is Annika Harris, the New York Times bestselling author of Conscious,

A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Love Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Really, the goal of the book is to shake up our intuitions about consciousness as much as possible, because I think if we're able to make progress, if we're able to, and the human brain, I think, is not capable of understanding everything, and so it may just fall into that category. But if we can understand consciousness better, it will require that we really challenge some strong intuitions that we have. And I think we're at that point with regard to consciousness.

I like that you say that the human brain isn't capable of understanding all of these things. I feel like there's a hubritic flare that kind of emanates across the scientific community that we can indeed understand everything. And perhaps that's true at some future point or with the- I think it's an aspiration. Advent of robots. It's interesting because most science I know, and typically scientists more than other people I know

are much more willing to say they don't know something or we may never know or this is deeply mysterious. Physicists in particular, but scientists in general. a natural circumstance of the messaging, when we learn something new, it's kind of declared as if we know all these things and everything is knowable. But I don't actually think that's the stance of science. Well, particularly with physicists. I mean, the more you dive deep, they're just throwing their hands up all the time. Yeah. It's like, how do you even begin to understand what these things mean? I've been watching these wonderful videos of this physicist, Nima Arkani Hamed, who's brilliant and hard to understand, but I do my best. But he spends most of his time talking about how space-time is no longer something that we think is fundamental. I think is fundamental.

That there's something that's more fundamental that space-time that basically there is no, at a fundamental level, there is no space and time. So yeah, I mean, if we're never gonna get our minds around that, even if we can believe it. Well, time is a focus of the book in the later chapters. And I wanna get to that, but let's start with, let's just define our terms here. Like when we're talking about consciousness, like what do we actually mean?

So people do use the word many different ways and it's confusing. The way I'm using the word in the book and what I think most people mean when they're talking about the mystery of consciousness, the kind of the consciousness in the most fundamental sense, is the closest word I can get to is experience. And I use Thomas Nagel's description of consciousness from his essay called What It Is Like to Be a Bat, which is a great essay and I recommend from the 70s. And he says in that essay, an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism. And that language for a lot of people, they kind of get it right away. Actually, for me, that happened.

I knew exactly what he meant. But the language really isn't very precise and it can be confusing. So I usually follow that up with a series of questions, especially for someone who just says, I don't know what that means to say it's like something. And so I'll say, is there something that it's like to be you right now? And I run through this in the book. And of course, whoever I'm asking, we all know we're having an experience, right? We're conscious and we're having an experience. And then is there something that it's like to be this book on the

table? And our intuitive answer is no. And despite what's actually true in the world, the fact that we can imagine a collection of matter in the universe that entails no experience at all, the lights are not on from the inside, right? That's non-conscious material. And then a collection of matter in the universe, like your brain, where there's something that it's like to be that matter. That difference is consciousness and it's how I'm using the word in the book. Although I do actually prefer experience. I think it's slightly less confusing. Yeah. And I've been thinking about that definition over the last week and I can't escape this sense that it's still reductive in the sense that we're looking at experience through our own experience, right? We're defining what experience means only through the lens of what it means and feels like to be human.

And it doesn't leave a lot of space or room for contemplating that experience could take another form that we can't relate to. Well, yes and no. So that's where I'm talking at a more fundamental level. experience could take another form that we can't relate to. Well, yes and no. No, I think, I think, but that, so that's where I'm talking at a more fundamental level. So I think, and that's partly what I try to do in the book is strip away everything that could be human. Like you could, you could radically change an experience, but the fact of any experience at all. And, you know, I get into these more far out theories, but even if you contemplate that, you know, a single cell or bacteria has some minimal level of experience that you and I could never imagine what it would like to, what it would be like, if there's any experience, I mean, the most minimal experience

you could imagine, if there's something it's like, then that is consciousness. And that could be completely unlike any human experience. It's just whether it's completely dark and dead, whether the stars, there's no experience there at all. It's a collection of atoms that are doing their thing, but there's nothing that it feels like at all. Or there is. Or there is, right. In a very binary way.

Yeah, well, yes and no. I mean, it's in a binary way once you go from nothing to something. But then, of course, there's this gradation of what's possible in experience, once you have experience. But yeah, I think you can say that it's either there or not.

Right. The fact that it exists begs the question of the evolutionary advantage of having it at all. Like, what is the reason that we developed this? Yeah. As opposed to, you know, the sort of zombie example that you use in the book. Yeah, no, and I think that's a very interesting question, and that's kind of where my thinking started. And it's early on in the book that I pose these two questions that I think. So I have two categories of intuitions that I want to challenge. One category is our intuitions about consciousness itself. And then intuitions that occur in other areas that are in our lives that strongly influence or inform our intuitions about consciousness. And so I kind of put those into two separate categories and I start with consciousness and I just, for myself and in my own notes, I just wanted to get at what are the most basic, strongest intuitions we have about consciousness? And so I asked these two questions in the book.

And so I ask these two questions in the book. One is, is there behavior we can point to from outside a system that we can use as conclusive evidence that consciousness is present in that system, right? Is there something we can witness from the outside, some physical behavior that we could say, yes, anytime we see behavior A, B, or C, that's absolute evidence of consciousness. And I think our intuitive answer is yes. And it's a very strong yes. And even after dissecting this for 15 years, my answer is still yes. I often use, you know, my daughter. If my daughter's falling down and she's crying and asking for a Band-Aid, all of that behavior to me absolutely signifies that there's consciousness present, right? She's having an experience of pain. And so I wanted to start there because I thought this is an important exercise in all areas of science. And this is where our strongest intuitions are. But could we be wrong? Is it possible that the behavior that we think is evidence of consciousness is not necessarily evidence of consciousness?

And so you can kind of go in the direction of AI and imagine we might in the future create something that seems like a child who is crying because she fell down, but the lights are actually not on. There's no consciousness there. But I think the flip side of that is also interesting, which is even if we can come up with behaviors, and for myself, I can't. And I think it's super interesting that we can't. But on the other side of that, we know that consciousness can be present with no behavior at all. Right. So you use the diving bell and the butterfly as an example. Have you

read that book? It's so beautifully written. Yeah. Yeah. So that's based on a writer who had something called locked in syndrome where I believe his was due to a stroke, but it can, it can happen variety of ways that damage the brain, like a stroke. And it left him completely paralyzed, but with a full experience of consciousness, as full as our experiences right now, as full as his experience was before the stroke. He could hear, see, think, write a book, but he had no way. He was completely paralyzed, except for in his case, his left eyelid, there was some mobility left in his left eyelid. And miraculously, his caretakers noticed this and they were able to develop a way for him to write through. I don't know the exact details, but yeah, each blink created a certain letter and then he would spell out words and wrote this beautiful book. So that's a case of even if we can find behavior,

there's this other problem in terms of behavior, which is there can be zero behavior and still be a tremendously detailed experience of consciousness. Every year, heart disease claims one out of every four American lives. Filmmaker, actor, and OG podcaster Kevin Smith narrowly escaped adding his name to that statistic, surviving a widowmaker heart attack last year. The experience changed his relationship to food, to lifestyle, and prompted him, among other things, to go vegan. It's an incredible story, masterfully told by a master storyteller, super entertaining.

So please enjoy this brief excerpt from episode 433. So I went into the green room and there was milk there in a glass bottle in ice. So I cracked it open, took a big thing of milk, big drink. And then I was suddenly fairly nauseated my first thought was like ew somebody fucking pissed in the milk or something like the milk's been fucked with like you know it's got to be bad milk i think i've just had some bad milk so i felt weird and i asked jordan who runs our company, and Emily, who does my hair and makeup. I was like, hey man, can I have the room? Because when I'm sick, I don't want to be around people.

I just want to go off and fucking die like an animal. So I was like, can I have the room? I don't feel that well. And they were like, yeah, totally. And they stepped out and I laid down on the floor. So there I am. I'm laying down on the floor. I feel nauseated.

I feel hot. And I throw up bile. And then I feel aated, feel hot, and I throw up bile. And then I feel a little better. Then Emily comes in, and she's like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, can you turn on the hair dryer and just dry me off? Like I'm sweating profusely and stuff. So she's like, yeah, totally. So she sits me in the chair, puts the hair dryer on me.

And as she's drying my hair, you know, she feels me in the chair she puts the hair dryer on me and she's drying my hair you know she feels my neck and she goes you know this is gonna sound creepy but i feel your neck all the time for for while i'm doing your hair never felt this before you're freezing cold on your neck like you sure you maybe something we should look into i was like yeah i don't feel great i was like i'm gonna i need a couch somebody find a couch this is at the theater the alex theater in glendale so uh jordan found a couch and i was find a couch? This is at the theater, the Alex Theater in Glendale. So Jordan found a couch. And I was like, all right, I'm just going to lay down here for a while, man. Which is like, you know, now again, knowing what happened.

Like, that's how fucking people die. You know, I'm like, I'm just going to lay down. I don't feel good. I'm going to lay down. And, you know, meanwhile, my heart was fucking attacking me. Or, you know, fair enough. I had attacked it most of my life with all the shit i ate so the heart was like turnabout's fair fair play so i'm laying on this couch and i can't

get comfortable flip around and stuff which is weird because i could fall asleep with the drop of a hat so then there's a chair there so i went to the chair and sat in it and i put my arms above my head to facilitate breathing because i couldn't quite catch my breath i was like but no like tightness in your chest no nothing no arm no you know they tell you like your left arm your right arm goes numb it's going to feel like an elephant sitting on your chest none of that shit just couldn't quite like catch my breath this is a normal breath up to the top then i could only go and i couldn't ring the bell i couldn't like get it all the way up to the top so i put my hands above my head i was raising them up like this like you know

like a like a football referee try facilitate breathing and so i'm sitting in the chair and jordan kind of creeps in around the corner. She goes, you all right? I was like, I feel really fucked up. I've never felt like this before in my life. I was like, maybe I should see a doctor. She's like, well, we canceled the second show. And I was like, why would you cancel the second show? And she was like, I've never seen you be sick before.

This is really weird. So called off the second show. I was like, all right, well, if the show's called off and I felt okay. Cause Brian said he could cut everything out of one. So I was like, all right, we're covered there. I was like, if the show's called, called off, maybe I should go see a doctor right now. And she goes, it's Sunday night. There are no doctors open.

So I called an ambulance and I was like, why the fuck would you call an ambulance, man? Oh my God, this is embarrassing. Like they're going to show up. They're going to tell me I smoked way too much weed and stuff. Like, don't, why would you do that? She's like better safe than sorry. i didn't know what to do so i'm sitting there in the chair with my arms up and all of a sudden like and when you call the ambulance fire department comes as well so six brawny ass fire firefighters come in the room and there i am sitting there in the chair

with my arms up one of them young enough to like be like oh i fucking know who this guy is and looking at me like why is silent bob celebrating a touchdown and i was like hey and they were like you're right i said yeah i just i can't quite catch my breath two paramedics come in guy and a girl bobsy twins and the guy goes uh hi what's your name is kevin smith he goes mr smith how you feeling mr smith's my father and he goes oh i've heard that joke before he goes uh what's going on i said i can't, I've heard that joke before. He goes, what's going on? I said, I can't quite catch my breath. He goes, all right, let's see what's going on here. I'm going to get a blood pressure cuff on you.

Put a cuff on me. Starts pumping it. And then the lady's got this what looks like a fishing tackle box. And she opens it up. It's got leads and wires in it and stuff. All of a sudden, she grabs my fucking hockey jersey and yanks it up. And every one of my titties and guts falls out. And I'm like, whoa!

And she's like, what? What's the matter? I yank it right back down i said don't do that there's a bunch of people around here she's like i gotta get these wires on you and i was like well i'll hold my shirt out you just reach under it and use my nipples as guide posts like but don't lift my shirt up and she looks at the other guy she's like we ain't got time for this and the guy goes uh mr smith i need you to do me a favor open your mouth and open my mouth he's like lift your tongue i did he's gonna put something in it it's okay and he sprayed something under my tongue and they said close your mouth and i did and i remember thinking like this is so fucking weird your whole life your parents train you like if a stranger says to you open

your mouth and put something in it you fucking say no but because the dude's wearing a uniform i was like ah just totally let him do whatever he wanted so the guy goes uh he looks at the lady's fishing tackle box which is now wires attached to my chest and i didn't think anything of it right like they're moving fast they're paramedics and stuff i'd seen paramedics work before but i'd never been at the receiving end of them so the guy goes you know what we're gonna take you for a ride to the hospital and i was like oh my god please don't do that this is embarrassing i honestly just smoked way too much weed today he goes yeah that could be the case he's gone but we're so close better safe than sorry man we're gonna take you to the hospital you ever been to the hospital before i was like no he goes oh you're

gonna love it is it really he goes yeah man we're gonna take you in an ambulance you ever been in an ambulance i said no he goes we'll even ring the siren i was like all right let's fucking do it so he put me in this chair that becomes a bed that becomes a gurney right it's like a transformer but in order to get me there that's what a fireman come into it because i go to get up and like whoa you stay right there and they bring the six firemen over and they're like all right pick them up dudes put their hands under me and six fucking brawny ass firemen lift me to the ground it was most fun i had like in the last year because nobody ever tries to pick my ass up like it was fun i was like we they put me in the chair and shit got me upstairs as i was being wheeled out there's a bunch of people lined up for the next

show and i guess they'd been informed that i was not having a second show because I was suffering from food poisoning. Somebody had heard that I threw up. So they're like, oh, it must be food poisoning. So that's what they told everybody. He can't do a second show. He's got food poisoning. And as I'm leaving, there's somebody, you know, a bunch of people outside. They're all clapping.

Like, way to go, Kev. And then there was one guy who's making the universal face for sticking his finger down his throat you know the vomiting face but i didn't know that they were told that i'd puked and i wasn't honestly thinking about that i was so like what the fuck i'm in an ambulance now i saw a dude pointing his finger in his mouth and i was like does this fucking man tell me suck his dick as i'm being put in an ambulance like where is the decency and shit like that you're being wheeled out in front of all your fans. Totally.

And I was like waving to him and stuff like the queen. They put me in an ambulance. I go to Glendale Adventist, and that wasn't the name of the hospital on the call sheet. Since we were shooting, we were in production. There's a call sheet for every production. Call sheet has a bunch of useful information on it, including where to go in case of a medical emergency. This is the hospital we've designated as the production hospital. The ambulance didn't take me there. They take me to Glendale Adventist, which is a little further away.

But because the medics knew what was happening and they knew that Glendale Adventist was a fantastic cardiac hospital. So I get there. They bring me into the ER. That's where I meet Dr. Ladenheim, Mark L ladenheim guy saves my life comes in he's like hi how you doing i said i'm good i just can't catch my breath he goes well how's your pain you know on a level of zero to ten what kind of pain you in i was like negative three

and he goes oh well then you're doing this all wrong that's what you mean he goes if you're having a massive heart attack you're supposed to be in pain as i'm having a massive heart attack he goes you sure are right now you don't't know that. And I was like, no, nobody said anything. It's the first time he was communicated to me in the emergency room where I was like, what the, and he goes, uh,

so we're going to move fast. Cause it's what I think it is. We got to get there as quickly as possible. So I'll see you upstairs. And he leaves. And another guy comes in with a bucket, a razor. And he goes,

uh, okay. In order for the doctor to get up to your heart, we got to go through your groin. So I'm going to need to shave your groin. So can you take off your jorts? And so I take off my jean shorts and then I leave my underwear on because I'm like, I take my underwear off in the emergency room. Dick out in the emergency room.

Like I'm seeing I've been in the emergency room before with other people. And it's a mess. And once you're done looking at the person you're there with, once they're or whatever the fuck once you look around you're like oh my god people in various states of undress and whatnot can't help it's emergency room so i'm sitting there going i fucking take my underwear off like that forget it like all i need is one person with a fucking cell phone camera be like silent bob's dick and i'm ruined for life so i'd say the guy goes you gotta take your underwear off and i was like uh why and he goes because i gotta shave your groin and i said well what's the groin to you and he goes it's where

your leg meets your body what are you talking about i was like all right well if that's the case i'll pull my underwear to the side and you just get in there and do virgin smoothie or landing strip you're tearing on death and you're negotiating over like because i was ashamed of my dick like i was got by he goes what are you doing what are you talking i said look man i got a small dick i got body shame issues and shit obviously and that man just told me i had a heart attack and if you make me take off my underwear in front of all these people i will have a second heart attack and that's going to be on you man so let's do this and he goes fine just pull him over so pull my underwear over

and he shaves both sides i can't believe you you won that battle it was i think they were just like how amusing well he's gonna die anyway let's go so they got me upstairs and the first thing uh dr laden i'm seven they brought me in he goes why is he still wearing his underwear and the guy who pushed me and goes he's got a story he's got body shame issues and i said yeah doc my dick is real small and the doctor goes we ain't got time for this and he yanks my fucking underwear off my body like i'm a heroine in a 70s porn movie and stuff so i was trying to fight to keep my hockey jersey on because hockey jersey is like a moo moo and it covers everything and stuff so i was like if i can keep my jersey i'll cover my dick at least even if he's going up my groin he

don't need to see my dick none of these people need to see my dick so i'm like uh he's like take that shirt off him and i go no i need that man this is my lucky hockey jersey like you know even though i'm drugged i didn't know this i was drugged at this point uh they started feeding me fentanyl they have to because they're gonna fucking puncture your body and your groin cut a hole into you and then feed a fucking tube up your femoral artery so naturally they don't want you feeling anything. The moment they start this shit, I'd be like, fuck you. So they drug you with fentanyl. I didn't know this.

So I think I'm being keen and clever and shit, like coming up with a lie about having to wear my fucking hockey jersey and shit because it's my lucky hockey jersey. And really, I was drugged, and I didn't know that until after I was coming out of the operating room. My wife was just like, are you okay? And I said, you know what? If that's a heart attack, man, I'll take fucking five more. That was easy, man. And she goes, you must be on drugs. I was like, no, they didn't give me any drugs whatsoever. I was sober that whole time. And she said,

the doctor was behind me and he goes, he's on a lot of fentanyl like right now. So they're pumping me full fentanyl. And even though I was drugged, I was like, I got to keep this Jersey on. It's my lucky hockey jersey. And the doctor's like, if it's so lucky, why are you having a heart attack? Get that off. And they took off all my clothes and I was laying there. I was like, you have your will of me. That was, I was more scared of than the heart attack. I've been a parent for two decades, helping raise two young men to maturity. And I thought I had a decent handle on the dad thing, but I gotta tell you,

nothing could prepare me for teenage daughters. So I brought in the expert, Lisa DeMore, PhD, a teen whisperer par excellence. Lisa is a Yale-educated psychotherapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology, best known for her New York Times bestselling books, Untangled and Under Pressure. Here's a clip from episode 438, a conversation I reflect upon almost daily. 13-year-olds, right, are in this extremely unique developmental box where their brains are wildly

dysregulated, you know, where they're very gawky. They're very easily overtaken by emotion as a function of neurological development. They are caught in this moment where their emotion centers have been upgraded, but their perspective maintaining centers have not been upgraded. And so if they become upset, the whole system crashes. And what my work feels like my main aim is so that parents know the developmental box they're in. So when their 13 year old walks in the door and they say one word and the kid loses it, or, you know, has some sort of meltdown, they can actually have the

developmental perspective of, oh, oh, okay, they're having a meltdown because neurologically they can't. It's not that this is about something about me. And then to try to offer some strategies for getting through that moment. But, you know, so I would say what I aim, you know, hopefully is that, you know, I think the work that psychologists can do is the more we can just give parents a perspective that is neutral, developmental. 12-year-olds are like this, 13-year-olds are like this, 14-year-olds are like that. It doesn't always map perfectly onto your own kids' ages. Then parents can adjust.

But kids are a moving target, right? And unless you have a good memory for your own adolescence or good access to developmental information, it's very easy to take them at face value. But that's not really appropriate. But the more you can do that, then you can sort of uncouple from the emotional trigger and depersonalize it, right? We all have our buttons. Yeah. And our kids know where those buttons are and they know how to push them. And, you know, it's taken a lot of work on my part, a lot of meditation and mindfulness work and work that I do in recovery to just be able to have the capacity, the facility

to pause when agitated and not just react and get emotional about something, but just, when agitated and not just react and get emotional about something, but just take a beat, take a moment and try to cogitate the neutral best next thing to say or do. I think that's awesome. That's one reaction. I also want parents to know it's okay to get mad at your kids, you know, not in a mean, nasty way. But I think, you know, if you don't always have the wherewithal to not react, I think another way to look at those moments is to think, you know, no one's going to ever think our learning at home that if you're a jerk, people aren't going to like it. And they're going to get angry sometimes or they're not going to want to be with you. And so in my own parenting, I remember when I had toddlers, I had two daughters, I would get mad.

Eventually toddlers make you really mad, right? would get mad. Eventually, toddlers make you really mad, right? And I learned to say to my daughters, you know what? I'm actually getting mad, right? I'm asking you repeatedly to do this thing, and I know I'm being patient, but I want you to know I'm getting mad, and I'm going to start to be mad if this goes on. And then if they continued to be annoying, then when I got mad, I felt like you had fear warning right like so it wasn't out of the blue um so i think there's a place for anger in family life um if a kid has really been incredibly provocative and the parent is predictable right and they know it's coming i also think there's a lot of value in apologizing to kids when we

screw up right so say we blow it right and and they didn't have it coming. To me, there's a lot of power and there's a lot of beautiful research on this about rupture and repair, right? There's a lot that happens in a relationship when a parent comes back to a teenager and says, you know what? I overreacted and I owe you an apology and I am sorry. There's a real growth that happens when parents can do that. What parents can't do is they can't keep doing it repeatedly, right? I mean, that's where it can fall apart. But I'm definitely sort of the brand of psychologist who feels like, let me give you five options for how to react to a kid because it's going to depend on so many contextual factors. So sometimes you may be able to be reserved. Sometimes you might just get mad and they shouldn't be surprised

because they always know that's going to get you going. And sometimes they didn't have a comment and you're going to apologize. But they all are available. And in the course of the millions of interactions we're going to have, we're going to need them all. Yeah. millions of interactions we're going to have. We're going to need them all. Yeah. And those millions of interactions, there's a scientific way of kind of approaching that, and then there's a very kind of intuition-based, artistic way of approaching. It's like this dance,

right? And you have this beautiful analogy of the swimming pool that I think kind of encapsulates that. Can you kind of elaborate on that? Sure, sure. So, this is an untangled, and it grew out of my observation that, you know, teenagers work to become independent. That's their job. The piece that seems to really get parents is that they don't become just slightly more independent each day. You know, they don't just become a little bit further and more autonomous each day. That a typical pattern is a little bit further and more autonomous each day. That a typical pattern is that you haven't heard from your teenager for three days, right? Or she's barely acknowledged your existence and then something goes wrong,

right? And she's very, very upset. And so then she comes seeking the parent, right? And it may be that she's needing physical comfort or just wants to talk and wants to share things. It is not unusual in these moments where there is actually a physical, like they're draping themselves on you or like cuddling near. Okay. So the girl may be upset. I know the parents thrilled, right? The parents like, ah, you know, like loving it, absolutely loving it. And then, and then she's gone again. Right. And so in observing this happening in families, the metaphor I came up with, and it's slightly belabored, but it does work really well, is that the girl is like a swimmer, and the water is the world, and the parents are the wall that hold the whole thing together. They're the pool. And swimmers want to be out in the water, right? I mean, they want to be out in the pool, and they want to be with other swimmers. They want to be

gaining strength. And I keep thinking about this metaphor. When you're in the middle of the pool, you're not thinking about the edge of the pool. Like, that's the furthest from your mind, right? But then they get dunked or they get exhausted or something. And they have that feeling, you know, I think all of us maybe can remember this from swimming lessons where they're like, I'm drowning, I'm drowning, right? So they come scrambling for the wall, which is the parent. And they cling to the parent to get their breath back. Okay, so the parent is loving it. I think that usually what happens for teenagers is they do have that swimming pool lesson experience where they're like, oh wait, nevermind, I'm fine. And so then-

Goodbye. Goodbye. But I think actually it becomes a pretty abrupt goodbye because they're like, I'm fine. And oh my God, I'm in my mother's bed. This is so awkward. So they shove off, right? They push off in a pretty abrupt way. So they may say, and I love this about teenage girls, even my own, like that margin of like mean but not punishable commentary, you know, that they make. So they may say like, wait, did you wear that today?

Like ow, you know, or something like that. Just with like a razor blade precision. Yes, yes. And so the parents repeated experiences, I have no idea where you are. Oh my God, you're letting me cuddle you. You just kicked me in the stomach, right? And it's sort of on repeat. And so what I wrote that up for is not because I'm like, and so here's the magic solution to prevent this.

Because you actually cannot prevent this. And I actually don't want you to prevent this. Though I don't think your kid should be rude. If they say something really rude, you can say, that's rude. We don't talk like that. What I wanted was for parents, and this is exactly what we were talking about, to know this gore. This is what's happening. This is not meant as a personal rejection. Your daughter can breathe again. Now she's on, you know, to her next thing. And so what my aim in offering parents this metaphor was so that they would savor

when they did get to have those moments. Okay, this next guy truly knows no limits. His name is Colin O'Brady. He's a good friend, and he's an absolute beast, an elite adventure athlete with four world records to his name. latest jaw-dropping feat of endurance and sheer human will, pulling a 300-pound sled 932 miles for 54 days straight to become the very first person in history to cross the continent of Antarctica solo and unsupported. Here's an excerpt from episode 439 in which he shares his experience, excerpt from episode 439 in which he shares his experience, lessons learned along the way, and how we can apply his wisdom to our own daily lives. It was this beautiful sunny day, actually, this kind of calm day where I had these tears of joy rolling down my face. It was actually one of my best moments. It was kind of like, oh,

like I made it. Only 23 people I think have ever done solo unsupported and unassisted from the coast to the South Pole, 23, 24 in history. And so just doing that was like an amazing accomplishment. And so like, it's a big moment for me. And I'm like, oh, I've kind of, you know, I'm feeling good about this. And then the next day I just get lit up in this storm. And the next seven or eight days, like the storms had lasted previous to this about one or two days.

And then all of a sudden this storm got seven, you know, six days, seven days, eight days. I find myself, you know, kind of picking through this Sastrugi, you know, day 48, eight days in this battle with this storm. The wind hasn't been any lower than 40, 50 mile per hour. It was just brutal conditions. And I find myself falling like really bad. So I actually fall on the ground, hit the ground super hard. And I remember this one moment I fall into this big hole and my rope on my harness pulls tight. And then my sled starts sliding towards me. And I'm in this kind of four foot hole. And I see this sled like kind of like maybe kind of fall down on top of me.

It's like I'm looking where my leg is, but like I can't move it because the skis are on the ground. I'm like, wow. Like and it's like teetering. It's like this sled falls on me. It's like broken leg, broken ski in a Sastrugi storm. And then I look down and my skins have ripped off the bottom of one of my skis, which is impossibly hard to get back on in this storm. And I've only gone for one hour. And so I'm like, okay, the only way to get my skins back on is to set up my tent.

So I think to myself, okay, like I should set up my tent right now and then like maybe regroup, but I like, can't just waste the day. Cause I am starting to run or lower on food and certainly, you know, trying to stay in the front of this race. And so I set up my tent and there's this video clip of me where I didn't, I filmed a lot of this stuff. My obviously I filmed it all myself, but I filmed a lot through time and I'm looking in the camera and I'm just going like, I'm sobbing and I'm like, I'm not doing good. Like, I just want to give up. Like, I'm like, so be down in this. And it was just kind of in this moment, you know, two things for me happened in that moment to get out of that headspace, which is another one of my favorite mantras. It's the simple one that a lot of us

have, which is this too shall pass, you know, remembering sort of the impermanence of this moment. But also I had this satellite device that I was pinging to the satellites every 10 minutes that people could track me in real time. That's how the New York times and family and friends and all these school kids through a nonprofit were following along. And they see that I've stopped. And a friend of mine, Blake Brinker, he saw that I stopped and was like, wow, something must not be going well for you. And was checking in. You could send these rudimentary text messages to the satellite device. And he sent a text message and it's a passage from one of my favorite books, which is The Alchemist. And he says, remember the allegory from The Alchemist that you're being

tested by all the lessons you have to go through before finally achieving the ultimate success. And he goes, don't forget when passing, The Alchemist, of course, is about the desert, because it's own kind of desert. And he says, more often than not, people die of thirst when crossing the desert a few minutes before seeing the palm trees on the horizon. And so it was just this reminder of like, yo, like you're in it, like you are getting tested right now. But if you can manage to get back out of this tent, remember that this too shall pass, then you will hopefully get to the other side of this. And sure enough on that day, it was tough,

but just taking my tent up and down in the storm takes an hour, hour and a half. And so I do that, but instead of getting my sleeping bag out, I take my tent down again, fix my skins and get back out and battle through this storm and manage 20 miles that day, which was a pretty solid mileage for me on any given day.

And I think to me, that was both the lowest moment, but also a crux moment where I'm being tested by all of these things. And it would have been, there was a million reasons to quit in that moment. At least maybe not quit the whole project, but quit in that moment. Be like, I'm falling. I'm going to get hurt. My sled's going to fall on me.

My skins are falling off. The storms lasted a week. Like I'm starting to get frostbite on my nose and my cheeks. Like I'm beat up and I still managed to, you know, with the strength of sort of others and that vibration from family and friends and supporters is able to kind of draw some strength and inspiration to keep going. And really kind of the essence of all of this was how much as humans, of course, I'm all alone and this is what I'm, you know, pontificating about, but I'm thinking about the importance of community, the importance that we all have to lean in, to love one another, to really be compassionate, to help, to uplift and support one another and how much stronger we can be when there's that, you know, not this finite level of love, but this infinite love that we can share

with one another and what that can really create in this universe was absolutely spectacular to feel that and be so viscerally connected to that at the end of this journey. And what has it taught you about not only your own capabilities, but about human capabilities in general and potential? You know, I feel like I scratched the surface of this, you know, 11 years ago, and we've talked about this before, but when I was severely burned in this fire in Thailand, I was told I would never walk normally.

And then I recovered from that through the guidance of my mother's love and positivity ultimately. Yeah, and I'm gonna interrupt you really quickly here just to share one reflection on that. We have talked about that and I'm well aware you really quickly here just to share one reflection on that. We have talked about that and I'm well aware of that story from your life, but this is how weird memory works.

In my mind, I had this sense that that had happened way earlier in your life than it actually had. And when I sort of realized like, oh wait, that was 2008. Like that wasn't that long ago, dude. That was only 10 years ago. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I was, I had been a collegiate swimmer before that. I mean, it kind of gone through a big chapter of my life and yeah, it was, you know, took a surfboard and a backpack and scraped together some pennies after college to go travel the world. And I met Jenna at the very beginning of that trip. So that was a net positive for that who ultimately became

of course, this most important person in my life. But not long after that, I found myself in rural Thailand with a kerosene flaming rope wrapped around my legs. My body lit on fire and having to dive into the ocean to extinguish the flames that saved my life, but not before my legs were severely burnt and spent several months in this high hospital being told I would never walk again normally. And in that moment, my mother came. She arrived about the fourth or fifth day and kind of comes to my bedside. And she says like, Colin, like visualize your future, like visualize yourself, you know, being whatever you want to be, you know, your life's not over. And I was just in this deep, tragic, you know, place in my mind and my body and my spirit. And I closed my eyes kind of trying to, you know, placate my mother in some regard. And I pictured myself crossing the line of a triathlon, which is not something I'd ever done. And so I won't get into the whole story, but the, you know,

the next 18 months were kind of learning from that lesson and keeping this sort of fixed goal in my mind of racing this triathlon and ultimately, you know, competing in the Chicago triathlon as an amateur and winning my first, you know, ever triathlon and my first go at it, which was a crazy moment. But the reason I bring that story up, I mean, it's important inflection point in my life, which is, you know, in that moment, I started to feel, I wasn't like, wow, like I'm so amazing. Like I'm so blessed and so good at this.

I was like, wow, like as humans, I believe we all have these reservoirs of untapped potential inside of us and can achieve these extraordinary things when we shift our mindset for the positive, when we're supported by this loving community of infinite love and compassion and positivity, like, wow, like how extraordinary is that? And so that was my first kind of lesson towards that. But I was, you know, 22, 23 years old and I'm kind of the beginning of this journey, which has been the last, you know,

decade of my life in this chapter in Antarctica. Certainly not the last chapter of my life, but the most recent chapter of my life is Antarctica. And to connect to that on such an even 10X or 100X deeper level, which is like, wow, look at what we are capable of myself. I mean, people keep coming back. I do these interviews and things and people want to say like, Colin, are you superhuman? And I'm like, yeah, I'm superhuman. And so are you. So are all of us. us. But it just, I think it just happens how we flex this muscle between our ears, this six inches between our ears. Like what we can do with our minds is extraordinary

and how we can all be connected and uplifting of each other in that sense. And so for me in Antarctica, the lessons learned were yes, about my own potential, but really were resonant, you know, across humanity of what we are all capable when we set our minds to things. And again, I don't think that necessarily anyone wants to walk across Antarctica solo

and unsupported and unaided. I don't blame you for not wanting to do that, but like we have dreams, we have goals and it's so easy to get in our own ways of stopping the progress towards that. And like when I started this whole thing, like, like I said, you know, Jen and I had like no money. We had like a whiteboard on our wall, every reason not to do this. And like, it should be like, yeah, like go get a real job, like grow up, like do something. We're like, no, like what can we do to have positive impact? Let's start a nonprofit. Like let's dare to dream greatly. And like, we started out by like taking out our Mac laptops and be like, well, if we want people on social media to do this, we better know about marketing. I had like 200 Instagram followers,

like my parents and my close friends were Googling like Google, what's the difference between marketing and PR? Like we're basic of all basic questions, you know, but I just got the metrics back on this last project. And we did, you know, as of now it's 1.8 billion media impressions and counting. And I don't say that because like, I care about having like my name in like the press, but because of that, we've created this platform, this ability to share these stories about inspiration, positivity, love, nutrition, health, all the things that I'm passionate about. And I know from you, from having this platform, this ability to share these stories about inspiration, positivity, love, nutrition, health, all the things that I'm passionate about. And I know from you, from having this podcast, it's also a blessing for you to be able to, you know, have this voice,

not because like you want to be rich role, this like famous guy, but because you have this opportunity to share with the world and the resonant positivity that you can put in the world from that is incredibly humbling and meaningful. And I applaud you for it. I mean, you know, lasting impact, that's the juice, right? So what is the lasting impact that, you know, what is the impact that you want this adventure and everything that you're doing

going forward to have? Like, what is the change that you want to see in the world? Yeah, you know, I think that when I've really tried to drill down to this, I, you know, I mentioned this before, like sort of this athlete and arena. And I'm, by the way, I'm a massive sports fan. Like, I, you know, I mentioned this before, like sort of this athlete and arena. And I'm, by the way, I'm a massive sports fan.

Like I'm, you know, I like watching sports as throughout my life. But I think that our sort of knowledge or interest in sports in general, not always the case. I think like the NBC Olympic coverage is a great example of not doing this. But oftentimes the sports are like winning, losing, like this sort of like the zero sum game of like cheering for your team or rooting against the enemy or something like that. But, you know, for me in doing this, it's not so much about that at all. It's about tapping into these sort of universal truths that we all face and encounter, which is like facing obstacles, stepping outside of our comfort zone to grow and being an example of those lessons and showing, you know, showing all the flaws. Like I'm not sitting here going like, yep, I stepped off the plane.

I knew I could beat Lou. He was not, you know, it's like, no, like I like had this huge daunting task of crossing Antarctica. Oh. And by the way, like the most experienced polar explorer in the world, it's also out there beside me, but I was willing to like, give it a shot, which is, I think, emblematic of someone starting a small business, everyone going like, oh, but like, why wouldn't Google or Facebook just like do the same thing? Why would you start with that tech idea? Like that's never going to work. Or, you know, the

person that's like starting a family or has lost a loved one and like just figuring out how to get on through life. And so hopefully like by sharing my story as authentically and really as I can with all the ups and downs and the struggles and the warts and the successes that people can take from that in their own lives, what they will, and really paint their own masterpieces. She is the most dominant and decorated female in the history of obstacle course racing. It's an athletic career. She's balanced against full-time professional duties as a corporate lawyer, and her name is Amelia Boone. Dubbed the Queen of Pain, she's been lauded for her grit and ability to suffer, but her biggest challenge is the courage and the vulnerability that she has summoned to face a 20-year eating disorder and her very public desire to change the way we

talk about an affliction that impacts over 30 million people in the U.S. alone. Here's a clip from our powerful conversation, episode 475. So what is the protocol now? Like, how do you make sure? Because you've been in, you know, treatment centers before and have seen what has happened when you haven't had like active, you know, aftercare and, you know, really made your recovery a life priority. Yeah. Um, you know, that, I mean, I think that's the

greatest unknown. Um, and that's, so you set up, I set up as much guardrails and support as I could, um, coming back here. Um, I started work initially part-time and then I was still doing more like an intensive outpatient. So it was kind of doing the two and then you, so you slowly step down. And then right now I have kind of an outpatient team and then really just setting up a support network. Um, and for me, I have a great support network, but it's making sure that I actually use it. Um, and actually reaching out and being, saying like, hey, I need help. And this thing that we talked a lot about at treatment is outing yourself and just saying like,

hey guys, I have to out myself right now. I'm having really bad disordered thoughts and I just need to tell somebody and put it out there. Cause when I put it out there, then it doesn't hold as much power over me. Yeah, and you have to do that in real time when it's occurring because the tricky thing is when that moment arises when you're staring

at a plate of food and you're thinking about not eating it, it's too late. Then they're like, call somebody. But that train left the station a long time ago, maybe months ago. It's about the daily habit of checking in with people and people who know you and can monitor like, Hey, you're a little off today. What's going on and kind of compelling you to be honest. Yeah, exactly. It's having that support system and network. And, and really for me fully owning that there are some things that I can't be

completely self-reliant on right now, you know, and, and that's a bitter pill to swallow for somebody who likes to be fully self-reliant. But there have been times in, in coming back to the Bay area and coming back to work where I realized like, I need to set up, like, I need to set up dinners with folks right now to like go out and eat with them because it's better. I do much better in like a social scenario than that, than when I'm by myself, you know? Right. Well, now you're publicly on the hook. I know. Well, so now I have the entire world as accountability. So it's a double, I mean, it's a double-edged sword because I did have some people reach out to me and say, oh, well now everybody's watching me. You can't screw up. And all of a sudden my heart was like, oh my God, I'm human. I'm going to screw up. I've screwed up. Like we're all going to have screw ups. And I think it's, you know, with, with alcohol or drugs, it's very easy to name your screw ups because it's like,

I did the substance or I didn't do the substance. Food, it's very, very slippery. It's not binary. No, it's very, it's like, did I restrict that meal a little? Or did I, am I really eating, you know? So you gotta really be in touch with yourself and, you know, be willing to have that kind of honest

dialogue going on all the time. Like it's about your intentions as much as anything else, right? Right, but you know, the, the, the authenticity and the vulnerability with which you, you know, kind of have offered this up to the world, I think is honorable and, um, and, and super courageous. And I don't say that in a perfunctory or light way. Like it was, I know it was a move that like you, you know, had a lot of consternation about. Like should I, you know, should I talk publicly about this? You don't have to.

You have no obligation to. You made that decision. I was on the, I went to the website for Opal because I wanted to see what this organization was about. And they had like a, there's like a slogan on the homepage that is beauty in imperfection and authenticity. And that's lovely, right? Because we're all imperfect. And I think the path towards being that fully integrated person who's not living with that kind of dissonance requires, you know, the courage to be authentic in real time, you know, and to be human and to be, you know, exposed on some level. And, you know, I can't imagine what it felt like after you wrote that blog post and you like hit,

you know, publish on it, like walk me through that. It was actually the most freeing experience that I've ever had. I sat down and I bawled my eyes out for the next half an hour or so. As you were writing it or after you published it? After I published it. Just the catharsis. The catharsis. Because I had been writing it over a span of... I left treatment at the end of June. And then so it took took me like a few weeks to kind of wrap my brain around it. Um, and, um, I was so anxious. I remember that day before I, um, was like going to publish it. Um, it was all done. It was sitting, it was ready to go. And I remember actually going to the pool to swim that morning. And then just like, it was like the best one my life because it was just like anxiety or something like that i don't know fueled but um in in putting

it out there it finally i just i cried because it was just i finally felt true to myself um and what was the motivation behind doing that honestly a lot of it I hate to say that there was a selfish motivation because it was it was almost a an alignment for myself yeah you know people are like oh would you were you you're so great you're inspiring other people and I'm like that's not the discomfort of living in that kind of dissonance becomes intolerable. Exactly. And I can't say why exactly I felt the need to out it to the entire world as opposed to just,

because I understand there are portions of yourself that you can keep close in hand. You don't have to let everybody know your dirty laundry. Um, but for me, it was very important to have that be a part of my story considering I've been so open and vulnerable, um, about many other things, but not this. And then that kind of selectiveness didn't sit well with me. Right. Um, and just to be able to be, feel free. I felt very, very free after I published it. And I went for a run the next day and I was like, I was the most just free feeling.

And then people started giving me negative feedback and then that went away. But I'm joking. Well, I mean, first of all- The initial 24 hours was great. I don't know. I'm sure, well, look, first of all, shame can't survive the light, right?

So whatever shame you were harboring, the only way out of that is to do exactly what you did. And I'm sure there's trolls out there or whatever, but like all I saw was this overwhelming, like outpouring of like love and support. Like it was like, it was like a viral moment in the endurance sports world. I did, I honestly will say I expected a reaction.

I did not expect that type of attention to it. And I'm blown away in the best way possible. I mean, I, I was, it was amazing. Like, I mean, I get kind of like choked up thinking about it because people were so supportive, um, and so great. I'm still like sorting through emails to respond to people. Um, and I think for me, it was very important to talk about it to you at a time where I am not recovered. Um, and, um, and that was, that was, that's a bit tough. Cause I think that you see so many people talk about their disorders in the past or their addictions in the past, but it comes from a recovered perspective. And I got a lot of feedback saying, thank you for being open before you're there.

Because it's not as simple as that. And I go back and forth on whether like total freedom is possible. I feel like the voices get quieter, like things like they get easier the further and further like you get into recovery. But I think that you always kind of have to be vigilant. And maybe you can speak to that too. Yeah, I mean, I'm of the mind that there is no recovered. There's recovery. There's being active in your recovery. I would never consider no recovered. There's recovery. There's being active in your recovery.

I would never consider myself recovered. And I had a relapse eight years ago after I'd been sober for 13 years. I'm very aware of how fragile it is and how it requires constant attention and focus. And that's not to say that, you know, your situation is the same, you know, it's different. But I would be curious about like, is there a sense like that there is a recovered when it comes to relationship with food? I just

feel like that impulse is always there and keeping it at bay, you know, is important. And there's tools for doing that. But to fall under the belief that it could disappear altogether and never reappear I think is dangerous. Yeah, I think there's different mindsets. I think some people think that if you don't believe that fully recovered is possible, then, you know, you're never going to get there. Um, but I, maybe this might be more of the unpopular opinion, but I do kind of similarly believe to what you do is that, you know, like you can be in a very, very good place of recovery,

but you still need to be mindful of things. And especially the longer, you know, like this has been 20 years of my life. Um, and a lot of this stuff has become so ingrained and automatic in me. And so it's almost in some ways like exposure therapy and unlearning habits and things like that, that didn't happen overnight, you know? Yeah. And it's all about where you are in the moment. Like my relationship with this is like, what am I doing today? Like where, where is my recovery? Like in the middle of this experience that we're having right now, because I know people with 30 days of sobriety who like are super sober. And I know people who've been sober for 35 years who are out of their

minds. Right. They may not drink, but they don't have emotional sobriety, which is really kind of like where there's no destination for that because you can always iterate and improve on who you are as a human being. So it's less about where are my cravings for alcohol right now than it is about what's up with my character defects. You know what I mean? I like being married to my wife like i i don't want her to leave like so i i have to like be on top of this shit it's

funny when as soon as as soon as i started to realize that like the food was no longer like the the scary issue and i was like god now i have to work on myself right it's like now i have to like kind of like underpin that's the whole thing that is the universe is driving you like this is this is all about that right and i and i think my and my big thing is that i i'm a thinker um and i've always like no no no i know my feelings for so many years i was really good at thinking about my feelings like really really good at like thinking about my feelings but not actually like feeling anything and And I think that actually in our society, we prize a lot of thinking over feeling, um, you know, a lot of people follow like the stoic, like

philosophies and things like that. And, and, um, once I finally started to like tap into what am I feeling right now? And like, then just like not even, not even assigning, like not assigning judgments to that, but then just actually like being like feelings are valid too. It doesn't all have to come from the mind. Chase Jarvis is one of the most influential and award-winning photographers of the last decade. And I think it's fair to say that this host of the Chase Jarvis Live Show and the founder of Creative Live, the world's largest live streaming education company,

is also a bit of an authority on the creative process, which he distills in his marvelous new book, Creative Calling. No better way to close out this episode than by sharing Chase's thoughts on creativity, which isn't reserved for the talented select few, but which is in fact an essential aspect of being human. Our culture has shifted and changed. The gatekeepers are gone.

The tools of creativity are more accessible than ever. There's a democratization of this universe that didn't exist back then that I think has stimulated and motivated and inspired a lot of people to think about creativity more broadly. You nailed it. And whether that means quitting your job to be an artist or just finding a hobby or like, you know, being intentional about the images you put on Instagram. These are all aspects of creativity. And, and, and really what you've done is brought in the aperture on what creativity means while also underscoring the importance of it in everyday life for everybody, no matter who you are. If you took that away, I am done. I am out. This podcast is over. No, that's exactly, literally you just sort of, you know, I don't even need to introduce the book because that is the ethos behind the book that was, you know, specifically broadening the aperture on creativity. Because right now there's people

going, well, I don't know if I'm not really identify as a creator. I'm an attorney or I'm an accountant or I'm whoever's listening. And it's like, no, no, no, this is exactly why you, and if you're, if you're a a creator you identify as that great this is like right in your sweet spot but there's a whole universe of people who are what i call creative curious that understand that there's some power there that i can't kind of like the je ne sais quoi i don't know how to grab onto it and i want to understand that a little bit more and when you broaden that definition of what creativity is which to me is part of the challenge that we've had historically with how art and creativity have been viewed in our culture. When you broaden the aperture a little

bit, you can all of a sudden sink your teeth into it and find immense and powerful meaning. Yeah. I think historically the word creative or creativity isn't necessarily pejorative, but it's exclusionary. People either identify with that or they don't or they're scared of it. And in truth, it is part and parcel of what makes us human. It is a universal aspect of the condition of being in one of these bodies.

Yeah, literally we are creating machines. And that's part of like expanding the definition to understand that, wait a minute, you know, my decisions on which how to get to your house today, do I go this way or that way? The what I, you know, decide to do with my day and my time on a on a minute by minute basis, but also on a life scale basis, like those are all wickedly, wildly creative acts that have been discarded into like you know if you're thinking of them in neural pathways just like the base neural pathway that you always go but there's an opportunity for in all of those places to do something different and when you start to realize that this creativity in small daily doses is the same exact muscle that we use to create our life. It's just creativity, different scale. Your head starts to go like, okay, I need to pay attention here. Right. Well, so then if I was to ask you how you define creativity, what is the response to that?

It's such a, the way that I approach it is so simple. It might be painful for some people, but it's the act of putting two things that might not have gone together just a moment ago of putting those two things together to create something new and useful so um it is a very broad definition but that's to me what actually makes the book really relevant because there are people like this this is not about changing your lifestyle. This is not about moving to Paris and wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. It can be about that. If that's your deal. Totally. It can be, but it's also, it doesn't have to be about a new set of friends. Instead, it's a new way of operating. It's a new way of seeing what's in front of you. And, you know, just at a super top level,

it's like I operate from the principle that A, every person is creative. That it's the thing that separates us from every other species on the planet. And it's fun. I'll just walk into any first grade classroom, right? Who wants to come up to the front of the room and draw me a picture?

Every hand goes up. And then do the same thing with the sixth grade class and then a ninth grade class. And you see that we're, this is a thing that is innate and we're training it out of us. So if that's principle one, principle two, sorry, one is that there's creativity in every person. Two is that creativity is a muscle. It's a habit, not a skill. It's a process, not a product. It's a muscle. And I guess Maya Angelou said it well, like the more you use, the more you have. Just think about training or anything else, right? So it becomes more available to us. And then if you follow one and two, the simple argument number three is, so then all these small creative acts that we do every day, yes, playing the guitar,

making a meal, building a family, um, writing code. Yes. Those things are literally the things that are going to give you the insight that you have agency over creativity with a capital C, like creating the arc of your life. So to me though, like it, from a very simple definition, you just have to make a simple three-step argument, and all of a sudden you're at this, like, I need to pay attention. Yeah. That creativity is a non-depleting, renewable resource, that it's not something that certain people are struck with, but that they cultivate through a deliberate and intentional practice over time. Yeah. That is divorced from the results of it

and all about the process of doing. You've got it. Again, I'm out of here. This is like amazing. I think you say in the book, like it's not fake it till you make it, it's make it till you make it. So the process of being a maker

in whatever form that is for you. Yeah. And when you think about it, like let's talk about it away from the sort of small C creativity of making a meal or building a business or whatever, and talk about it on the life scale. The people that you are inspired by, that you moved by, that you're connected to, that you admire, their lives were created intentionally. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they created the puzzle that is their life. And they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed, and it's created. It's not just you just

fell into this thing one day. And so when you start to look at creativity with that sort of capital C on the life arc, you're like, who do I am? And it doesn't need to be someone famous or fancy on the internet or, or some, you know, well-known entrepreneur or artist. It can be your next door neighbor that lives in amazing integrity. And, and they have a, a mindfulness about them that you really like, that's not on accident. That was created. That person set out with a vision for themselves and slowly but surely got there. There was no overnight.

There was no, it was a creative process. And that's available to you. And the only way you learn is through practice. And this is why I advocate action over intellect. Like if you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move, like that's not how it happens. You make a lot of little imperfect moves. You learn a little bit of a lesson and then you move on just trying to make the same mistake more than, you know, one or two times, ideally one. But it's the action, it's the doing that actually creates the learning.

It's great to get information from the internet or your mentor or whomever, but learning, like actually doing that part is incredibly valuable. What needs to be the takeaway from this talk is whether you are all in on this or you're just deciding if you're going to put your toe in the water, amazing time. And it just so happens that this corresponds with, it is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe. Because whatever you were sold as safe, now that's beige, it's vanilla. It's not like you'll blend in in a good way. It's you're leaving so much on the table in terms of identity, earning power, connection with other people, vulnerability, authenticity. It's the equivalent of not participating.

What do you guys think? I think that was proof positive that this has indeed been an incredible year. I really hope you guys enjoyed that look in the rear view. Links to all the full episodes and the social media accounts for all the guests excerpted today can be found in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Part two with a bunch more awesome excerpted conversations will be up later in the week, late Sunday night, December 29th. So Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. And a reminder that you can watch a version of this recap on YouTube at youtube.com forward slash richroll. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, which really helps new people discover the show.

Tell your friends about your favorite episodes. Share the show on social media. Hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. And you can support us on Patreon at richworld.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing the show. Jessica Miranda for graphics.

Allie Rogers for portraits. DK, David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And as always, theme music by Analema. Appreciate the love, you guys. I will see you back here in a couple days with part two of our best of 2019. Until then, relax. It's going to be fine. It's okay to take a break. It's okay to pause when agitated and try to enjoy the holidays. Peace. Namaste. Thank you.