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

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

Welcome to Part II of our 7th annual Best of the RRP Anthology — our way of taking a moment to reflect on the past twelve months by revisiting the year's most compelling podcast guests. It's been an honor to engage with so many extraordinary people over the course of 2019. Reviewing the year in conversation brought powerful new insights -- a reminder that these evergreen exchanges continue to inspire and inform. For long-time listeners, my intention is to launch you into 2020 with renewed vigor. If you're new to the show, my hope is that this anthology will stir you to peruse the back catalog and check out episodes you may have missed. Links to the full episodes excerpted in this anthology are listed in the below show notes. Thank you for taking this journey with me. I appreciate you. I love you. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube.  Here's to an extraordinary 2020. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich

If I surrender, okay, that's the first thing. If I go, all right, I do want to change. I do not want to have this body. I do not want to have this job. I do not want to have these feelings about my partner. I don't want to feel like I'm an inadequate father. Once I come to that point of I've got a problem and my life's unmanageable, then am I ready to come to believe that I can be restored to sanity, that it is possible?

I like the optimism of the program, that the program assumes that it's possible to be happy, not like it's not some sort of Protestant, we are born to suffer, suffering is good, work hard, flagellate, you know. I can see how that idea enters because the death of self, the death of the individual, the flagellation, the mortification of the flesh, the loss of the individual does sound a lot like, you know, tear yourself apart. But I like the bliss of Hinduism. I like the bliss of the Vedas. I like the love, the voluptuousness, the senses. I don't want to become passionless. For me, the journey I'm continually trying to make is that there's a macro journey of how can the unenlightened man become enlightened? And then how do I,

moment to moment, when I re-engage with, oh, I want this, I want these people to approve of me, I want that to happen, how do I get back? If I'm startled or suddenly fearful or suddenly full of desire, how do I transition back to it? So I'm continually dealing with that voice. That's Russell Brand, and this is part two of our very special Best of 2019 edition of the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's happening? Greetings. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate that.

Welcome or welcome back. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Thanks for listening, for subscribing, spreading the word, all the good stuff. I hope you guys had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or whatever holiday you may choose to celebrate this time of year. Did you listen to our part one recap? How did you like it? It's pretty great, right? I know. Well, I promise you part two will not disappoint. Final thing, compiling these best of episodes is really tricky and difficult. It's just so hard to choose amongst my babies. I'd

love to include all the guests in this because I love all of them. Every single one of them has been a gift. We did the best we could. So please know that if I left out one of your favorites, I'm sorry. It really does break my heart to leave anybody out, but we can't include everyone. Anyway, as I said, these two shows are special to me. Simply put, they are my love letter to all of you guys, my way of saying thank you, I appreciate you, I recognize you, I believe in positive change, I believe in you, and I believe in the power we all have

to do and be better in every single moment, especially as we kind of wrap our heads around moving into the new year. So together, let's step into our best, most authentic selves and let's get into it. I think I want to kick things off with the incomparable wit and wisdom of the most singular actor, comedian, turned modern mystic and under the skin podcast host russell brand a dream guest if there ever was one excerpted from episode 448 here's a clip from our confab on life love spirituality meditation and his latest bestseller mentors

for me the journey i'm continually trying to make is that there's a macro journey of how can the unenlightened man become enlightened? And then how do I, moment to moment, when I re-engage with, oh, I want this, I want these people to approve of me, I want that to happen, how do I get back? If I'm startled or suddenly fearful or suddenly full of desire, how do I transition back to it? So I'm continually dealing with that voice. Yeah. Well, it's the hero's journey and there's something about your innate humanity and your willingness to be vulnerable in the storytelling matched with like this facility for language that you have that makes it very compelling. And then you'll surprisingly kind of zing people every once in a while with a paragraph about like,

here's how you can do this too. But it's done in such a way where you don't really feel like you're being preached to in any way because you're caught up in the storytelling itself and the humanity of it. Because I don't like being told what to do. I've never liked it. Who does?

And yet there is a whole massive industry built around these books that are telling people what to do. I've never liked it. Who does? And yet there is a whole massive industry built around these books that are telling people what to do and people love reading them and buying them. But I question whether they're effective. I think people read these books, a very small percentage of them take that wisdom and put it into action. But I think a lot of people just feel good about buying them and maybe feel a little bit better about reading them. And then it becomes this sort of placebo that- You might be right, except placebos can be effective.

Sometimes they work, correct. Yeah. But like, you see, you've made a transition in your life and it's fucking hard, isn't it? To sort of go, right, I'm not gonna be, I'm going to be fit. I am going to put myself through physical trauma or stress. Yeah, and so when somebody comes to you and says, "'Russell, tell me how you did this,'

or, "'How do I go from here to there?'' And what they want is a distilled, six point plan that they can execute on. And life doesn't work that way. And it's through the storytelling, the humanity that we can connect with something that can live within us that has staying power, that resonates, that we will remember a year

or five or 10 years later, I think. Yes, I agree with that. I believe that, but how to frame it again within the 12 steps, which is how I, you know, again, like it is robust. I feel like it works. Like that if I'm, if I surrender, okay, that's the first thing. If I go, all right, I do want to change. I do not want to have this body.

I do not want to have this job. I do not want to have these feelings about my partner. I don't want to feel like I'm an inadequate father. father you know once i recognize once i come to that point of i've got a problem in my life's unmanageable then am i ready to come to believe that i can be restored to sanity that is possible i like the optimism of the program that the program assumes that it is possible to be happy not like it's not some sort of protestant we are born to suffer suffering is good work hard flagellate you know because i feel that you know that i can see how that idea enters because the death of self the death of the individual the flagellation the mortification

of the flesh the loss of the individual does sound a lot like you know tear yourself apart but i like the bliss of hinduism i like the bliss of the vedas i like the love the voluptuousness the senses i don't want to become passionless i don't think i don't you know when i meet like you know you meet enlightened people sometimes. I like the mischievous dudes that are on your wall back in your house. Because when you meet people, well, I've transcended to another. Come on, let's get it. Or the self-proclaimed enlightened person that just hugs you a little bit too long.

A bit too much staring and a bit too much hugging. Yes, yeah. There's more to this than staring and hugging. I know, right? Although staring and hugging are part of it. Like the repronosh who has to take it out into the world, right? And actually fucking live it. That's what's good about that particular book is the way that he's saying,

oh my God, I've been preparing for this my whole life. Now I'm on this train. I'm like, these people fucking stink. And he goes, I have to remind myself. Amateur. Spiritual amateur. Come on, this is it. If you can't work it on a train,

how are you going to work it on the next plane? But like he's saying, I have to remind myself these people have got a birth and a death and that they're the same as me. It just shows you how these principles are challenged in the material world. That's why I think we need that fundamental spiritual belief that we need to somehow have the faith to have the commitment. This is not real. This is not real.

And you can see how people, you know, how that became the kind of, in a sort of secularised Christian cultures, oh, right, yeah, heaven, the afterlife, so that the billionaires can get on with being rich and we just scuttle about in the rubble. No, no no no it's to that someone said to me in like uh one of them like i met with a group in new orleans and this man went to me like he was off to he looked he was such a romantic fellow so bearded and stained

shirt and some sort of naval looking hat and heavy and leathery and he uh went to me that he was off to help the homeless and we were in new orleans so there were no shortage and he goes uh he goes uh yeah the material or this he says this is this is uh just crumbs don't settle for crumbs i want to be at the banquet to recognize that anything that occurs within this limited bandwidth whether it's uh sort of lamborghinis or limitless orgies it's nothing it's taking place on a pinhead, you know, but then we have access to some kaleidoscopic experience, but does take discipline. The Maya. Yeah, bloody thing.

It's gorgeous, isn't it? It is. It's a gorgeous illusion. Intoxicating, you know? It's a delicious tasting lie. I agree with you with the optimism of the steps, but I also appreciate the matter of fact nature of them. It's like, you know, the,

you will have a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. Not like you might, or, you know, it's possible, but like, just do these things and you will have this transformation and it doesn't matter how you feel about it or how much you're questioning it. And the expansion occurs because,

like recovery is littered with people that come in, you came in as an atheist and now you're this like, you're ready to start your own religion basically. Working on that. Yeah, where are we with that? Starting the old cult. The acolytes are everywhere at this point. I don't know, I just need to get the right kind of blanket,

work on that stare and long cuddle and then it's. This is very good for your ego, I would imagine. Oh, that's exactly what I go for. The irony. Yeah. But you feel good on the vegan diet. I feel good on that. And you've been doing the BJJ. I really want to say this to you.

Yeah, I do the BJJ. I love it. But when I like, I love it and I'm not good at it. I'm learning. I'm learning. Don't tell myself negative things. Little Russell needs encouragement and love. I'm learning.

I'm learning, I'm learning. Don't tell myself negative things. Little Russell needs encouragement and love. I'm learning, I'm learning. But today when my wife was putting a new car seat in the car, because the one that's in there, I don't know, it's not comfortable enough for that two-year-old. She's got some specific taste. I thought, I'm going to say to Rich Rolls sometimes how detached I feel from my body. My wife is active.

She is of the earth. She knows how to be. She knows how to do things. Thank fuck, because i'm like some gaseous little poet just floating around commentating you know like when she picks up that car seat she gets it and if you leave me to put the car seat in i'll get oh it's too hard i can't do it oh what's these fucking instructions what do you mean top the top tether strap into the buckle loop i looked at it i went away but that's not how you're wired you know she grounds you but you can you know show her the vision yeah exactly like you need both of that right yeah you met you met julie you can see there's a similar kind of

like yin yang dynamic yeah what is it with you guys i mean i'm much more grounded and practical and rational and she you know she's you know, she's, you know, an ethereal being, you know, and she allows me to expand my, not only my perspective, but my sense of what's possible. She'll say, why don't you look at it from this perspective? And it's something I never would have thought of. And a sense of belief, like a support and a belief in a different reality that she held for us. We've been together for a very long time. Have you? We've gone through a lot. And when we met, we were living completely different lives, but she held this vision that I could not have seen myself.

So, and you, I think you, I would imagine I'm projecting completely, but that you fulfill that role in your own relationship. Yeah, it's the same actually. I mean, in the sense of a vision as in uh imagining and dreaming new spaces yes but it was my wife we met when like you know sort of 11 12 years ago and she knew that we were meant to be together and i knew that i had to try and set world records

for promiscuity we've got to work for these records how did you how did you overcome that like did you just acquiesce over time or what was that process like for you it actually wasn't the promiscuity ultimately that was problematic but it was more difficult codependent relationships with inappropriate partners like in my case just people that i wasn't like i was very attracted to well i after a few relationships like that like after sort of exiting one i felt like ah well to jimmy a mentor said like lee goes you can't keep doing that next time you see the sign pointing in the direction of glamorous amazing relationship maybe don't go that way it's so hard though oh yeah i mean it's so

very alluring the flesh is alluring and like in it that you know we don't it's good we are physical people nothing wrong with the you know unto caesar what is caesar's and all that there's nothing wrong with the bodies and the world and the but you'd knocked on that door enough time i mean you know you know what that avails you yeah and when i reconnected with my wife i felt like oh my god i've been using totally the wrong metric was it what do you mean reconnected you had known her previous? Yeah, we'd known each other for 11 years. We went out when I was about in my early 30s and she was like 20.

Maybe she was even 19, but that sounds worse, doesn't it? But anyway, so then I went off to pursue the records. And then when we got back, we went on sort of one date and on the first date it was like what so what are you and she's like yeah i'm ready to be a parent i'm like yeah me too and that was you know like from then on we sort of took it relatively slowly still but i think that's only four years ago and we're married and we've got two children and i'm like i'm at. I know like the realness of it, the earthness of it. I'm no longer looking to externally acquire happiness.

So to what do you attribute that shift? The program, the program, the ability, because I've known her, that could have happened at any point. You know, I've known her for 10 years, but I just wasn't ready to see that. I wasn't ready to let go of the belief that, no, no, I want to live this kind of life,

I want to be this kind of person. And it's odd, actually, because there is a real superficiality to that sort of romantic and expressive and abundant love, in that when those relationships ended, I was quite able to sort of go, oh, okay. Because there was something about it that was a construct. It was taking place in my consciousness primarily. This relationship was very, very, very deep, very earthed and real.

Like this is a person that I wouldn't want to be without. I wouldn't want to be without this person. So I'd not surrendered to that before. Yeah. And four years now. Yeah. it's good it's a relief it's nice to think that there is nothing like i don't it's nice to have practices i suppose you know i suppose the institution of marriage and coupling and stuff i suppose it works in that it's beautiful to feel you know that idea of like here i am here. That's it. Like my little daughter says, I sit in my seat.

I sit in my seat. I am here. I'm not over there. I'm not looking over there for something else. There isn't some other new magical thing. No other agenda. Being present and in it, but also with enough awareness and personal development to understand that, you know, you're not looking to this partner to complete you. That that's your own personal journey.

That's your connection with your higher power and your, you know, spiritual interior self and your relationship to spirituality in general, right? That that can't be solved through relationship with another human being. No, no. And I think that is the, you know, crux of suffering for a lot of people. It's good to have that. It's good to have some principles of like, you know, so next time I find myself going, Laura, will you do this? Why didn't you do that? I want this. Like, that's that thing that's never going to work you're doing it again and every time I sell it to myself as yeah but though this time I am actually right but really my relationship with other people is an opportunity to be of service

it's not an opportunity to be served she is a fiercely independent singer songwriter musician she's a best-selling author a blog blogger, a playwright, a director, a riveting speaker, a viral TED talker, a crowdfunding mom, an ardent feminist, a fearless activist. The list goes on and on. Her name is Amanda Palmer, and she is iconic. The full package. In episode 459, we convened to talk art, music, activism, and radical compassion.

Here's a slice of that experience. Perfectionism is definitely the enemy of creation. Yeah. And so lately, you know, what I have found is really helpful is I just have these blocks of time. I also have a kid now, so I really have to commit to a block of time because my time is just not my own anymore. It belongs to my family. And I sit down, and instead of vaguely pondering, is this idea really the one that I want to follow? I guess I could,

like, I just have stopped being wishy-washy. And I go with the first thought and I follow it. And I, you know, I really shove perfectionism out the door and I just try to finish the thing. and I just try to finish the thing. And I think there's also a luxury that comes with being an artist who has made a lot of shit. Because once you've made a lot of shit, you're not so precious about each and every little offering because there's thousands of them out there. When you've only offered the world five or 10 songs,

any given song is going to be a huge percentage of your catalog. So you're way more precious about it. But once you've proven yourself time and time again, and you've written hundreds of great songs, like whether or not this next song is the best thing you've ever written, isn't very important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want it to be. You still hope it will be. If you were going to do a second TED Talk though, right? Like, because that was such a sensation, right? It's like that one hit wonder thing. Like, can I repeat that? Can I catch lightning in a bottle again?

Would be probably a different emotional experience. Well, I would never do that TED Talk again. But oh my God, yeah. Give me another. I mean, I've got 10 TED Talks I could do. I'd love to do a TED Talk about patronage and the relationship over time through history and into the future about our lack of imagination around helping each other. I'd love to give a TED Talk about miscarriage.

I'd love to give a TED Talk about childbirth. I'd love to give a TED Talk about the stupid rules around breastfeeding. Like, I could just go on and on and on. I just don't really want to do that right now. Yeah. Well, can we talk about patronage though? We can talk about anything. Yeah. Like I said at the outset, like your relationship with your audience is like something I've never seen before. And it really, and I've heard you speak about this, like you're, how you think about the, how you think about patronage and the relationship is unique,

but it's also more ancient, right? Like what's not functional is the relationship of industry to artist now and how we think about what that exchange looks like. And yours is one of depth over breadth, right? Where the industry kind of is driven by breadth in terms of like, how big is your audience? How many can you sell? And all of that, rather than the intimacy and the connection that you can create with the people that are

super into what you're doing. Sure. Because capitalism, I mean, we're all, what you're doing. Sure. Because capitalism, I mean, we're all, it's just like what's going on with the rest of the country and the problems that we're running into everywhere, which is, it's not about, it's not always about growth. It's not always about being the biggest and the best. And, you know, we've really been fed a painfully unhealthy diet of unsustainable ways of being. And all of that applies to the art world. Elaborate. I mean, I grew up watching MTV. That was my education and what it meant to be a performer and a musician.

You know, I was like raised on at the altar of Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson. And, you know, these massive megastars were, you know, my guiding light, like, that's where you're supposed to head. Be massive. That's what success looks like. I didn't have many models, even in my immediate little community of musicians, just making a living. You know, musicians just helping out their tribe members with, you know, small, hopeful, connective reflections of what life in this town was like, of what we are going through now. And, you know, wind the clock back a little bit, and that's how human beings have been using art and music for thousands of years. This scale thing that we have just been experiencing in this teeny sliver of human time is bananas. Well, we forget, and this is what you reminded me of, is that we forget that art and music really had nothing to do with commerce.

No, and we're never supposed to. Art and music for thousands and thousands and thousands of years of human history were just useful tools of the tribe. We needed it for ritual, for grieving, for transition, for celebration. None of that was about selling shit. It was about doing and being and connecting. And so how do you think we lost that initially? So how do you think we lost that initially? I mean, you get capitalism and money in the mix and things start to get very weird very fast. Yeah.

But we're in this interesting time now where, you know, in the MTV era, look, you either have a video on MTV or you're on the radio or nobody could possibly have any sense of what you were doing. Yeah, it's very locked down. That's all changed. Everything has been disintermediated. The middle man and the gatekeepers are now gone. Everybody can be a creator and distribute their wares worldwide. And the possibility that you can be this massive band, that isn't even really a reality, except for a few acts these days anyway.

Well, that was always true. I mean, and what I have found fascinating is how little things have changed because I think it's foolhardy to say that the, that the, that the gatekeepers are gone. They've just shifted faces and, you know, we still have our mega pop stars they're just you know the gates have just sort of changed materials and you know in this era we still have massive stadium pop stars and giant machines and we you know we just we've just sort of shifted the way those people climb up the ladders and they climb to the top of the mountain, but they still climb to the top of the mountain. You've still got there.

But I think that the infrastructure is still fractured. Like you said in your book, we are the media. That's a radical concept that's also very true and we're still in the very early stages of that, but it's undeniable, you know, with you leading the charge and we're seeing more and more people kind of blaze the path similar to yours, that this is the future. Like finding your tribe and honoring that is the path. Yeah. And I, I mean, I, I adopted the internet really early on as a community tool, but none of us saw any of this stuff coming. You know, none of us back in the, you know, 2000, 2005 era could have forecasted that in 2019, we would be talking about deep fakes and talking about, you know, and looking at a generation of kids who it's very possible will

never trust an image or even a moving image because who knows if that image is really real and their cultural literacy, their media literacy is going to be so different from yours and mine. You know, we grew up in an era where like, if you saw someone saying it on a TV, it was obviously happening. That's not true anymore. Yeah. So, playing that out, what does that look like? Very strange.

I mean, I don't know. And if I had the answer, oh my God, that would be my TED Talk. I don't have the answer. But I do think, for me with music and art, it's always going to circle back to why we needed it in the first place. The platforms will change. Who we trust will change. The middlemen will change. The gatekeepers, the filters will change.

But why we do it and why we need to feel it, that will not change. that will not change. So the universe conspired to once again, allow me to sit down with one of my heroes in episode 479, when actor, director, entrepreneur, and filmmaker, Edward Norton, joined me on the podcast for a deep dive on society, politics, awareness, his work as an environmental and humanitarian activist, and his latest film, Motherless Brooklyn. Here's me with the great Edward Norton. Like I've noticed that you're someone who, you know, feels strongly about your private life and you're not one to go out and do all the talk shows and all that kind of stuff. But you've really embraced in the kind of press junket with this movie, you've embraced the podcast format. You've done a lot of the big shows. And I think it's well

suited to you because it provides space to have a nuanced, mature adult conversation about the things that you care about. And I think that that is part and parcel is reflected in the kind of movies that you like to make, and certainly this movie. Well, thanks. I mean, here's an interesting thing, though. I don't think it's a bad thing that you haven't seen the film, and maybe it'll come with our friends tomorrow night,

and then we can talk about it more. But I actually think it's nice in a funny way today because we're recording this the day that they're putting the film out. Today's opening day. And just knowing what I know about your own work and story, I think it's interesting to talk about it a little bit like this, but not worry about what the film's about per se. Or even the process in making it, because I've been talking about that a fair amount, right? What's more interesting today is a walk in and you've got like David Lynch catching the big fish, which I love, and Ego is the Enemy, which I haven't read. What I think is really fascinating is literally what I'm going through today

that is different from any of these other conversations. And that I think, I think connects more back to things that I'm really interested in about your own, let's call it like tipping point moment of feeling like I need to prior. I mean, I need to shift my priorities. Let's like, if I go real basal,

not I need to get fit or, but just really like I got to shift my priorities is that the funny thing is, is I probably have not ever, I haven't, I've threw myself into this as much as anything I've done on a creative level by simple virtue of the fact that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote it, produced it, directed it, raised all the money for it. It's 20 years in the making. Yeah, it's a long gestation on this one, right?

And I really couldn't get it out of my head. It was really not at a certain point about like the ego of, I want to play this role. It really was, it started to become for me about things that i i wanted to get across that i started feeling actually the very best feeling that you get about a thing which is like it's and this i have talked about but it's the joseph campbell transparency effect it's like this people will be able to see themselves in this they will be able to see us in this they'll be reminded they'll be able to see echoes of the now but also like truths about the past and how we got where we are and and even just on a personal level

reconnect with empathy which is i think really really important right now um but mostly i just it mostly i just wanted to i get stubborn about not completing a thing. And I really wanted to complete it. And so I did. And so I've thrown myself out there to talk about it like way more than I generally do or want to. Because I really do think it's better for people to figure stuff out on their own. However, here's the really interesting thing today, which is, I kind of was intimating this to you in the kitchen, but the funny thing is, for every form of cultivation, we didn't have, there's not a ton of financial support behind putting it out.

and we didn't have, there's, it's not a ton of financial support behind putting it out. They've done a good job, but it's just not the kind of film that, if you throw $100 million in marketing in a film like this, you're gonna lose 50 million bucks. You know, that's just the way it is. So I don't expect that. So I've tried to lean into it.

But what's really interesting is, I know for sure already today that it's not gonna blow blow the doors off it's not going to be some it's not only not going to be some record weekend it's not those things it'll be soft like it'll be it'll be less than than people hoped it would do in an opening weekend right so this is what we're talking about is it's, in almost every framework, it's not only not relevant to what I was trying to do when I did it, but I actually know now from experience on film specifically that the very best things I've done, and I mean, the stuff I've been nominated for Oscars for, the stuff that I haven't, but that people will almost ubiquitously call cultural touchstones, like Fight Club, or American History X, or the 25th Hour, or none of which got any awards,

or anything like that, but are generally the first things named if people say these things, right? Every single one of those. You've been down this road many times. When I say down this road, what I mean is considered a financial failure in the initial assessment of the matrix of like measuring things by the amount of initial box office they do, right? But not by the main metric or the most important metric, which is, did we do what we set out to do? Yes.

Did we say what we wanted to say? Yes. Are we, the team that created this thing, satisfied that we accomplished what we, you know, set out to do? Absolutely. But what I'm saying is what's fascinating to walk in and see this book is I have been through it. Like, I've been through it. I've actually experienced the very rare satisfaction of going through the feeling of disappointment. Like when Fight Club came out,

we all thought we made a ass kicker of a film. Which you did. Right, but it came out and everybody felt stung. Everybody felt stung by that. It's so hard to believe that that was the case but i know it was like booed in venice but also it just it just you know the budget the film was like 68 million bucks and i think its total box office in the u.s was under 40 which means the studio took home 20 so you're you're into like deep in the red, not like partially in the red, like deep in the red, right?

That was the era when, not to get business wonky, but the studios still owned the DVDs. And the DVDs on Fight Club actually, in my understanding, ended up making it sort of a profitable enterprise. But it was still like, wow. Yeah. Wow. Like we felt the kind of heat we felt from the people who loved it was like a once in a career. It was like that feeling of like people get it, they love it, they feel so connected to it,

the level of passion. I mean that movie, if you're gen X, if you're a gen X male, I mean that movie was transcendent. There are few movies I go back and watch every single year. And it's one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen in terms of like what I connect with emotionally. And in my opinion, it takes you to a positive place. It takes you through the sexiness of nihilism,

but back out to where he rejects that, he grabs the girl's hand and he says, let's like, let's try this a healthier way. Right. You know what I mean? But there's definitely an embrace of chaos and anarchy. Sure, sure.

On the way, I think, to saving Elaine from the church and running, you know, it's the same as the end of The Graduate. I really believe that. Yeah. But my point is, we went through that, we felt stung. We came out the backside of it. But you knew that was gonna happen going. No, we didn't. No, we didn't.

We felt- But didn't Brad say to you, like, people aren't gonna like this. He did, but you can't, like, this is what I mean about ego. You still go like, God, we thought we made a hit movie. You know what I mean? We thought we made a hit movie.

And it's sort of like in some matrix, it's not even the matrix that we care about. That matrix tagging it as a disappointment reverberates out. It hits you in the head and you go, God, like, like. You question yourself. Yeah, we didn't, we didn't, yeah, that sucks. Like you feel bad about something that in your heart you feel good about, right? And I think, but my point is that even having been through it

when we talk about like the ego being one of the most pernicious addictions it's like i've been through it multiple times like multiple times you know what i mean and this film that i've made it's it's as good as anything i've done like just full stop i know it is and i also you know i've had people michael eric dyson he's a sociologist at georgetown he just full stop. I know it is. And I also, you know, I've had people, Michael Eric Dyson, he's a sociologist at Georgetown. He just wrote a fucking essay on it that hit me out of the blue. I was crying when I read it.

That was the Esquire piece, right? It's an incredible article. And it's partially about the film, but it's also partially about what it inspired in him to think about race in America. And Ken Burns wrote this essay about it that had me, I was on the floor, he's a hero of mine. And I'm like, there's this whole side of me right now

that's like, I did what I said. He couldn't have praised the movie more highly than he did in that Medium article. And there's a big part of me that's like, it's literally like Chinatown. It's like the psychic part that Jake gets in my house, in my head is saying, how much is enough? Like, how much more do you need?

Like, what more could you want? And the answer, the best part of me is for sure, nothing. Like, that's it. That's what you're going for. You're going for activation, pleasure and activation. And is that happening? It's happening. I can feel it.

I can see it. And this will find its level and people will get to it and all these things. and activation. And is that happening? It's happening. I can feel it. I can see it. And this will find its level and people will get to it and all these things. But on a day when the distribution head at Warner Brothers is calling you up and saying, it's going to be a little softer than we want, despite our best efforts. And your brain just slams you. And I don't mean like goes, yeah, okay. But you know, we we gotta hang in there. You're saying all these things, like it literally becomes like a Touretic conversation. You're saying these things and there's a voice that goes,

but yeah, well, we're playing, this plays out on a longer horizon. This is like Daniel Kahneman thinking slow. There's a residue from that, right? But this is what's totally fascinating to me. It's not a residue. It's a big, fucking loud, frustrated side of your head that is the ego and goes,

shit, I wanted everyone else's version of what we want to be fulfilled to. A brilliant writer known for her warmth, courage, and vulnerability, Kelly Corrigan has been dubbed the poet laureate of the ordinary. In episode 467, we talked about finding beauty in the simple things and how to better understand and communicate and connect with the people we care about most. My favorite line that I ever wrote in all these books is the last line of Tell Me More. And it's, you're a profoundly ordinary kid is singing in the shower and you get to be here to hear it. And in the context of that book, which was written in the wake of losing my dad and then losing my good friend, Liz, and giving a eulogy in front of her three kids, eight, 10,

and 12. And then going home and having my kids get in a big fight at the dinner table. And then my daughter kind of storming off and then she was in the shower. And then I heard something and then I went upstairs and then I kind of leaned my ear against the door and I heard all the single ladies, all the single ladies. And it was like, I get to be here. Like I get to listen to this kid singing in the shower and whatever that means for you, that's what it means. But for me, it was like head to toe chills. Like I was so hyper aware, you know how you are after a loss and it fades. And that's partly what tell me more is about too,

is like how difficult it is to kind of hold that clarity and live in that space and not return to your normal crappy self. Who's pissed off about gaining weight or getting a parking ticket. But that moment of standing outside that door was like, Liz will not have this moment. She will not get this moment. She will not listen to her 15-year-old singing Beyonce in the shower. And I'm here. And to be able to be present and aware of the import of that,

which is such a fleeting thing. It's so difficult for us as human beings to hold onto that truth, right? And that is what the book is about. It's sort of like you navigating the aftermath of your father and your friend passing away and grappling with your frustration or perhaps on some level shame for not being able to kind of, you know, maintain that level of gratitude throughout, like constantly having to remind yourself, but defaulting to just the daily grind. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. So the book is built around these 12 things that I feel like we have to be able to say to one another and to ourselves to be adults in the world, to be in permanent relationship. And the first one is the

most unusual. And it's this thing that this mindfulness guy taught me. So I was working at my husband's, I was writing at my husband's startup. It's called Medium. And it's a total class. Is Medium still a startup? No, I guess it's still going it's still going it's still going so ev williams who started it is and you know would let me come and and right there he's very generous and opened the doors to to writers in the area and um so i would come and you know it's like total classic san francisco, like Kombucha Bar, Meatless Mondays, Nap Pods, which I'm pretty sure is like where the millennials are getting it on. And then they had this mindfulness guy, his name's Will Kabat-Zinn, who would be an amazing

guest for you. He's Jon Kabat-Zinn's son, who wrote Wherever You Go, There You Are. And so anyway, he would lead these sessions. So I just like plopped in there right next to And so anyway, he would lead these sessions. So I just like plopped in there right next to Ev as if I was like a real employee. And this guy did this little talk before we meditated about, it's like this. And I didn't totally know what he meant, but I felt like it resonated on that level that like a song lyric might resonate where you wouldn't even want to parse it. You just want to like sit with it and hold it and put it in your wallet. And so I kept thinking about it. And then I actually ended up

in a long conversation with them. And I said, you know, I have these moments where I totally lose track of what matters. And I have, and I have these moments where it's crystal clear. And they're so precious and I want to hold them. And I can't. And he said, it's like this. And he said, when do you lose track? And I said, well, here's an ordinary Monday morning at our house. So I have these two kids and a husband,

and they are eating breakfast at the table, and then they're very busy people. And so they don't have time to put the dishes in the sink, but I do. So I take the dishes over and I'm already like starting to feel steamed about that. And then they're gone. And then I go back to the kitchen table where I serve this like organic food that I buy at a grocery store that really irritates me. And on the kitchen table is a little teeny pile of cut toenails. And that just took me over the edge. The indignity.

The indignity. I mean, do you have cut toenails? Like, have you ever cleaned up somebody's cut toenails? Oh, I've everything. Has everybody cleaned up somebody's cut toenails? Is that what I don't understand about that? Well, it's just, it's just toenails. Oh, I've everything. Has everybody cleaned up? Somebody's cut toenails. Is

that what I don't understand about that? Um, well, it's just, it's just the idea, you know, look, kids at a certain age, it's just, they just, they just do what they do and then they walk away. Yeah. Right. And the implicit message as the parent is always like, oh, okay. So I'm here. I'm the one who's supposed to clean all this up. you. You know what I mean? It's like a daily thing. Yeah. But the only way out, of course, is to realize that it's like this. And if you don't mind, I'll just read the end of this chapter. Because what I was feeling was that, well, after the cut toenail thing, then this UPS guy came who is like aggressively fit, like you fit.

And I am not fit. And I do not exercise. And I do hope that during this conversation today you can persuade me to turn over a new leaf. I think you're doing fine. Oh, it's terrible. It's terrible. I'm going to age so badly. Anyway, put a pin in that. So anyway, the guy comes and he gives me this little envelope

and it's from J. Crew. And then I remember that I bought this t-shirt, this little linen top. And then I realized that like linen has no stretch in it. There's no lycra, but there's lycra in almost everything else. So I don't really know what size I am anymore, you know, because maybe I'm a six, but maybe I'm a 12 because I've been wearing stretchy clothes for like 15 years. There's the size we tell people that we are and then there's the real size that we are. Yeah, your driver's license weight, so to speak.

So anyway, I go upstairs, I put this shirt on and then I literally can't get it off and I have to cut it off with scissors. So I'm fit to be tied. I'm like staring at myself in my new stupid vest in the mirror, and I relax my face. I exhale. I console my reflection.

It's like this, Kelly. This is how it goes. Hidden in the morning's frustrations, like a rattlesnake in the woodpile, is something else. I close my eyes so I can listen for the other thing, the further away, much worse thing in the quiet of my own head. Life ends. I've known this since the summer of 1972 when an ambulance drove away in silence with the old lady down the street who gave out almond joys

on Halloween. But now I've seen mortality do its awful ghosting up up close, twice, and that has changed the context of everything. In the new Zodiac, without Greenie, my dad, without Liz, all terms have been recalibrated. Pain is agony. Bad is fatal. The scale is reset, making it hard for me to reconcile what I've seen with how I live. Liz would have done a week of aggressive bromodomain inhibitors at Cedars-Sinai for one morning of hairballs, eggshells, and toenail clippings. To see her kids become teenagers screaming obscenities at each other in the hall, she'd have given up every organ in her pelvic cavity. Then there's Greeny, who would have told you that life was a carnival. All music and snack stalls, fortune tellers, and strongmen, it's magical,

lovey. Edward, my husband, called Greeny a happiness genius. But ask anyone, he was as excited about being alive as anyone you will ever meet. This isn't just a kid making a hero out of her dad. And me, I walked next to him in that festival light for almost 50 years, and then one night in February, his hand went still in mine, and here I am, same as ever, except quicker to anger and 13 pounds heavier. Shouldn't loss change a person for the better, forever? Maybe Will's curious phrase, it's like this, applies here too. This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief, it's like this applies here too. This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief. It's like this. Minds don't rest. They reel and wander and fixate and

roll back and reconsider because it's like this, having a mind. Hearts don't idle. They swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it's like this, having a heart. Lives don't last. They thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear, because it's like this, having a life. Beautiful. There's so much in there. I know.

To talk about. I know. But that acceptance that you are not going to be able to hold it. Right. That's huge. Well, it's freedom and it releases you from that pressure that you feel or that guilt that you harbor that you're supposed to be other than what you are. Yes. And the self-loathing that comes with it.

really astonishing to stand in front of a congregation of people and give a eulogy for a young person and then ever be mad again does not seem to go together. Like, I guess I had sky-high expectations that I would forever consistently and constantly be different. And you're not. You're not. And that's weird. It feels like you're dishonoring this memory of this person. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a comfort to hear that it's just like this.

And yet, it leaves me wondering, well, why does it have to be this way? Why is the human mind, soul, spirit does it have to be this way? Like, why are we, why is the human mind, soul, spirit wired in that way? Like, how is it possible that, you know, two hours after some life-changing experience, you could get into a road rage or, you know, distract yourself with, you know, some small indignity and then beat yourself up for it to make it even worse. So I blame our neurobiology. And by that, I mean the way that we have evolved as a species to survive under the circumstances as they've changed over thousands of years.

of years. And I think it's astonishing the levels at which we are operating at any given moment. Like I could be having this very deep conversation with you at the same time that I'm thinking, I would like to floss my teeth. I would like to drink this water in front of me, but I don't want to make any noise. I hope that reading wasn't too long for Rich. I wonder if other authors do readings on here or whether I just totally bugged him. I can hold in my head and in my heart simultaneously, I'm going to say, two dozen different discrete thoughts that are operating at different discrete levels. that are operating at different discrete levels. That's really something to marvel at and accept as the truth of our machine. Like this is what our machine does.

This is how the machine works. 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, an 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 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, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health 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. 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. 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 treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming 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, has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health 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. A recurring theme on the show over the last year with people like Mark Manson, Russell Brand, Judd Bre, and others, has been acknowledging the extent to which we've allowed technology to create constant distraction from what's most important. Well, one guy literally wrote the book on it, and it's an absolute must-read if you're struggling to put the phone down. read if you're struggling to put the phone down. His name is Cal Newport, and he is a guy who has spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about how to get deep work done. His latest book is called Digital Minimalism, and I would go so far as to call it a survival guide for 2020. Episode 447 is one of the most popular of the year, and here's a taste.

447 is one of the most popular of the year. And here's a taste. So I'm a tech guy. I mean, I'm a computer scientist. I'm an internet nerd. I was using the net before, you know, there was worldwide web browsers. I've been blogging for over a decade. And so I look at certain things like social media platforms. And to me, it's junk food.

And so I don't see it as a stance of, you know, neolitism to say, for example, I don't use Facebook. I see it more like saying I don't eat Doritos and that you can love tech like I do, but not necessarily embrace all of the trends. And so that's a lot of the message I'm out there preaching is that you have to be intentional. You have to be selective. Yeah. How do you counter the argument that, you know, just leveraging my own personal experience, like I'm totally on board with everything you're saying, and yet I can't deny that social media has benefited me in certain ways.

Like it has created the foundation upon which I've created my career in many ways. And it's allowed me to connect with and contact a lot of interesting people that are now like friends of mine in my IRL, in my real life. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is part of the issue when you're talking about things like social media is that in some sense, the people from whom you might be hearing about these topics is actually a pretty rarefied group, right? So it's people that maybe have large media brands, right? I mean,

so this is core perhaps to your business. You have a sort of a large brand and a lot of businesses use social media very successfully. There's a reason why Facebook is worth $500 billion. For example, if you're trying to advertise, it's like a miracle what Facebook allows you to do. But I don't know that circumstance applies to most people, right? I mean, so for a lot of people, I mean, they're trying to whatever. They're trying to connect more with their family, their community. They're trying to do well by their job. They're trying to build a life that has certain elements of meaning to it.

They maybe don't need or have any reason to have a large audience. And yet they still feel compelled. Well, I think I just need to vaguely be on these services. And then they step back and look at what's going on, and they realize it's one, two, three hours a day that they're glancing at these things. So at the core of minimalism, for example, is this notion of there's no good or bad tech, but intentions are really useful. Right. So the solution, right? Rather than becoming a neo-Luddite or a denialist, you have this idea of digital minimalism that's really routed in orienting your digital diet around your core values. So, elaborate on that for me.

Well, I mean, minimalism itself is an old idea. So, you can go all the way back to Marcus Aurelius and this whole through line through the ancients into Thoreau, into the voluntary simplicity movement of the 1960s. It's a through line, right? And so, minimalism itself is this ancient idea that can apply to lots of different things. And the basic idea behind minimalism is, in many cases, it's better to focus most of your energy on a small number of things that give you a large amount of value, as opposed to the alternative, which is maximalism, which is trying to spread your energy over everything you can find that might give you some value. And so, these two things are set up.

This is like a dialectic, right? You have minimalism and maximalism. And so, in all different parts of our life, the sages have told us minimalism, less is more, is better than trying to spread your attention widely, right? So, I'm just bringing minimalism into people's digital personal life, basically. Right. Talk a little bit about the importance of solitude. So, solitude's an interesting idea. It has different definitions, but the one that caught my attention came from another book called Lead Yourself First, which was about solitude and leadership. But the definition that these guys used, which was, it's actually an army officer

and a really well-known circuit court judge, federal judge. So, it's an interesting pair of guys who came together to write about solitude. This judge actually, he does, he writes his legal briefs in a barn in Michigan that has no internet. So, he's after my own heart, right? But anyways, right, they had this definition of solitude. And they said it's not, don't think about it having to do with physical isolation, right? Don't think about, you know, are you alone on a mountainside or not? They said it all has to do with what you're processing. And so, their definition was freedom, solitude is freedom from input from other minds.

So, if you're processing something that was generated from another mind, you're not in a state of solitude. Anytime you're looking at this or anytime you have the earbuds in, unless it's music, if you're listening to something, if you're reading something, if you're talking to someone, it's not a state of solitude. Your brain is in input processing mode. Our brain takes very seriously the idea that, okay, this input we're getting right now came from another human being. And that turns on all sorts of different centers that don't turn on when you're just, let's say, looking around at nature. If you're not doing that, you are in solitude. So, you can be in a very crowded coffee shop, but if you're just sitting there alone with your own thoughts, you're in a state of solitude. So, it has nothing to do with physical isolation.

And why is it important? So, it turns out it's crucial for humans to have solitude on a regular basis. One is just maintenance mode. I mean, it takes a lot of power for our brain to, okay, all hands on deck. Like, we're processing, you know, there's another human mind that we're processing right now. All hands on deck, right? We've got to fire up all these systems. It's complicated, right? Like, when I'm talking to you right now, one of the things my brain is doing, some of the research I got into is something called mentalizing, which means I'm building a simulation of your brain within my own brain so that I could then start doing experiments in my own mind of, you know, how is my ritual simulation going to react if I say this versus this? It's incredibly complicated.

It uses a lot of energy, right? So if you're always doing that, the brain doesn't get down cycles, right? So you're going to get anxiety and other types of issues. It's also crucial for self-development and insight generation. If our brain is in processing mode, it can't actually be making sense in any sort of significant degree of the information that it's processing. And so someone listening to this interview is in processing mode. But if they really want to get insights out of it, what they also then need is after they hear this interview, some time just alone with their thoughts, thinking about what they heard. And then that's when the brain makes sense of it, right? And compares the insights

against their own mental schemas, their own understanding of the world, figuring out where it might apply or not fit into their life. You also need it for personal development. You can't have insights into what am I all about? What are my values? How's my character going to develop? What do I want to do going forward? All of that requires solitude. Your brain just has to sit there, has to think. Things have to bounce off of each other. We need it. But I think a lot of people would contend that it's a luxury, right? Like, I'm just, look, man, you know, I got, I got, I got, you have, you have a bunch of kids. Like, I got kids, you know, I'm going to my work.

I'm trying to make money. I'm trying to get through the day. I don't have time for solitude. And that self-reflection is the purview of somebody who's living a life that's not mine. Yeah. Well, see, I think that's because we put solitude on this pedestal. And we think about Thoreau and his cabin. Right.

When am I going to have time today to get out to my cabin? But there's an illusion about that as well that you talk about in the book. Yeah, which is not really what he was up to. Right. But we're no busier now than we were 10 years ago. But 10 years ago, we had lots of solitude.

And the reason is, is that when you have this precise definition of solitude, all you need is freedom from input from other minds. This used to happen all the time. You couldn't avoid it. It's, you know, there's nothing on the radio and you're driving to work. Solitude. You're waiting in line at the pharmacy. It's solitude, right? Now you look at that person and you're like, what's wrong with that guy? What's wrong with them, right? And so that's what's so unique about this current circumstance, as I mentioned before, is now that we can pull out this wirelessly connected device everywhere,

we can banish all those moments of solitude. So what's weird is not the call for solitude. The thing that's very, very unusual is the fact that we have banished solitude. That's what's incredibly rare in the entire history of sort of human civilization is it's only like seven or eight years old, this idea that it's now possible to get rid of all solitude. So to get solitude in your life is as easy as just some of the places where you used to have it. Even when you're really busy, you get it back by just not using your phone. So, okay, on my commute today, I'm not going to put on the podcast for the first 20 minutes. Or when I'm walking a dog, I'm not putting in the earbuds.

Or when I go to the store, I'm leaving the phone in the car. So it's stuff that you're already doing. Just do some of those things without the slot machine and the constant access to solitude, you know, busting information. Okay, how you guys all doing? How are you feeling? You can

take a breath. It's okay. I'm going to do it. Feel better already. Next up is a guest who has appeared on the podcast more times than anyone. Perhaps that's because she's my wife. Her name is Julie Pyatt, but it's also because she never fails to leave me and all of you better armed to meet life's challenges, relationships, family, to meet life's challenges, relationships, family, from a spiritual perspective. In episode 465, we took stock of our 20-year relationship to go deep on dealing with conflict,

improving communication, and the importance of constant evolution. For better or worse, or like it or not, I mean, you and I are very different individuals. We are maybe extremely different. And somehow we have been put together by Divine Mother for this journey that has ignited some inspiration, some vision for many who write to us, who want to know how we are in relationship, and the fact that we are so extreme that, you know, sort of everything about the way we walk the earth is completely different, the way we approach the earth, the way we experience life. And I'm looking for now this next level of evolution and expansion when we are truly igniting both feminine and masculine energies within ourselves. And as we access these greater energies of fully stepping into our power, how does that look in a new paradigm relationship? relationship. And so we have traces and aspects of this prince princess paradigm that we've played into that have worked for us. And it is a human way of relating man and wife. And I feel like we

are on the precipice of writing a new way of being in relationship. And what does that mean? And so for me, to be clear because i can see you're like you're like can you make a list can you know i'm not but i do want yeah flesh that out so i know exactly what i mean i'm looking for first of all more ceremony in our marriage i'm look but i'm i'm looking for it not in not in that i'm doing it and you're going along with it. I'm looking for a recognition and a knowing of the power of ritual and ceremony. And as we move through life, the letting go of our habits of watching Netflix, of watching movies, whatever those humanly activities are that gather our attention for a moment, I'm looking for an expansion into really understanding that a life is precious

and every moment we spend is precious. And now that we know that we've been given the privilege of being in this space, of having an audience, of having people that we can commune with, really committing to using that time and using that time in relationship. So we're back to the anniversary, no date, no celebration. The reason why I wasn't really attached to it is I didn't want to go to dinner with you. I don't want to go to a movie with you. I don't want to go do some typical anniversary-esque, you know, I don't want a dozen rosings from you. I want to go on the side of a cliff and like take our clothes off and, you know, light a ceremonial fire. Not really, because there are fires around here. But you know what I'm saying. I mean, I want to explore what can we really do together that's beyond... I've gone to enough dinners. I've had enough roses. I don't need to go to

another dinner. I don't need to go to... We can't even go to a hotel room because you sleep in a tent. So unless we bring the tent to the hotel room. No, I get what you're saying. So do you? Can you? Yeah, and I'm up for that. I'm up for that new experience. And I think it would cultivate an enhanced level of intimacy that would take us into this next chapter. And I think just doing a retrospective on where we're at and how we got here, I look at it like this. We got together for whatever reason to co-create. We committed to this path less trodden. We underwent difficulties. We burned in the fire.

Almost died. To emerge from that. And then we're presented with opportunities that I think over the last seven years, whatever it is, eight years, I have just worked my ass off to capitalize on in order to create stability for the family. And also almost as an amends for the trauma that proceeded it and to prove to myself that I could be a successful productive member of society, which is something I had previously struggled

with my entire life, or at least beginning when I started drinking. And I've been in kind of crisis mode for that entire eight-year period, just trying to make it work. And now we've emerged from that with a situation that is successful it's stable i've got this platform i'm able to provide for the family and essentially i'm in this incredibly privileged rare situation where i get to make choices about where i want to place my energy and make money. Like I am essentially in control of that, but I'm still operating day to day like I'm in that triage situation. And this has been impressed upon me by many people to just, listen, you can take a minute here

and breathe and relax. And I'm like, yeah, but I gotta do this. And then this is happening. And it's like, yeah, five years ago, you had to be that way. Maybe two years ago, you had to be that way. But now you don't have to be that way. And what is it all worth

if you can't really feel gratitude moment to moment for what you have co-created and to be present in your own life. And that's something that I definitely struggle with moment to moment. Um, and something that I want to be able to embrace and bring into my life in a more meaningful way. And it's, that's a challenge for me, you know, cause I'm running this program. And the fear associated with flipping the switch and doing it a different way gets associated in my mind with stopping, you know, like an arresting of the things that got me here, right? Like this is the way I do it and this is what's working. To do it any way differently would mean risking capsizing the whole thing.

Well, first of all, I want to say thank you that you have done an extraordinary job of coming into this level of expression. And it's absolutely beautiful to see, and it's breathtaking. And that has been an amazing experience for all of expression. And it's absolutely beautiful to see. And it's breathtaking. And that has been an amazing experience for all of us, definitely. I would also say, again, that in a human format, we like to make a list and say from the brain, that we have all these things to do first, and then we'll get to the spirituality. And so what we have to remember, and what I will remind you is, it is the purity of this relationship that fruited this entire drama, the entire thing that we're doing. So it started on a very special day. Well, it started before, but the day that we actually were married, it was a spiritual world concert.

There were channelers, Bhagavan Das, Kirtan, gospel singers, African wedding dancers, and it literally was all about spirituality. And it was one of the most beautiful days in my life. I posted it on our anniversary on my Instagram feed. That ceremony is what was the intention that created what we experience now. Are you connected with that? Yeah, I am. So what I'm saying is that, I just wanted to check in because you never really asked. You're like, yeah, it was okay. No, it is that level of desire, of devotion. It's really this devotion, this love affair with life, the love affair with the wonder of life,

and what is pulsing through each one of us in all life. And so what I would say to you is that you don't have to change the format of how you run the podcast. I mean, sure, you can shift and all that. And you know, we're going to be taking some time off in December, which is magnificent. So all of that is great. But I guess what I'm talking to more is in the day to day of how you go about your day. I know there is time that is spent either in this for all of us. I'm not like judging, I'm just saying, it's social media, it's scrolling through Twitter, it's Netflix, it's stuff that we do out of habit, stuff that we do out of habit, and this would be good for everybody. What if we all made a list

for the next week of things we do out of habit that are not high vibrational activities that are furthering the life that are actually met being medicated or being suppressed or controlled by the society to check out what are we that are serving as medication yeah and but we just do it by default because we don't really even, we're not really thinking of it. We're like, okay, I worked a hard day. Now I deserve an episode of Handmaid's Tale. Right, because I just want to distract myself and I just want to breathe and just, can I just not think about my life right now and invest in some story that'll lull me into a sleep state? But what if you like chose, let's not ask you to

give it all up, but let's just say if just one day a week, there was a two hour time period where you turned all the lights off and turned on a candle and you actually communed with the greater being that you are. And you were like, you know, like when I sit in that, it's like, you know, lead me, guide me, direct me, reveal yourself to me, like reveal the path to me. I'm here. I'm here. I'm listening. I'm listening. One of the most fascinating and popular guests to grace this platform, triple board certified physician and environmentalist, Zach Bush, MD, delivered perhaps the most compelling, poignant, and moving monologue in the history of this show to conclude episode 414. If you missed it the first time around,

you're in for a treat. If you already heard it, it's worth listening to again and again and again and again. If we don't reconnect to nature, we'll just destroy it again. I want to try to bring this to some sort of closure that doesn't feel like I'm the most depressing person you've ever listened to. And so I'm kind of battling in my mind now to kind of get us back to the space where we can say... It is doomsday meets like unbridled optimism. Like I don't really know where you're coming from. You don't know where to go with this one. So let me take you back to kind of where, how do you reconcile those two things? And I do it actually through my experience as a physician in the ICUs.

And in the ICUs, when I was practicing intensive hospital medicine, I got the privilege of being around human beings at the end of life. And I was so compelled by this experience that I ended up getting another subspecialty in hospice and palliative care and dealing with end of life things for four years with a hospice group. And at the end of life, we've termed it death. And what I've laid out for you today is the possibility of the death of our species in 70 years, 100 years, who cares? It was 200 years, it's still pathetic. And so we're looking at the last chapter of life on earth with our current course of action. But let me tell you about what my experience has been in those last moments with patients who are dying. We have the belief, I think, in our subconscious because of the movies we watch, because of the TV shows we watch, because of our big divorce from the death process.

It's become sterilized. You have probably not seen many people die. You've probably not seen your loved ones die. They've probably died in operating rooms or in ICUs or they died before you could fly across the country and see them. And so very few human beings are now watching this process of death. And it's allowed death to be defined as an endpoint, of death and it's allowed death to be defined as an endpoint,

as a contraction or a disappearance rather than what I've actually seen it to be. And what I've seen it to be is a massive expansion of consciousness, of reality, of awareness, and ultimately of love. And the most poignant examples of this are people that actually die biologically, and we spend 15 or 30 minutes in an ICU resuscitating them with drugs and shocking their chest like you see on TV shows and everything else.

And we have a dismal track record of pulling those people out. It's not like TV. We lose the vast majority. It's around 6% of cardiac arrests in the hospital will actually be resuscitated. 6% will survive. 94% will die. So you have somebody who's now biologically dead and you're artificially sustaining life. You've got them on a respirator and you're pounding on their chest and compressing, you're pumping drugs in their vein to try to get their heart restarted and doing all of this. And they've meanwhile been in the ICU for a week or a few days or weeks, months in some cases before they have this moment.

By this time, they've been isolated away from humans for quite some time. They're only touched by latex gloved hands. Only people with gowns on will come and see them. They have masks on. They haven't seen a human face close up in months. They're just so isolated and lonely. They go into this moment on the other side. And then we start working on them and doing our code. And as the hero depicted on TV, you become that doctor that pulls somebody back from that other side of the veil.

And it was startling as, you know, I moved past my internship and started to be kind of a senior resident in these environments and really responsible for being around these patients for hours after these experiences, they all told such a similar story on the other side of biologic life. And it had to do with a little bit of a typical story that you might see in the movies or something where they saw white light and there was a sense of expansion and all this. But there was one sentence that came back again and again. And I had one ICU shift that was very weird. I had one ICU shift where I worked for 36 hours shift.

And during that night, in the middle of my 36-hour shift, I see three people die and I bring them all back with my team. And to the last one of those three, every single one of them, their first sentence was always, why did you bring me back? Which always kind of deflated my win. All of them said that? Yeah. They all said, why did you bring me back? And the variety was huge.

One of these was an African-American pastor, had over 200 visitors in his ICU room in the days before he passed away. in his ICU room in the days before he passed away. And the other one was this very isolated, kind of ostracized gentleman in his community who was dying of complications of AIDS. And then I had this kid who had genetic defects and all this stuff, and he was dying of complications of pneumonia because he couldn't breathe anymore because his skeleton had collapsed. So you just couldn't pick three different medical cases

or three different human beings. And every one of them, first sentence, why did you bring me back? And then as they start to get oriented, and in the hours that follow, they are telling their loved ones, I went into this space, and it was bright white light everywhere. And I, in that moment, felt completely accepted for the first time in my life. And that was an unexpected sentence to hear out of multiple accounts. I felt completely accepted for the first time in my life.

So what do you make of that? I think we're all walking around lonely as hell. And our opportunity to rebirth, because death is not an end point. It's a transformation moment. It's an expansion beyond the limits of this frail biologic shell that we carry around. And the instant that we step out of that, we find out that the universe embraces us in every single second of our existence in complete acceptance of who we are. We are enough in and of our own identity of I am at every second of every point of our existence. And it's the disbelief of that that's keeping us locked in these stupid conversations we

just had for the last hour and a half. That is myopic conversation in and of itself. When you back up for a moment and say, okay, we're killing ourselves. But what if we need a death moment to transform completely, to let go of all of the preconceived notions of what it is to be human and to say, you know what, we are beings of light and we are completely accepted at every moment, including this moment when we would rape the earth of what we're raping it of, when we would kill each other at the rate we do, when we would destroy the entire ecosystem of a green planet in the middle of black space, when we would kill each other at the rate we do, when we would destroy the entire ecosystem of a green planet in the middle of black space,

when we would have that level of hubris, we're still completely accepted. And our journey is somehow understood by something more benevolent and more complete than we can see as human beings. And so let's not beat each other up over this issue. Let's not see this as a failure. Let's see this as an obvious next step in our journey. And death is the inevitable thing marching at us that's going to say, are you going to wake up and see the transformation at that moment of death and

transformation and you're going to say goodbye, Homo sapiens? Or are you going to do it a moment before that, in the body, before the doctor starts the resuscitation, are you going to say, you know what? What if we all looked at each other in wonder and awe and said, you're enough. I accept you completely. I want to be with you. I want to live with you. I want to be alive, period. And if it's with you, then it must be on purpose because we're in the same room. And the odds of that is zero. And so we are here. Seven billion of us showed up right now, which is really odd because I just laid out a horrific story of what's happening on the planet. And yet seven billion of those white souls that seconds after death are going to realize that they are who they've always been. They're fully accepted, and they are moving in true love,

and that white light is the love, and they're in that space, what if we can transform before we die? Then there's no reason to go to Mars. There's no reason to go anywhere else, because we will do absolutely every single thing differently here on Earth. And we're going to do it differently by just that simple recognition of I am who I am. You are who you are. That's enough. And I accept you completely. And let's figure out how to do this within the design of nature. There's enough energy. There's enough food. There's enough soil. There's enough commodities. There's enough resources for everybody on the planet to thrive at a level that's never been experienced in human history.

We cannot continue any form of human economic systems that have ever existed before and expect us to escape the death moment. We literally have to reinvent everything. And so if you are under the age of 18 right now, you are the last generation that may live to the fullest extent of the human potential. It is you who are being called to transform because you showed up right when you did. If my generation is to do anything, it was to say, oh my gosh, we're going in the wrong direction. But my generation doesn't have enough time now to turn the boat around, reinvent everything. And so our mission is not to inspire the farmers that

are currently fighting the good fight. It's to inspire their children to do the right thing and do it differently, connected to new children who are in the cities, who are in the tech world, wherever they are, connect those kids back, give them a sense of that unity, give them a sense of the oneness, and give us all a sense that this is the inescapable optimism as we are going to transform, period. And it may be right after the point of our death or miraculously, it might just happen right before it. That was one of the best monologues I've ever heard in my life.

Preach it, brother. That was amazing. Oh my God. You're this incredible contradiction in terms with the doomsday and the optimism and the deep-rooted experience and knowledge in science. And yet somebody with a vast capacity for spiritual exploration. You're a wizard. You're a gift, my friend. We all are. And that's the excitement that I have is you can't actually come close to the

science of atomic physics or astrophysics or human biology without an overwhelming sense of we are just so far beyond logic. We're so far beyond the material world. We are these entities that are moving with such power, and we have been kept from that power. And we've been kept from it so that power can be taken from us and consolidated in the hands of a few. It's going to be hard to top that, people. And the one thing I take away from that is,

man, what a great year it has been for the podcast. And that is in part due to the many great sponsors who make this show possible. Regenerative farming, restoring the health of our soil and biodiversity has also been a recurring theme on the show with guests like paul hawkin zach bush the chesters and rylan inglehart a pioneer in the vegan restaurant landscape of california he is the face behind his family-owned restaurants cafe gratitude and gracias, and the co-founder of Kiss the Ground, a nonprofit that educates and advocates about the connection between soil, human, and planetary health.

In episode 483, we talk sacred commerce, tools for building community, regenerative agriculture, and inspiring more gratitude in our culture. What I discovered and what became Kiss the Ground with, you know, the co-founders Finian and Lauren was knowledge that has been kept and understood from many indigenous cultures around the world, many pioneering, you know, pioneering farmers and permaculturists. And this is wisdom that's been in little pockets for a long time coming from many places. We're standing on the shoulders of that wisdom.

And we saw being that we live in Los Angeles and the communications capital of the world, the trend setting capital of the world, we said, all right, this is the most exciting, important idea, inspiration, pathway. We're going to tell the story. We want this to be a paradigm shift that we can actually go beyond sustainability.

We can actually regenerate and restore our soils. We can restore our biodiversity. We can have healthy food for, the idea that we can't feed the world on small ish or even medium sized farms is absurd. 40% of the food gets wasted. 80% of the food feeding the total population comes from small farms.

So walk me through that because that's the thing that I have difficulty wrapping my head around. I mean, the conventional wisdom is, look, if CAFOs do one thing, it's that they know how to drive economies of scale. Like they take a super concentrated, you know, number of animals and they try to blow them up into food using the least amount of time and resources possible.

And they've kind of perfected this, right? This is having a huge deleterious impact on the planet, untold suffering, all kinds of terrible issues with that. Nobody's a fan of this. But when I look at how many people are on the planet and the forecast for the 10 billion that are soon to come, and then I look at biodynamic farming, my first instinct is we don't have enough land.

Like you need more space for these cattle. Like certainly we're gonna have to reduce our addiction to animal foods on some level. Not everyone's gonna get struck vegan, but how can we scale up this wonderful practice that is sequestering carbon and regenerating the earth and all of that and do it in a way that actually is gonna function

in the modern world. Totally. I'd say, you know, my view is that the big billboard is we need to eat more plants, eat less meat as like the big, the biggest billboard that as far as where we are, because 95% of the meat that we're eating is, you know, just a total train wreck. But if we want to get interested in the more nuts and bolts of how to grow food in a way that actually restores, heals, and not just the aspect of animals and eating animals and animals' role on grasslands and keeping grasslands healthy. And ultimately when we're talking about keeping grasslands healthy,

we're talking about keeping land that we're growing grains for eating. When we decoupled animals from land, we just put animals in barns and then we put chemicals to boost the nitrogen, the NPK, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus as like the quick fix to grow grains and crops. Essentially, the chemicals obviously started to degrade the farmland. the chemicals obviously started to degrade the farmland. In the last 40 years,

we've lost 30% of the farmland being grown to desertification. Right. So destroyed. So the United Nations said we have 60 years left under the current system of harvest, 60 seasons left. the current system of harvest, 60 seasons left. So we have to scale way back.

I mean, right now, most meat that we're eating is coming from a total destruction system. So we need to cut way back on that. We need to be eating more plant-rich diet. And then if we're really serious about how we can actually restore and heal land and restore the broken soil, animals grazing on grasslands has an amazing restorative effect.

And that is a solution for those that are gonna continue to eat meat. And that can be something that has a total full environmental win for the planet. And it's showed that a CAFO situation has total methane, a lot of greenhouse gases going up and a grazing situation where you have managed grazing of animals on grassland, you have a net sequestration of carbon going, even the cows still produce methane, but within that overall system,

there is a net sequestration of carbon and a significant net sequestration of carbon going into that land that's being managed that way. So the, you know, and a lot of the land that across the country is not fit for agriculture. We don't wanna be tilling it. We wanna put in annual crow crops. So there's actually,

and we've killed all the natural bison or, you know, grazing animals oftentimes that were on that land. And so, you know, there's this real live opportunity of, you know, putting grazing animals back to a good life and having a net beneficial, you know, impact on that soil, on that grassland, on that environment. And we're obviously encouraging less meat consumption, but for the people that are gonna eat meat, this is an opportunity for that to have a beneficial impact.

And again, I get the morality aspect of people not wanting to kill animals, and I love and respect that perspective. But for those that are choosing to eat meat, here is a really a win-win situation that can have a benefit for many stakeholders. Yeah. Including, you know, the thing, the biggest thing that we don't have a solution for, which is how are we going to sequester enough carbon such that we don't go into climate chaos? Yeah. We need some emergency actions right now.

We really are running out of time. And things like the farm bill and these subsidies are really preventing us from embracing a solution that's right in front of us. from embracing a solution that's right in front of us. Like, you know, it seems to me that if we could stop subsidizing the, you know, the growing of all these crops that go to feed and we can start emphasizing biodynamic farming, the price of meat's gonna go way up and that's gonna cull the herd literally

in terms of like the number of humans that can afford these meat products. It's gonna drive down meat consumption and make that possibility more realistic. But there doesn't seem to be any political will for this. That's the problem. There's not, but I'll tell you, since we started Kiss the Ground seven years ago and we launched the soil story, which was the first piece of media that we, that, you know, that I had seen, that was like a three minute short synopsis of regenerative agriculture and the potential of it. The amount of attention and term people using the terminology and the amount of investment going

into that space is been, I mean, it's still, it's still a drop in the bucket, but, you know, the fact that general mills, you know, making a public declaration, people could say, oh, that's total greenwash, a million acres by 2030. Another startup called Indigo just committed to, I think, 10 million acres under regenerative management, and they're wanting to pay farmers to sequester carbon. under regenerative management and they're wanting to pay farmers to sequester carbon. You know, the momentum, when we first started talking about this, it was very fringe. And again, I didn't know it.

You know, people like, you know, my understanding is Al Gore, people who are very experts on, you know, climate. People, you know, Bill McGibbon, you know, had understanding of this, but they weren't standing like this was a solution. It was still too fringe. It wasn't.

But now there's an article every week that's coming out talking about how farmers can be a solution to climate change. There's an opportunity to have the farmer be the hero, that we can actually restore our landscapes and restore our food system, restore our climate, and farmers can make a little more coin on it. Our era has brought about a more evolved understanding of gender and a rising and

increased awareness around its non-binary nature. I wanted to better understand fluid identity. So I sat down in episode 487 with former pro golfer, Kendra Little. Kendra is intersex, born with variations in standard sex characteristics. She was amazing. I love this one. Here is a sense of that experience. I love this one. Here is a sense of that experience.

So the first real pivotal moment though comes at 12 or 13 when you have this doctor's appointment. So walk me up to that point. Like prior to that, was there some gender confusion or were you convicted in being a girl? Was there some sense that there, I mean, what was the reason that you went to go see this doctor and what happened? Right. So, I mean, you know, kind of when you're, your earliest memories, you know, as, as when you're, you're a kid, you know, six, seven years old, you know, that's kind of, for me, at least like my first, you know, things when I

look back on and think about like how you feel. That's when I first remember knowing or feeling that something was different. But at that age, you're, you're just so like your idea of the world is so basic and so, you know, minimal, um, you don't really like know what to make of it. So I always knew something was different about myself even before, you know, I found out that I was born intersex. Um, and I could never, you know, put my finger on it. I could never, you know, figure out what it was. I would, you know, I'd be in school and, you know, I'd have my friends that were guys and friends that were girls and I could, you know, relate to, to, you know, both of them in different ways, but also kind of feel like not really like fully be able to relate. Um, and so that was always something I, you know, I felt from a young age and didn't know what it meant. Um, so, um, you know,

yeah, it's like 12 or 13, you know, you're going into middle school, you have to have your, you know, physical, uh, for sports or whatever the case was. So going for a physical and the, the nurse, um, you know, you do the, the whole, you know, body examination and she could tell that my body wasn't developing, you know, as a typical female would. And she's like, okay, we need to, we need to check this out. We need to see what's going on. And, um, so go up to OHSU, which is a very reputable hospital up in Portland and yeah that's when I that's when I discovered or they discovered through ultrasound and blood tests and all that stuff that I was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome right so explain what AIS is so AIS

is a condition there's there's like three different conditions um and it's intersex is like a big like umbrella term for people that are not born within you know the typical gender binary depending on you know what's inside their body right it can mean a lot of different things it's like an umbrella term yeah and they say it's like one in two thousand which is true but ais is more like i don't want to misquote this, but it's something like one in 200,000. Um, so it's, it's pretty rare. Um, but that still means there's tens of thousands of people walking around. Exactly. So, um, and so it can mean different things. So for me, I was born without any female reproductive parts, any female internally sexual reproductive parts.

I was born with male reproductive parts internally. So that's essentially – But it was not evident when you were born. Exactly. So that's where it can kind of differ. So sometimes it's detectable at birth. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's not detected until puberty, which was the case for me.

it's detectable at birth. Sometimes it's not, sometimes it's not detected until puberty, which was the case for me. Um, and what's really not a good thing in there. Doctors are still doing this is these babies that they detect, you know, are born intersex are assigning genders to these babies before, you know, they grow up and are able to decide for themselves who they want to be. And so you have these kids who are growing up and sometimes, you know, the parents won't even let them know that this happened. Um, and so they'll grow up and be like, I don't feel right. Something's, you know, something's different. I don't identify with, you know, my gender. And then they come to find out that they were born intersex and were assigned a gender as an infant. So, yeah. Well, we live in a binary dualistic society. I mean, when you're born, there's a birth certificate and there's two boxes, right? So you got to check one of those.

Yep. Exactly. Yeah. And it's, yeah, Matt, that's changing. I was just, I was just telling Daniel that Oregon just passed not a law, but they're allowing people to identify as the third gender on their license when they're applying to get their license. So you're seeing all these little things that are coming into the equation that are allowing people to be a little bit more diverse with what they identify as. Yeah, fluid, exactly. identify as. Fluid. Yeah, fluid, exactly. And I think it's important, I mean, this comes into play when we're going to talk about sports down the line here, but not to conflate intersex with trans, like these are different things. Exactly. I think that's an important thing to say. Because, and this is something that I've been trying to kind of tiptoe around, like as in talking about this, because I don't't one thing i don't want to do

is alienate the the trans community and delegitimize you know what they're feeling just because it's not you know from a genetic standpoint i was genetically born both but that doesn't mean that someone that wasn't genetically born not you know as they were born or who they were born as that doesn't take away from how they feel right just because they don't have like, you know, as they were born or who they were born as that doesn't take away from how they feel. Right. Just because they don't have like a, you know, genetic, you know, uh, thing to back it up. Right. Yeah. There's a distinction between biology and gender. Exactly. Right. And this is where it starts to quickly get complicated and I'm the furthest, you know, from having mastered all of this, which is why I'm like i i'm i'm open and i

want to learn more that's and that's like that's the most important thing is that you know people and that's that's what's wrong with our society in general is people just like nope this is the way it is this is how i feel about it and i'm not changing my mind it's like if everyone could just have an open mind and be open to you know different we would get, we'd make a lot more progress than, than, than we do. The problem is I think the overwhelming majority of people are, you know, closed minded and aren't willing to, to shift their, um, the way they view things or the way they feel about something because of their experience in, in growing up or whatever the case is. And, um, but I totally agree. I think, um, as long as people have an open mind, we can, we can eventually, I don't know when, but we will eventually get to a common ground where everyone feels seen and things are as fair as they can be. So I don't know.

I mean, you reached out to me, like you're wanting to tell this story and to share it. So I can't help but presume that there's some aspect of you that wants to be, you know, if not a role model, like somebody who is in this conversation, you know, in service to other people who are, you know, struggling quietly with what you had to go through. Yeah. I think I look back to myself as a 12 year old and, and, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change how this, how everything played out from when I found out until, until this moment sitting here with you. Um, but I do think that a big motivation for me in telling this story and coming on, you know, this podcast and sharing it in other, in other areas is to be a voice for, for kids, um voice for kids or adults who are struggling with this or struggling with any sort of identity or whatever they're going through. And that there is a platform for you to be seen and to be heard and how you're born and how you feel

is validated and it is legitimized. And just um, and just, you know, so much of life is just finding commonalities with people and being able to relate. And I remember the first time I met up with, um, someone for the first time, knowing that they were intersex going into this meeting. Um, it was something I'll never forget. It was the most incredible experience for the first time, getting to relate to someone in person that has gone through the exact same things, um, as me. So kind of taking that and putting it on a platform that obviously I can't meet every single intersex person to ever exist. So, and not every intersex person to ever exist, we'll see this story, but the more

that I can, um, share it and put light on it, hopefully the, the more corners of the world it'll reach. And you don't have to be intersex to relate to my story. I think everyone is going through something internally or something that they feel on the inside that they don't feel like they can share or talk about or identify with. This story is for them as well. And whatever you're feeling on the inside, it needs to be respected

and it needs to be addressed. And you will always have people in your life that are willing to sit down and hear you. What is the one thing that you want that person to hear who is dealing with this quietly? to hear who is dealing with this quietly? I think what I would have wanted to hear is that the way you're born is perfect. You're perfect just the way you are. We live in a society that tells us there's two genders and there's roles within those genders. And I think, forget about it. Don't worry don't worry about it. Um, you're unique, you're perfect and just own it. Um, I think if someone would have told me that at 12 years old, when I had just found out, I think that would have made a pretty profound impact on me. Um,

maybe not immediately, but in time. And I think I would have been in a place where I kind of could have dealt with this before I turned 30. But yeah, I just think that no matter what your genetic makeup is, no matter how you were born, you're perfect just the way you are. No one has to tell me how tenacious addiction is, but I think we're all on some level craven animals, vulnerable to habits that don't serve us. To learn more about the neuroscience behind addiction and mindfulness strategies for overcoming cravings, I met with Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, thought leader,

and scientific researcher who has devoted his career to these subjects. This clip is excerpted from episode 471. It can really be distilled down into a simple process of you need a trigger, a behavior, and a reward from a brain perspective. So if you see food, you eat the food, and then your stomach sends this dopamine signal to your brain that says, remember what you ate and where you found it. Now, this reward-based learning process is set up to help us remember things. So it actually, the dopamine firing is there

to help us remember something. It helps lay down a memory. And often dopamine in modern day gets associated with pleasure, but we can put a pin in that and talk more about that later. Not really a whole lot of pleasure in that agitated, frenetic, driven, got to do this. And that's the drive to use more when we get addicted.

So basic learning process, remember where food is, same thing, remember where danger is. You see the saber-toothed tiger, you run away, and then you get to remember, okay, don't go back there or I won't get to do that again. So that process is still at play. It's the strongest learning mechanism that's known in science, all the way evolutionarily conserved, all the way back to the sea slug.

So really, really well-known process. Yet in modern day, it's still at play, but we have availability of food 24-7, right? We all have refrigerators. You can find a diner or a restaurant that's open at any time, day or night. You can get food delivered any time, day or night. So we don't really need to remember where food is anymore. We just need to remember where our phone is and we can order it.

Yet our brain is still saying, well, hey, you know, I'm taking up a whole lot of real estate for this learning mechanism, so let's use it. And so we start to learn to do things like eat when we're stressed or anxious, not when we're hungry. You know, and this splits out hedonic versus homeostatic hunger. You know, the homeostatic hunger is like when we're actually hungry. The hedonic is based on emotions and based on stress and things like that. We learn to take pills when we are emotionally or physically in pain as compared to learning

to deal with it. Social media is engineered for the likes and the retweets. Yeah, it extrapolates out even to things that are as inert as boredom. It doesn't have to be this sense of dis-ease or some kind of emotional discomfort or something that triggers an uncomfortable memory. It can be as banal as standing in line at the grocery store.

Yep, yep. I don't know if you've ever pulled up to a stoplight late at night and you look around and everybody's crotch is glowing. You know, it's like suddenly 30 seconds at a red light is intolerable. Right. Well, we only got there

because we've let ourselves get there. And we can say, oh, I'm not gonna do that. You know, I'm gonna be a good boy and willpower my way through this. Forget about it. Like you said, that doesn't work. So let's get into why it doesn't. Like, why is it that I can't override that impulse

and through sheer force of will, like marshal my mental and emotional powers to prevent myself from doing that thing that I am so lured to? Yeah, it sounds pretty good, doesn't it? You know, we're these rational thinking beings. I think Descartes really sent us down a path that was not so good. You know, oh, I'm thinking, therefore I can think my way through stuff.

It's not how our brains work. You know, there's a part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that that's involved in willpower. It's the weakest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective. It's the first that goes offline when we're stressed, when we're angry, when we're sad, when we're tired. That's why we wander into the kitchen late at night looking for something because we've learned that.

And so we can say, don't do do that but then we just crash harder you know and in the morning we set that resolve to like okay i'm really gonna do it this time but that's just not how our brains work our brains don't don't work that way but we think you know we're i think it's more we're rationalizing you know it's like oh willpower it must be something let's study it um and there you know there's been a little bit of this and that but it turns out that willpower you know if you look at the people you know that quote unquote have good willpower habits there there's some really interesting pieces there one is they actually find things that they enjoy doing so people you know people do something like eat healthy or

exercise if you ask them why they do it the people that are really good at doing it, and you probably know this personally, it feels good as compared to, oh, I need to get in shape to get my body looking this way for the beach. Right. It's not like an intellectual exercise. Not at all. And that part makes sense, but that's not willpower. And it makes sense because that is reward-based learning. We're doing something out of the reward of doing it, not because we're doing it. So that's one of the big misconceptions around willpower is that if you look at reward-based learning, it's based on the reward. It's not based on the behavior itself. So if it were the behavior, we'd just say stop doing this. But it's actually the reward that drives future behavior.

And that's where we can start to intervene. How does it correlate with intelligence? Because just speaking from personal experience, I've noticed over the years through my adventures and journeys in the recovery community that people who are hyper-intelligent often struggle the most because they want to intellectualize this where truly it is an emotional thing more than anything else. And so they struggle trying to wrap their heads around how to do this. And they can't let go of the idea that that solution resides within the mind.

Yeah. Well, so hi, my name isd, and I'm a thinking addict. There you go. If you look at the bookshelves in my house, they are way too numerous. So speaking from personal experience, and I think this applies, is there's this, it's almost like the thinking part of our brain is kind of like this. It's like refined sugar or refined carbohydrates. It actually just gets us stoked. We're like, oh, that's interesting. I'm just going to learn more and I'm going to learn more and I'm going to figure out the solution to this thing.

Meanwhile, day after day after day, you're perpetuating the same behaviors. Unknowingly. Yeah. While you're buying every self-help book that's available. Totally, totally. So what we really need is to land in our body because our body is really, really wise. And so this is, you know, this intellectual thing is like,

you know, it's that, it just drives more addiction where it's like, I want to learn more as compared to really landing on our direct experience that says, you know, dude, why would you do that? I'll give you an example. So we did a study with people who are trying to quit smoking. And we randomized people to get cognitive therapy or mindfulness training, where we train them to really just pay attention to the results of their behavior. So when they come into the mindfulness group, they don't even know what they're getting.

So they come in, they're like, I'm here to quit smoking. And I say, okay, next, when you go home, smoke. And they're looking at me like, is this the experiment that you're running? Is this the study? And I say, no, smoke, but pay attention as you smoke and see what happens. So they pay attention to the smell, to the taste,

to the feeling of the superheated smoke going into what happens. So they pay attention to the smell, to the taste, to the feeling of the superheated smoke going into their lungs. And they come back and they're this Mr. Yuck look on their face. They're like, oh my God, how did I never notice that before? Because they realize that smoking tastes like shit. And they can only get that wisdom from their direct experience. I had a guy who, so we, in our first study, we, first class was on Monday, second class was on Thursday. This guy was smoking 30 cigarettes a day. He'd been smoking that for a long time. He came back on Thursday and he said, yeah, I'm down to 10 cigarettes. And I said, well, what happened? And he said, well, I noticed that I would drink coffee and the coffee was kind of bitter. So I'd smoke a cigarette to numb myself

from the taste because it's amazing how smoking numbs your taste and so he realized well i don't need to smoke i could brush my teeth and he just went through this litany of 20 cigarettes where they were all he was smoking all these things out of habit where he'd you know he'd learned through this reward-based learning process that oh if i smoke i feel better you know or whatever and he realized oh this was this is not a good way to go the idea being, you talk about this in your book is diverging from what Skinner calls the operant conditioning, right? Which is behaviorism, this traditional approach

to like dealing with these kinds of problems to a more Buddhist perspective, which you call or is called dependent origination, right? And this involves being present for the experience. And rather than getting into judgment, self judgment to just be curious about what's happening. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting. So one of the one of the first aha moments for us in my, you know, my research career was when I was looking, I was studying this operant conditioning or positive negative reinforcement. And I was thinking, wait a minute, this sounds way too familiar.

And I started looking into this because I'd learned on a retreat or something, I'd learned this dependent origination piece. And it was kind of complex or these 12 steps and all this stuff about birth. And I was like, whoa, what is this? But when I looked at it, and I actually worked with a Pali scholar to really explore this, it turns out that dependent origination explains operant conditioning. And so the Buddhist psychologists had figured this out 2,500 years ago before paper was even invented. And so they were describing the same process. And importantly, this process, dependent origination, was what reportedly the Buddha was contemplating on the night of his enlightenment.

As in, hey, pay attention, guys. This is kind of important. So really important concept that actually is rediscovered in modern day and drives and explains a lot of how addictive behavior is formed. We're in the final stretch. Three more guests to go. But first and finally. Okay, back to our regular programming. A recurring show favorite, author Ryan Holiday is best known for popularizing stoicism, an ancient philosophical yet highly practical operating system he kind of pioneered to mainstream modern adoption. In his recent book, Stillness is the Key, Ryan expands his lens east to explore inner know, contextually right now we're in a culture in which, you know, we've never been more starved of our ability to be still. Like we're in this

crazy attention deficit era of unprecedented proportions. I mean, you talk about the CNN effect, but you know, we're in the CNN effect on steroids. Like it's way crazier than just news being on television, 24 hours a day. And it's become increasingly more and more difficult to put the phone down and spend, you know, one minute with ourselves. And we tend to think of this as, you know, a modern epidemic.

And I thought it was really cool that you opened the book with this story of Seneca and you realize like, oh, this has been going on forever. Like this guy had the exact same problem that I had this morning. Yes. Yeah, and actually I'd written the book without that. I started with the Lincoln story.

That's originally where the book was gonna open. There's a story about Lincoln saying there's this city that's a key and that the Civil War can't be won without the key. And so it's like, oh, that's the title of the book, Stillness is the Key. That's what's going to be around. And I sent an early draft of it to Robert Greene. And he was like, I really like it, but I feel like you have to like root it in where we are right now, which is amazing advice. And he's like, isn't there this letter from Seneca where he's like in Rome and he's like describing exactly how noisy and loud it is. And it sounds exactly like a modern city.

And I was like, yeah, I think there is. Let me go look for that. And I found it. And I was like, exactly. I was probably in a hotel room when I found it. It's noisy. I got a bunch of stuff. And Seneca just, he's writing to his friend.

And he's basically, he's like, it's so loud outside my window that I wish I was deaf, you know? And he's just, he's staying above a gym basically. And he's like, these people are dropping weights and there's people splashing in the pool. There was a guy getting arrested downstairs. Like, you're just like, it, it sounds, it sounded like a summer afternoon in New York City when you just want to blow your brains out because it's so loud. And he's like, but I'm trying to work.

And he describes that stoic state, that apatheia, where that equanimity where you manage to tune it all out and you kind of go into that flow state and you do what you have to do. And that's what stillness is to me. Stillness isn't like the monk who renounces all his possessions. And of course it's still because he's on a, you know, a 10 year meditation retreat in a beautiful, you know, Buddhist monastery in the mountains.

It's like, oh, you can get this anywhere. And in fact, it's harder to get in real life, but that's where it's most valuable. Yeah, the mastery is in taking it into the world. And when you're somebody like Seneca or a Fortune 500 executive or a quarterback, you're shouldering tremendous responsibility and pressure. And there's a lot of external stimuli that's vying for your attention. and there's a lot of external stimuli that's vying for your attention. And the mastery is in trying to figure out what's important and what's not and being able to focus on what is key, actually, in moving you forward on the trajectory that you're here to do.

Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's why the people who can do it either produce the sort of stunning things that take our breath away or get paid all the money because like no one else can do it. It's really hard. And it was refreshing to hear Seneca, like, you know, sort of struggling with this, grappling with it in real time. Yes. Because we think of him as somebody who has mastered these. Well, what I liked about Seneca's story is it's not just, hey, this guy has some ability to tune out the noise, because what if you're sensitive? It's like also his personal life is collapsing. Everything's falling apart. Everything's... So, he's also going... Like,

you're saying, yeah, there are all these outside noises, but oftentimes the noise is in your head. It's you are the... Or it it's in your you've got some spiritual malady that's causing and so it's that he's able to do it on all the fronts at the same time and clear it and clear it and get and and i don't think i don't think stillness is this i think the other things people think stillness is maybe that idea of nirvana like you you get there and then you're there. I think it's like, can you get it for 20 minutes? And what can you do in the 20 minutes that you have?

You know what I mean? It's like, let's talk about football. It's like the stillness that New England has being down 28- three in the Super Bowl and just stringing together four or five drives in 12 minutes to pull off this thing, maybe the high watermark of the entire game. And then you go back to regular life and you dream about getting back there sometime. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just have these moments where it all comes together. And I think the book and what I've been thinking a lot about is how do you build a life? How do you build habits?

How do you build systems? How do you build a practice that lets you get there every once in a while? Because when you do, it's just magical. And that's where all the good stuff comes. Well, from a very top level, the book really, you know, when you are trying to drive the reader towards this understanding of what it means to be still and the importance of stillness, it strikes me as really this journey to learn to turn inward and really crowd out the externalities that create the confusion and the stress and the anxiety and, you know, the competitive nature and the measuring and all of those things that prevent us from being clear on, you know, what it is, you know, that is ultimately driving us. I think that's true. But I think maybe that's something that Eastern philosophy people misread in it. They go like, oh, okay, like I got to eliminate noises.

I got to eliminate distraction. I got to live a quieter life, blah, blah, blah. It's like Tiger Woods had like a monk-like obsession with golf, but was so broken spiritually that it wasn't like noise in Tiger Woods' ear that was making him unhappy. It was the voice inside of his head. You know what I mean? And so I think you can fix it. I'm trying to say you've got to attack it from all angles. Like if you have mental discipline, but then you have this deep insecurity inside you that's going to never, never feel like you're enough. In a way, almost your mental discipline is your worst enemy because it's just going to be, you think like, oh, I, if I win a Superbowl, I will be happy, you know, or dad will love me if I become a billionaire. And then also it's like, you have those things, but you eat terribly and you don't take care of yourself physically and you have bad

habits. It all feeds it. There's, there's no like one magical thing you do and you have bad habits, it all feeds. There's no like one magical thing you do when you have stillness. It's this like process of getting there. Right. Well, in addition to athletes and sports franchises, I mean, your writing has been embraced by Silicon Valley, like these other subcultures that are really steeped in that like fine edge of performance.

And generally just how to live a more meaningful life and do it in a grounded, strategic and fundamentally rewarding way. I hope so. Yeah. I hope so. So stillness is the evolution of this process. Yes.

And I say evolution very mindfully. I think it really is, in certain ways, it's a synthesis of your other books, and it's also a very natural next chapter. And certainly your most spiritual book. So I'm interested in how you arrived at the decision to tackle this subject matter and why this became your next book. Yeah, I mean, I think stillness, the idea of stillness, I'm not referring to the book, but the idea of that concept of stillness, it struck me as like when you remove ego, stillness emerges. You need stillness to overcome these kinds of obstacles. So it's sort of, it's sort

of the glue that went unsaid in the other books. And, and so I was, I just kept coming back to this idea. And when you look at really great people, whether they're athletes or generals, or just like a wise person that you met, or your grandfather, what they all seem to have is that I just am, because I'm not a still person. I'm like a high energy person. You probably hear it through the microphone. Like I move my arms a lot.

I'm like that kind of person. So when I meet someone, they're just like, whoa, you're just like operating on a different plane. Yeah, that like unflappable, calm, groundedness. That almost seems archaic because it is so rare that you now meet somebody of that kind of stature. Yes. And what's interesting is that basically, and this is what inspired the book, is that basically any and all of the ancient schools talk about that idea in their own way as the sort of like the end goal of what we're doing. Yeah. It's a consistent thread that you'll find in every philosophy and every religion

fundamentally, which is something that you explore. Like Stoicism and Epicureanism are supposed to be opposite philosophies. And yet like Stoics talk about apatheia and the Epicureans talk about ataraxia. Yeah, I wrote down all those words. And I can only pronounce a few of them myself. Apatheia, aslama, hishtavut, samatvan. I just went through all of them to record the audio. But I was just in that, those two, it's like, wait, they have, these are opposite philosophies. They have the same idea in basically very similar words. You're just like, whoa, how does that happen? And then you realize, oh, that's just what we're all working

towards. Everyone wants to be calmer and more in control and less like heart beating out of their chest at the whim of their emotions or insecurities. And that we need it not only at the personal level, but also we know that's where our best professional work comes from. And so I was just fascinated with that. The color of the Queen of Pain, she's one of the world's greatest adventure athletes. Her name is Rebecca Rush, and she is a seven-time world champion, best-selling author, activist, and Emmy winner. How about that?

In addition to superhuman success on a mountain bike, she has performed at the elite level across a multitude of athletic disciplines. And she's also the protagonist in Blood Road, an extraordinary documentary that chronicles her 1,800 kilometer mountain bike adventure along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to reach the site where her father, a U.S. Air Force pilot, was shot down in Laos. This is an amazing conversation. Rebecca is a badass. She's super cool. So please enjoy this clip from episode 450. I've never considered from my upbringing, men or women don't do this job. I mean, you can definitely look around the room and go, oh, there aren't that many women climbing. And instead of me sort of being like, you know, well, that sucks. It would be, well, let's invite some more in. And so that has tended

to be my mentality with cycling. Well, this is your whole thing now, right? The inclusivity and trying to, you know, broaden these, broaden the doors, you know, make those doors swing wide open for more women to get involved. It's pretty great. I mean, you see it now you go to a climbing gym and there's tons of kids and girls and everybody's climbing and riding bikes and having fun. And, but yeah, at the time there weren't a lot of women doing it. You know, I didn't really think about that, Rich. I wasn't like, oh, I'm a female climber or I'm a female this. I'm just doing it. You're just doing your thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is the year of free solo. So, you know, climbing is on the cultural roadmap in a way that never has been before.

Like the awareness of it is just exploded because of Chai and Jimmy and Alex and Tommy and that whole community, which is really cool to see people, you know, at the supermarket talking about El Cap and stuff like that. But I think the film that really paints the picture more adeptly in terms of the culture was, for me, was Valley Uprising,

where you really got a sense of like what this community is like and how it kind of percolated up and has developed over the years. So when I see that and you're sharing with me about living in your car and this dirtbag lifestyle, I mean, that's what I'm envisioning, kind of like this rogue pack of people that just kind of go where, you know, living in your car and this dirtbag lifestyle. I mean, that's what I'm envisioning kind of like this rogue pack of people that just kind of go where, you know,

the season blows them and where the, you know, where the next wall is. It's a pretty special community. If you think about, I mean, one, you're, you're, you're connected by people in place. You go to a place like Joshua tree or Yosemite. And even if you just stepped out of your car and you're the average tourist, you can't help but be moved by the nature of those places. And yeah, the dirt bike climbers, or now there's cyclists doing it as well, bikepacking, it's people who have this need to be in that place. whether you live in a city or you get to live in, you know, Idaho or in the mountains where you live of California, there is a healing factor in nature.

And people know that it's just, you know, people living out of their car or committing to that lifestyle. They've just made a bigger commitment that they need that in their life. Just like somebody needs to go to church. Yeah. Well, there's something primal in our human makeup, in our base DNA that I think yearns for that, that we've moved too far away from. We have. I mean, it's why I think if everyone rode a bike or went running or did something outside

for five minutes a day, our world would be a better place. And it's why people put plants inside their house as a grasp to have part of that nature therapy. So lucky for us, we can do it as much as we do. And I think we can all embrace more of that in our lives. I mean, I think the discussion, the conversation ends up being around

like these crazy feats, whether it's, you know, some of the things that you've done are Alex free soloing or the slack liners and, you know, wingsuit people. And it's about chasing this thrill. But that's not really what it's about. I think it's about what you just mentioned, which is just living more in alignment with nature and being connected in a very tactile way to, you know, this world that supports us, that's spinning around in space. I don't know too many extreme athletes. And I know a lot of all those people that you've mentioned are all friends. I'm sure. Yeah. It's a small community. It's a small, dedicated community, but I don't know really anyone. I mean, Alex, even he accepts the risk for what he's doing, but none of us go in with the intention of, of wanting to. Yeah. There's a sense that there, everyone's an adrenaline

junkie and I don't think that's fair or accurate. No, maybe endorphin junkie might be a better word or, or, um, I mean, for me, I didn't choose to go to Alaska and try to survive sub zero temperatures just because I wanted to risk frostbite and see what would happen. It was that I really wanted to experience. I did rod trail in Alaska and to, to howl at the moon with the wolves and to be so deep into, you know, the last frontier in wilderness. But your why is bigger than that overall. Do you know your why? A little bit.

Yeah. But you're the one in the hot seat right now. I know I am. I'm working on it. And it isn't really until- I mean, your TED Talk was about your why. It was. And I was just going to say it wasn't until 46, really, when I rode the Ho Chi Minh

Trail that, you know, I've been an explorer all my life, but that was the first time that I started to explore inside instead of outside. And that trail, riding that trail really did make me, instead of running and looking for a finish line and grabbing the next adventure, it made me slow down and stop and look inside for a minute. And that was really hard. Well, for more than a minute. But that was a big transition for me to understand why I am doing this. And, you know, people have asked all the time, you know, why do you torture yourself? Or, you know, it seems painful and awful and what are you doing? And yeah, Ho Chi Minh Trail and the subsequent four years that have followed in that journey have helped me understand. And that's why I went back to Alaska too, is because I can finally articulate

what I stand for and what I'm doing and the why. But it's still that kid in Downers Grove, Illinois, who wanted to dig around in the dirt in the backyard. The impetus is the exploration, but now it's a lot more awareness of the internal exploration instead of just the physical. And I think also, and what I get out of your journey is this discovery of how you can take these adventures and these experiences that you've had and translate them, tell stories around them in a way that can be of service to other people,

whether it's opening that door for more women to get involved or really to be of service to the people of Southeast Asia, you know, which we're going to get into. I think it's an amazing transition and hopefully all humans get there. You know, it's part of the aging process perhaps when we realize that the more you give, the more you get back and that it really just isn't about us anymore or yourself anymore. And that has been a really exciting revelation for me that, yeah, I'm still super competitive. I was afraid when I got back from the Ho Chi Minh Trail that the competitive nature and spirit was gone and what am I going to do now? And what does this all mean? And that really

is where I spent probably a couple of years and what you might call depression, trying to evaluate, well, who am I now? And what does this all stand for? And is the athlete competitor in me gone? And if she is, what's next? Yeah. So how does that kind of inform your, you're on this interior journey now, right? Like, you know, how do you think of yourself as a, as a spiritual being? Like, what is your spiritual perspective on this? I mean, it just seems like it couldn't be any other way. What's been really apparent to me is the connectivity of humans and how these threads of people you've never met in your whole life that, but you still are connected. And I don't know the terms to explain it, you know, but the village man that I met, who is the son of the father who buried my father. village man that I met, who is the son of the father who buried my father. And, you know,

meeting him face to face. And we'd met a lot of Lao villagers along the way. And I didn't know that we were pulling up to his house. You know, I knew we were near the place and this village chief was going to take me there. And I locked eyes with this guy, you know, the million, not million, a hundredth Lao villager we'd met along the way. I locked eyes with this person and there was something about him. I couldn't stop staring at him. And he smiled at me and I smiled at him and then found out later that his dad buried my dad and he was going to take me there. And he even, his mother was pregnant at the time of the crash. And so his dad had told him this whole story growing up and the village shaman had said to the mom, you know, when one soul dies, another is born. And, you know, this soldier is basically in your belly, in you. This is part of you. And so Mr. Eyre, when he's telling me this through a translator, he reaches down and shows me. And he has, it's kind of a funny story. He has six toes and he pointed

to his sixth toe and said, see, this is proof that we were brother and sister. You know, we're a part of each other. And I've never met this man. He lives in the hut in the middle of the jungle. And yet we're connected. And when I went back the time again, a year later, you know, I've taken trips back there now three times. And I asked him, you know, were you surprised to see me? And he's like, no. And then the last time I went, I, you know, I kind of asked again, I said, did you know we were coming back? And he said, yeah, I had a dream. I saw you in a dream a month ago. I knew you were coming. Wow. And I believe him. These things, like the connectivity of humans is just fascinating to me. And people that have served with my dad, we've become good friends. My sister and I have become closer because of it all.

And there is a reason behind it all. And so, yeah, whether you call it spirituality or connectivity, but it's to me reinforces how important it is that we find community in our lives, whether it's through your running club or your family or through a charity or whatever it is that humans have to make connections. What better way to conclude this two-part anthology than by sharing the wisdom of Paul Hawken from our first live podcast event, which was just such an incredible experience. A pioneering environmentalist, activist, entrepreneur, architect of corporate reform, multiple New York Times bestselling author,

and co-founder of The Drawdown Project, advocating practical solutions for climate change. Paul has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability, and it was an absolute honor and privilege to engage him in conversation. So this is me and Paul from episode 473, recorded live at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles. If you create spaciousness for people to come in and make up their own mind and get interested in narratives and stories and so forth,

you're going to do much better than if you hammer them and say, if you don't do something or we don't do something, we're screwed. And that may be true in a kind of interesting way, but it's ineffective. And so may be true in a kind of interesting way, but it doesn't, it's ineffective. And so I'm always trying to think how do you create the spaciousness

so it's not a duality, you know. I'm, you know, and I mean, in his poetry it's about non-duality, right. And so duality is really the core dis-ease that we have, you know. And when we say combating climate change, or I'm going to fix it, you know, I mean, or we're going to fight it, you know, it's so crazy because it's like there's an it somewhere. I'm going to go like this right now, okay.

Yeah. Okay. This is it. Right. This is the atmosphere. go fight it and tackle it as you will climate's not the problem we're the problem we're the problem it's a human problem and we actually want the climate to change we're trying to get it to change in a different direction if it doesn't we're screwed so it does we need it to change the question is we need to change what we do and how we relate to each other down here in order to stabilize the climate. And that's what Drawdown is about.

Yeah, well, this stems from, and you've talked about this a lot, this sense of otherness, right? When we look at the climate or our environment as something that's other or other individuals and what they're doing as other, as opposed to embracing the unifying, holistic, of oneness that we all are. That's what we need to step into and to really

like grok the solution here. We all grew up with a conditioned mind that basically steals our joy. Uh-huh. If we let it. Yeah. And that conditioned mind, first of all, is like we're an individual.

Uh-huh. Well, so here's a question for you as a man of science and somebody who worked very hard with their team to create this, we should show it for those who haven't seen it, this beautiful book that's so inviting that you can read if you're in fourth grade or you're a PhD student. It's

all very organized and digestible, and it's about the data and the math. How do you square being this man of science with your, you know, sort of Buddhist leanings and your spiritual perspective on how we solve these problems? Well, I'm not a man of science. I'm a man of science appreciation. I'm a journalist. Okay. Yeah, okay. I don't, I'm not a man of science. I'm a man of science appreciation. I'm a journalist. Okay. Yeah, okay. I don't think I would have done well in science at all. And the, a Buddhist perspective is really one of a really,

obviously, used in terms of mindfulness and, you know, awareness, I'm a really piss poor Buddhist so I just want to put that out there I know some that are fantastic and I bow to them every time I see them Jack Kornfield is a friend I just think he's an incredible teacher

but the basic teachings are about practice, about what to become if you understand that identity. And if you're confused about identity, I am fill in the blank, you're confused, basically. And then from that confusion arises actions that are inappropriate or unskillful or harmful or unkind.

And generosity arises from that transcendence. Kindness arises from that. Compassion arises from that. And I feel like this situation we're in the most gnarly super wicked problem humanity has ever described and may ever face if we're in, the most gnarly, super wicked problem humanity has ever described and may ever face, if we're still here, is actually a blessing and not a curse. It's, I mean, you can look at it like it's happening to me

and say I'm a victim and be pissed off. And then you live your life in that mind. That's the mind you're living in. That's the mind you're living in. That's the world you're living in. And that's kind of a hell realm. And if we look at it from the point of view it's feedback and from the atmosphere, but actually from the whole of the earth

because you can't really separate the atmosphere from plants and forests and water. If you look at it from that way, then it's a gift, it's feedback. And you take 100% responsibility. and forests and water. If you look at it from that way, then it's a gift, it's feedback, and you take 100% responsibility. You don't ask other people to do it. You take 100% responsibility for your actions,

who you are, and then you begin to imagine, innovate. You do what Inky was doing. You do spoken word or whatever. You do things that make sense to you that help you connect more to this beautiful extraordinary miracle we call the living world and that's the gift of of climate change the gift is transformation of self and of the world and the solutions are transformative and those those are just some of them, you know, there's a lot more. And so we can either accept the offering and the gift or we can go into self-pity.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, as I try that on, this idea that global warming, global climate change is happening for us as opposed to to us. And how does that feel? There is an empowerment, I think, with that, this sense of possibility that there are things that I can do, you can do, we can do collectively. And then I scroll through my Twitter feed and I see what's happening at the highest levels of government and what's happening with well-funded lobbyists

on K Street and the farm bill and the subsidies and the lack of regulation and oversight and the stripping away of protections and all the like. And all of that goes out the window. So how do you navigate that minefield of what's happening in government, the things that actually you can't control, you don't have a say in?

Yeah, well, I mean, I read the same RSS feeds and stuff that you do every morning. I don't read them at night. Yeah. I think, first of all, I mean, Javi says this famous line, you know, fear is the shabbiest room in the house, you deserve better conditions.

And so fear is not a place to live in, it doesn't work. And so to me, it's about curiosity, which is like, huh, look what they did, look what he said, look what he tweeted. Oh my gosh. So when I see the ignorance or the inability to connect again, someone I connect, you know, I become curious as to what is the solution to that. There was, what is the communication? What is it that's going what it what will it take

actually and one of the things about this week and the week prior not just the things that greta tunberg said which is so extraordinary but i mean the science as it was coming out is that the sense of urgency is really growing exponentially which is quite interesting and i feel like and i mean that basically and people say well we're not doing enough and we're losing and it's happening too fast and all that sort of stuff but i think if you actually look at the climate movement and the rate of growth it's growing faster than the inertial problem of killing the earth. And we are at that stage where I think more and more people are going to realize that degeneration or liquidation of the earth actually,

we're coming to a dead end on that one. And so I feel like the urgency is going to change very rapidly. And those who think they're ineffective, and I mean, Zach Bush and I were on a stage together a few weeks ago, and when I said came out I said we're rehearsing the future in other words we're rehearsing

an awareness and understanding and practice that as people wake up they will move to and look to and practice and enact and it doesn't go the other way now is there enough time unanswerable question

will we make it unanswerable question those questions are irrelevant what's relevant is our hearts and who we are and what we do and are we actually fully engaged i mean there's no difference between a climate denier and somebody who's littered in climate and doesn't do anything. They both don't do anything. So what's the difference? Yeah. Right? I thought of that.

Yeah, beautiful. We did it. It's done, 2019. That's a wrap, people. I hope you guys enjoyed this look in the rear view. It has been an amazing year, and I thank you for taking this ride with me. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the show on Apple Podcasts. Tell your friends about your favorite episodes.

Share the show on social media. Hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Google. And you can support the show and us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped create an amazing year on the show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing the podcast and all the short clips that we share on social media, Jessica Miranda for graphics, Allie Rogers for portraits, DK for advertiser relationships, and theme music by Annalema. I appreciate all of you.

Happy New Year. Happy holidays. I will see you back here in the year 2020. Until then, I will see you back here in the year 2020. Until then, have an amazing New Year's Eve. Here's to a fantastic new year. And I will see you there in the future. Peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.