The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best Of 2022: Part Two

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

As 2022 comes to a close and a new year beckons, we are presented with an opportunity to reflect on the past twelve months. Explore new aspirations. And set intentions for the year to come. Allow me to indulge this truth by introducing Part Two of my annual yearbook—an auditory anthology of the year’s most compelling conversations. Enjoy the best of the year. Guest List + Full Episode Links: RRP 692: Malcolm Gladwell RRP 723: Mel Robbins RRP 715: Casey Neistat RRP 718: Whitney Cummings RRP 695: Peter Attia, MD RRP 678: Gemma Newman, MD RRP 702: Dr. Gabor Maté RRP 714: Robynne Chutkan, MD RRP 703: Max Fisher RRP 660: Sylvia Earle RRP 701: Ken Rideout RRP 694: Colin O’Brady & Jenna Besaw RRP 705: Paul Conti, MD RRP 670: Earthling Ed Winters RRP 681: Chip Conley Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Peace + Plants, Rich

Today you can start doing the right thing right now. Our choices impact the future. This culture is not one that supports healthy human growth. There is a tight connection between feeling anxious and not allowing love to come in. The trauma is something that leaves the brain different going forward. Influence is much, much more valued than creativity. And that sucks. The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Happy holidays from myself and my team here in Podcastlandia.

We've really enjoyed revisiting these conversations and putting together this special auditory yearbook for all of you. And part two does not disappoint. Compiling this anthology every year is a sacred process for me, and I'm so proud of all the amazing conversations we've hosted and the enormous growth of this podcast. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find 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. 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. 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 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. 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. Okay, so this recap practice is just one way that I can honor the magic that we make here together. And it's kind of a reminder of

the power we all have to do and be better. So with this in mind, enjoy part two of our best of 2022 edition of the Rich Roll podcast, starting with the Lord of all things overlooked and misunderstood, the great and just frustratingly multi-talented journalist, author, podcaster, and runner, Mr. Malcolm Gladwell. When it comes to evaluating the greatness of elite performers, we overemphasize peak performance and underemphasize longevity.

So I got in, I sometimes participate in the let's run. Yes. Well, this came up in the kind of extended blog post interview that you did with David Epstein and then let's run kind of erupted in outrage over your thesis here. They are so wrong and I am so right. So I said that the Myler Nick Willis quote does not belong in the same conversation as Matt Sentruis. In other words, Willis is up here, Sentruis is a step below. Even though everyone said, well, Matt Sentruis won the gold medal in the 1500 meters. How can you say that Nick Willis, who has never won a gold medal in any games, is his equal? And I would say, well, the answer is that Matt Sentry had one great shining moment, that gold medal.

And he was a relevant runner for a kind of three, four year window and had one very, very fast 1500 meters that he ran. Nick Willis was relevant for 15 years. He doesn't have a gold, but he had a silver and a bronze in two separate Olympics separated by a lot of years. He doesn't have a goal, but he had a silver and a bronze in two separate Olympics, separated by a lot of years. He was a threat to win almost any race he entered for over a decade. His top three times are all faster than Matt Sentulis' times. He's broken four minutes for

the mile in 20 consecutive years. And I think as a culture, we are somehow dismissive of long periods of elite performance and infatuated with brief windows of extraordinary elite performance. And I think that's wrong. Right, well, of course, being, you know, as we're getting older, we have a longevity bias, right? David accuses you of being, you know, of course you're gonna over-index on this

because we're getting old, right? 100%, totally. But it goes back to the beginning of our conversation when we were talking about kids' sports, right? Like we over-index on the highest performers and we're not paying attention to how we kind of inject these experiences with joy to create lifelong pursuits.

So imagine, you're right, this is the exact same conversation. Imagine that Rich, I make you the athletic head at one of these local high schools, and you stand up in front of the entire school on your first day in the job. What is the speech you give, right? Now I'm gonna put words, I know the speech you give.

You're gonna write the speech for me. Yeah, well, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say, I am here to put words out. You're going to write the speech for me. Well, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, I am here to create in you, teenagers, a set of habits around physical exercise that will stay with you for the rest of your life, right? I'm going to use my job as athletic director to teach you how to live a healthy life. And you're talking about healthy

in a sense of physical exercise, but all those things as well, because that leads you into psychological health, emotional health. That's your goal. You are not going to say, I'm going to try and win as many California state titles over the next five years as I possibly can, right? You're not going to give that. And the tragedy is that everybody else who gets that job says, I'm here to win as many California titles as I can over the next five years. Everyone should give the speech you give. That is the speech that's not being given. And we are suffering as a country, as a society, as a result. Look around you. 1% of the population in middle age is practicing healthy habits. Why is that? Because no one bothered to teach them

at the moment when those habits need to be taught, right? So my argument about Nick Willis, the idea of having a standard of performance that spans 20 years, that matters. Why? Because Nick's going to be, when he's 70, Nick's going to be healthy and running and competing. And that's what I want. I don't care whether he's winning at 70, but the idea that he could put together a portfolio of running that starts in his teens and ends in his 70s is something that makes

me so proud to be part of the same group of runners as he is. Well, the animating force behind longevity is joy, right? Like you can't have a long standing career at a high bar unless you're enjoying what you're doing, right? So we have seen outstanding, excellent performances from people who reached the very peak, but then they burn out or they hate what they're doing and they walk away from it, never to participate in it again.

So how do you ignite that level of joy and connection to that pursuit that keeps you going? So at your age, you're still interested in running and training and all of those things, and it brings joy and community into your life. And if there's a great performance every once in a while that comes out of that, great. If not, who cares? Yeah. So I like that argument. It's very Gladwellian, of course. It's orthogonal to the way that we think about these things. But you can't be intellectually honest about this unless you recognize that that occasional

outstanding performer is the kind of spark that inspires us all, right? Like you need the Michael Phelps's and the LeBron's to set this bar that kind of gets us excited about maybe engaging in that sport to begin with. Yes. I'm not saying that I'm opposed to- I mean, look at how much you talk about these fantastic track and field athletes. Obviously, these are important to you. They are, but I also recognize that that set of values

applied to the body of the sport are counterproductive. So what I'm arguing is, it goes back to the conversation we had in the very beginning about cross-country teams should have 20 people on them and the 20th person should matter as much as the first. I'm not saying we run the world cross-country championships that way, but I do think we run the middle school and the high school cross-country championships that way. In other words, it's time for us to understand that there are two very different models here and that the models can be contradictory and we need to find a way to kind of foster them both.

And right now the elite model, the peak performance model is winning. And that is driving a lot of young people out of the sport and discouraging a lot of people and frustrating our attempt to restore the health of our society. 2022 marked the second appearance of self-help superstar Mel Robbins.

One of the most widely booked public speakers in the world with followers in the millions, Mel is a former lawyer turned talk show host, mega best-selling author, and now, damn her for moving in on my territory, podcast host with a knack for helping people blow up limiting beliefs and mindsets. Here's Mel on some recent breakthroughs and her struggle with anxiety. The other thing I wanted to say, because this is going to lead us right into the topic about mental health, about mindset, about happiness, and the profound issues I've been working on in my own life, is I completely understand what you mean when you say it's

really hard to accept a compliment. It's hard to accept a gift. You'd rather have it be about somebody else. One of the biggest breakthroughs I've had in the last couple years, Rich, is this epiphany about my inability to receive love and the fact that I was uncomfortable for a long time hearing a compliment or having somebody say something nice or having a birthday party thrown for me or receiving a gift. And I have recently had this breakthrough because I have learned that there is a extremely tight connection between feeling anxious and not allowing love to come in. And so I have this visual, rich, and I'm going to explain this to you because I just had this emotional experience happen when you sort of were like pushing away

the love I was trying to shower you with. So I think when you block love, like imagine like there's this closed door. And when somebody tries to link with you or connect with you or authentically tell you how amazing you are, if you have a hard time hearing it, you basically have put a solid door between you and the other person. And I've been working recently with visualizing the galley doors in a kitchen that swing both ways. Because you're very good at giving love. You're very good at giving support. You're an incredibly amazing friend because you're always there when somebody needs you

and you always open the door to listen, to advise, to share. And I'm the same way too. And for a long time, when somebody would try to give it back to me, the door was closed. So let's talk a little bit about where that comes from. Like what is the genesis of that instinct for you?

Or what have you learned about that? What I've learned about this, and I would strongly encourage you to bring Dr. Russell Kennedy onto your show. He wrote the book, Anxiety Rx. He's a medical doctor who also got his degree in neuroscience and he started experiencing anxiety when he was in medical school. And he has gone on to heal his anxiety.

He treats people around the world with anxiety. Like he is a game changer on this content and the topic of anxiety. So his theory, and I now see this completely in my life, his theory is that all anxiety comes from childhood and it comes from the experience of being separate in childhood. And so every single one of us has an experience, and you may not remember it because 80% of your brain is formed by the time you're five years old, but you have an experience where you as a kid feel distinct and separate from your caregiver. And he talks a lot about this concept of a parental mismatch. So there are a lot of us that have parents who are wonderful people, or maybe they're not wonderful people,

but you have parents who are wonderful people, but for you emotionally, just like the five love languages, there can be a mismatch in terms of the love language you speak and need and what your partner does, that your parent and the way that they provide emotional support is a mismatch. And so as a kid,

when you don't get the reassurance you need, or when you don't feel loved or seen or heard or accepted, you feel separate from the parent that you're biologically hardwired and needing to bond with, which also means you feel unsafe. And so as a little kid, at some point, an alarm would go off in your body whenever you felt separate from your parents. And it could be as innocuous as go hug your uncle and you're like this, I don't want to hug my uncle. And you're like, get in there. Or don't do that now. I'm busy or the snapping at you. And you immediately feel that alarm because you feel separate. And so what happens is that this alarm that starts going off and going off and going off

in moments where you feel separate, you're not feeling the love that you need, you're not feeling connected, you're not feeling reassured, it starts to go off all the time. Now, as you get older and older and older, I mean, we've all had the experience of walking in to see old friends at lunch. And for many of us, we feel that alarm go off. They've all arrived there. They're all talking. You feel that sense of separation. That's anxiety. That's what it is. It's in your body. And it is, according to Dr. Kennedy, it is the little you basically waving their hand saying, I need a little reassurance right now. That's all that it is. And for decades, I have approached what has been an experience of living with anxiety

from the neck up. I mean, the five-second rule is a neck up approach. And based on the last two years of intense therapy that I've been in and a lot of stuff that I've recently learned from Dr. Kennedy, I realize it is fundamentally a neck down issue. That attacking anxiety and these moments where you feel separate or scared or you feel the alarm go off in your body, if you, instead of treating it like a signal that something's wrong, if you actually treat it as a signal that you just need a little bit of love from yourself right now, just put your hand on your heart. You can like take a towel and kind of do this on your back, rub it back and forth, and you feel like you're hugging yourself. Take a deep breath. Tell yourself whatever you need to hear in that moment

in order to reassure yourself that you're going to be okay or that whatever, you know, I get it, you know, you feel a little nervous, but all those people at that table love you. It's freaking bonkers how powerful of a purchase this is. And it's also made me realize that, wow, also made me realize that, wow, I am so not used to giving myself that kind of love and reassurance. No wonder I'm uncomfortable letting other people give it to me. There really is no one quite like the singular Casey Neistat. An icon in many different senses, Casey is the host of the wildly popular YouTube channel with over 12 and a half million subscribers. He's an entrepreneur, an angel investor, a husband, a dad, just an overall great dude, smart dude. And here we talk about creativity,

we talk about filmmaking, and some of the ugly, broader truths of the creator economy that incentivize sensationalism. What is the state of the union when it comes to like the creator economy or the influence, you know, like as sort of the grandfather of, or somebody who, you know, holds some responsibility for birthing this new, you know, generation of creators, like how do you see that? Because you have pretty keen observational skills about what's going on, what's going wrong and how to make it better. Sure. I don't know about the ladder about how to make it better, but I can tell you from afar, not even from afar, I think I pay

pretty close attention. It feels like, and this is a bleak response, but it feels like influence is much, much more valued than creativity. And that sucks. And I hope that people take issue with me saying that. I hope that's just me being cynical. But TikTok, I think, is the most amazing, horrifying, both delivery mechanism and creation mechanism I've ever seen. Brilliant because I've never, ever experienced an interface that is just so easy to find new things. There's no sort of cognitive burden. There's no like spending 20 minutes figuring out what Netflix you want to watch

or scrolling through YouTube to see which thumbnail is the most attractive. No decisions to be made. There's no decisions to be made. If you're not interested, you just flip it and you're onto the next. And that's fucking incredible slash terrifying. And then from a creation perspective,

it's fascinating that they've removed all those barriers. They give you special effects that you can do in camera. They give you the camera, which is your phone. They give you amazing soundtracks, which is that I watched this video and I liked it. So I'm just going to use that audio. And it's like, they've overcome all of those creative barriers.

But at the end of the day, I don't know that that has bolstered creativity. I think what it has done is it has made the top of the funnel so much wider than it's ever been. Like if the top of that funnel was super narrow when you and I were really young, when we're in the 90s, when to be a filmmaker,

man, being an indie filmmaker and getting into a film that was fucking impossible to do. And then it got a little bit wider, a little bit wider. And then YouTube and anybody could now share with the world, but you still had to figure out how to create and make and all that shit.

TikTok's gotten rid of everything. And now the top of the funnel is wider than it's ever been. But it still feels like the bottom of the funnel is wider than it's ever been. But it still feels like the bottom of the funnel, like really amazing stuff that you watch and it means something to you is as small as it's ever been. Everything is ephemera. Yeah. And on TikTok, it's not even about following people that intrigue you. It's just about reacting to whatever the algorithm decides you might want to look at.

Sure. So if in the course of a year, I'm making numbers up, but if in the course of the year, you see a hundred things, paintings or hear songs or watch movies or YouTube videos or see a picture or watch a TikTok that affect you, that you don't stop thinking about. We're now seeing a million, but that number of how many affect you, like that hasn't moved for me. I don't see more brilliant stuff. I just see more stuff. And what concerns me is that

that's what's sort of being celebrated is like, now it's purely about the metrics and not about how you achieve those metrics. And that sucks. I don't know where that goes. I don't know where that goes from here sucks. I don't know where that goes. I don't know where that goes from here. And I don't know what that means. Like I had a very, I think, eloquent sort of monologue

about how the egalitarianization of filmmaking is gonna mean it finally is an art form that everybody has access to. And we're not gonna get to see new perspectives and ideas shared in ways we'd never seen before because you don't have to go to NYU film school to make something. And I think that probably is still true, but we're watching it manifest and it's not, I'm not seeing new brilliant shit that's like, wow, I didn't see that coming. And that kind of sucks. it does make me want to go back and purely focus on the creative and see that if I can use my platform,

which is still big, to find success, that will be very reassuring. But if I make stuff that I still feel like is good and I'm really proud of and nobody watches it, I don't know what that would be. I'd still be psyched. You still have the satisfaction of- I'll still be psyched about it. As long as I think it's good, I'll still be psyched about it. But it would be telling of'd still be psyched. You still have the satisfaction of- I'll still be psyched about it.

As long as I think too, I'll still be psyched about it. But it is, yeah. But it would be telling of where we are right now. You know, is somebody more likely to try to follow in your footsteps or are they gonna pivot to TikTok where it's just easier to audience capture and create these short little things and jump on trends?

Are you gonna be like the guys that made everything everywhere all at once? You know, there is like some incredible filmmaking going on. Dude, have you seen Top Gun? Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. I haven't stopped. Like I'm trying to time it so I can sneak into theaters just to see that third act over

and over and over. There's still good shit being made. And I'm really excited about that. Super successful standup comedian, writer, actor, producer, and host of the Good For You podcast, Whitney Cummings, made a heartwarming and hilarious appearance on episode 718. Known for her stand-up, as well as for her sitcom, Whitney, she remains underappreciated, I think, in her wisdom with issues relating to mental health, which are earned through her own personal confrontation and working through a past marked with anxiety, as well as a codependency disorder.

So here's an excerpt lifted from that very conversation. So what was your breaking point with all of this? Like, how did you get ushered into the rooms? I had a family member going to rehab. The wild thing, probably very similar to work addiction, is that codependence is incredibly rewarded. It is incredibly rewarded. You are so useful. I played sports really competitively. I was always the first person to get there, the last person to leave. Like I was- Hello. Yeah, totally. Just mostly because you guys organized this wrong. You know, we think we're right about everything. I had an alcoholic coach who was less reliable to make it to

mornings from practice. So I had the keys to the pool. And that is a form of trauma that most people wouldn't categorize under trauma, but it was like- And I was proud. I was like, yeah, I'm reliable. I will be there. I will make sure that everybody gets in. We're going to have morning swim practice. Which goes, oh, the authority figure isn't reliable. I'm on my own. So as soon soon as and that drives the control issues and the perfectionism because you have great data that you should have the keys you know that's the tricky part is when someone's like you're mothering you're micromanaging well you guys suck at this like there's also a tricky one because like well I am better at this than you are maybe not for the right reasons but I am you know so then you get to a point where you just go it's not about that you know and then

when you're leading 200 people there's no time to act like that. And it turns out when you think that you're helping someone or helping them save time, you're just patronizing them. And you're like telling them, I don't trust that you can do this, so I'm going to do it myself. But the guy says, oh, you know, I'll do it for you. Oh, I got it. No, no, I got it. No worries. You go home. But you're really just saying, I don't like the way you do things. I'll just martyr myself and do it and then start to hate you and not even give you a chance, frankly. Right. You know, because we were proven wrong as a kid.

It was very hard to trust other people to do things. I had a family member of mine went into rehab and I was, you know, there 24-7, did the intervention, bringing the Nutri-Grain bars, bringing the the, you know, athletic greens, you know, just there every single day. What do you need? Can I get you a sweatshirt? Do you need new shoes? Do you need a comforter? I mean, I was just there all day, every day while I was doing two television shows simultaneously. And someone pulled me aside, my now therapist, who was the family therapist there. She specializes in neuroscience of addiction, childhood trauma, et cetera, et cetera.

She's 30 years sober. She's amazing. And she came up to me and she was just like, hey, so, you know, you're just killing this person faster. And I was like, you know, but, and of course I had guilt about what happened to both of us as kids. You know, what happened to her?

And I just wanted to fix it with my love. And that's not how neurology works. That's not how- Younger than you? Older. Older. Interesting. You know, and so we both have sexual abuse in our past,

which is a very, once you really get a handle on that, a lot of behavior starts to make sense. And you start to go, oh, wait a second. All these things I do, I could actually kind of like reroute to be incredible tools to give me a giant advantage. Like I actually think I have a giant advantage because of all these things. Like let me just perceive it that way. You know? So for the longest time I perceived my

trauma as exactly what it was. The trauma I didn't block out, which we can talk about later, or repress or completely disassociate from, but I perceived it as trauma and as a liability. And I have two broken legs and a broken brain. And then as soon as I changed my perception on it, I was like, oh my God, I was like gifted all these wild superpowers. I'm just using them wrong. You know? So once I was able to do that, my life got pretty awesome, but it took, you know, 14 years in Al-Anon and still sponsoring and still super involved. So when that therapist was like, you're actually killing this person that you love more quickly. Because you're not giving them the dignity of their own experience and they can't grow if you

do everything for them. Well, and you're slowly killing yourself trying to solve a problem that's not your problem to solve, right? Correct. But when that lands like a ton of bricks, like, does that ring a bell in you and say, I need to go to Al-Anon or like, how did you like walk into your first meeting? Well, cause then the first thing I did was I went to the person. I was like, am I killing you? Like, is this bad? Should I not give you a hundred dollars every day for whatever you need for groceries? Yeah. But you're, you're asking the unreliable narrator. Like, of course they're going to say, keep doing that. Does the drug addict need cash in rehab? Yeah. So I did the, you know, cardinal mistake, which I went back to the person and I was like, I just talked to her and she thinks it's fine when I'm doing it. Like, and she was like, okay, so I'm like, I'm a hero.

And I get, I don't think you understand. Okay. Like I'm handling this. I've got it. And she said to me, she goes, you know, there's a program that, you know, is worth going to. I'd love to take you some time. And, you know, I was like, why? Why would I need a program? She's the one that won't stop drinking. Come from the same household, cut from the same cloth.

Had the birth order been reversed, it would have just, you know. And she goes, well, I just watched you go to the problem for the solution. And I was like, yeah, that's how you get a solution. Like, I was like, you sober people are just, you don't get it. You know what I mean? I saved, I'm very busy person. I don't, so her whole thing was like, no, if your problem is someone else's behavior, you go to a program for the solution. Cause the solution might be do nothing. The solution might be do not a damn thing because we're so addicted to taking an action. But that doesn't compute. Does not compute. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to go to this meeting so I can figure out

how to get her sober. Well, that's the equivalent of like, I'm going to go to AA so I can figure out how to continue to drink without being an alcoholic. It's totally ridiculous. And so, no, or people that are like, I shoplift bad, but I'm just going to the gambling 12-step programs because it's basically a gambling addiction at the base of it. It's like, well, you're not, okay. But yes, the lies we tell ourselves and the delusions. And look, I had a ton of proof that I was a super high function as a perfectionist, as a micromanager, and as a martyr. I had gotten a lot of- Which makes it harder because the world is smiling upon you

and you're being wildly rewarded for these unhealthy behavior patterns that you're blithely unaware at some point are really gonna derail you at best and might actually kill you. Sometimes we're hurting people and ourselves and we don't even know it. What practices do we need to adopt now in order to live longer, live stronger, be

more agile, and more cognitively fit as we age? Well, physician, engineer, and Stanford Medical School grad Peter Attia, MD, answered these questions and more on episode 695, which was kind of a mini masterclass on longevity and human performance. So for your centenarian Olympics, like what are the events that you're working towards? Like what are the categories? You know, for me, I think my kids are the greatest source of joy in my life. So, you know, my hope is that my kids have kids

and that we're in proximity to them. And I just get to do the kind of stuff with them that I get to do with my kids right now. So again, it's silly, simple stuff. But again, I'm fortunate that I still have two boys that are young, five and eight. And so I realize to play with them is hard. Like they play on the floor.

We're building Lego, we're building tracks, we're pushing trucks, we're doing that stuff. And when I look at, for example, my dad, who's 85, he can't engage with kids like that. And a big part of it is my dad's mentally as sharp as a tack. He can't get on the floor. So something as simple as can you get on the floor, spend 30 minutes without your back breaking, and get up. Now, that takes a lot of intra-abdominal stability. You really have to be able to initiate intra-abdominal pressure to maintain that position. And of course, getting up requires a whole bunch of coordinated activities.

I mean, I have a very lofty aspiration, which if I get there is great, which is I'm gonna be able to get up without using my hands still, which I can do now, obviously. But even if I can just do it on one point of support, that would be fantastic. I love archery. It is such a big part of my life. And even though now I'm pulling a 75 pound bow, I think to be able to pull a 50 pound bow

in my marginal decade would be fantastic. I love driving race cars. Now, Paul Newman drove a race car until probably a year or two before the end of his life. And so for me, that's something that I would love to be able to continue to do. And that requires not just the strength and the coordination and the mental acuity to do it. You have to be able to tolerate insanely hot temperatures. It gets so hot inside of a race car that you have to kind of have the kind of cardiovascular fitness to tolerate that. Right.

But having clarity about what those things are allows you to then back cast to now and start to build the foundation for that capability. Yeah, like we were talking about earlier. I mean, that's a big part of why I do what you do, which is I do some of my activity, like I rock four or five days a week, carrying a weighted backpack,

but I always do it at like five or 6 p.m. So in Austin, that's about the hottest time of day. So it's a hundred degrees. Sometimes it's 105, 106, and you got a 60 pound pack on your back and you go walk three miles in the hills, your ability to tolerate heat. You go to somebody's barbecue at 11 o'clock

when it's 90 and everybody's dying, you're like, there's nothing. Right. Well, beyond this kind of realm, when you think about longevity and when we talk about longevity, we're really talking about health span, like what are the other buckets?

And I guess a question that I have is, how does this kind of line up with, you know, the ideas of the blue zones and these other kind of principles that guide how to think about setting ourselves up for longevity success? Well, as you said, lifespan and healthspan are the two vectors of longevity,

but I do think most people think more about the healthspan one. And the good news is they're not independent vectors, right? These are actually not orthogonal vectors. They're, even though we represent them orthogonally on a graph, if you take all of the steps to live a better life, they're just invariably going to also lead to a longer life. Now, there are exceptions to this rule. There are certain trade-offs one might make if you were really purely optimizing on one or the

other, but the overlap is so powerful. So I usually tell people not to worry about it. In other words, if they say, I don't care how long I live, I just want to live the best life possible. It's like, great, you're going to live longer, by the way. So I think of them, as I said, in those three buckets, sort of a cognitive bucket, a physical, structural bucket, and an emotional bucket. And within that physical bucket,

just to kind of round it out, you have everything we've just spoken about, which is the stability component. And that's the foundation. Everything has to be built upon that. And then there were sort of think of like three pillars that stand on the foundation, strength and aerobic base,

which is effectively a proxy for mitochondrial efficiency and exceptional fuel partitioning, and then a peak aerobic slash anaerobic piece. So kind of think of your VO2 max, your zone two and your strength. And again, I think people have a sort of intuitive sense of what those look like, but the devil is in the details

and how much time should you be spending on one versus the other? And it's really kind of a function of how much time is one willing to devote to this craft. Right. I think we, for understandable reasons, probably tell people that they don't need to do that much exercise because we're talking to the average person who's doing none. And it's true that if you're doing no exercise, just getting you to do three

hours a week has an unbelievable impact on your life, probably more than anything else you could tell that person to do. But I would hate for the message to end there because I think if you could do 10 hours a week and it's really well-structured, the sky's the limit for what you could achieve. Okay, Gemma Newman, MD, AKA the Plant Power Doctor, is a family medicine specialist in the UK where she provides evidence-based nutrition

and lifestyle advice to her patients. In this, her second appearance on the show, Gemma and I discussed optimizing hormone health through diet and lifestyle. People who have been longtime listeners or viewers of this show know that i've had all manner of whole food plant-based advocates on the program medical professionals including two recent appearances by our mutual friend simon hill and over the last nine years i feel like i've covered

most of the issues regarding this lifestyle and the role of nutrition and health generally, but one area that I admit to not having covered with any particular focus or intensity is women's health specifically, how this differs from general health advice and the role of food and hormones. So how do we find our way into this topic? I mean, maybe start with some thoughts

about when you say women's health, like what does that mean? How is that different from just human health in general? And we can get more focused from there. Yeah, so I mean, I did do extra qualifications in obstetrics and gynecology, OBGYN, you'd call that here, and family planning as part of sort of my work as a doctor. So for a while I worked in family planning as well. And I think it's not that women's health is over and above different in terms of nutrition to men's

health, but that there are various considerations that we would have physically that men don't have. Now, obviously the most common thing would be the fact that we have periods and we are kind of bound by that sort of natural cycle from the age of puberty to the age of menopause. Menopause itself is a huge life transition, which doesn't occur in the same way with men. I think primarily because there's less of a fluctuation and a sort of steep decline in hormones relevant to men's health. It's more of a gradual decline as opposed to a precipitous one. Exactly.

It's much more gradual. And I think that helps to ameliorate symptoms. Whereas for women going through perimenopause up to menopause, then you can actually have wild fluctuations of estrogen. It can go way up, it can go way down. And that's really one of the main things that's sort of responsible for a lot of the symptoms that women will get around the perimenopause, which we can,

I suppose, define. But, you know, hormones affect men too, obviously. They affect everybody. There's actually over 50 different hormones and they have to work together in synergy in order for us to perform at our best. And it affects every aspect of our lives, not just puberty, menopause, periods, fertility, but everything, mood, energy, our skin. It affects sperm counts, all sorts of things. So it's actually integral to all humans, but I'd say for women, there are a lot more considerations,

especially around the fact that we carry children and that we carry children and that we have periods and that we have to go through menopause, which are very distinct life phases that do require extra thought and attention, I think. And so what is the role that nutrition can play in this and also lifestyle habits? So if we talk first about periods perhaps because that's probably one of the main things that women will focus on from around about the age of 11 or 12 the quality of your periods can change based on the nutrition that you have so periods are starting earlier which i think is an interesting thing i don't think that's just because of extra nutrition. I think there are also other factors

at play with regard to environmental pollutants and things like that. I think there's a lot of reasons why girls are starting their periods earlier. And that's really significant because essentially that means that our growth is kind of done. We don't tend to get much taller after we start our periods. And I think if you go through puberty and start your periods too early, it can put you at increased risk of actually things like heart disease at a younger age. I've never heard that.

Yeah, which is a really interesting thing. And I think there's just a lot of extra hormone exposures in our environment that we haven't been able to consider before. So- Meaning like environmental toxins, toxins in skincare products, et cetera, in our foods that are dysregulating our natural hormonal cycles. Yeah, exactly. And things that mimic estrogens in our body, plastics, for example, phthalates, BPA, they have hormone mimicking effects, which I think do affect things like fertility in men, sperm counts, but also potentially also

affect when young girls and women start their periods. So yeah, there's a lot to consider now that we haven't really considered in the past because they didn't exist. But I think in terms of practical things that people can do, increased fiber is so important. Main reason being that if you're constipated, you're actually potentially recycling unwanted hormones through the body. Hormones that you would have otherwise got rid of, you're actually reabsorbing. So trying to make sure that young girls and, well,

children and everybody in general doesn't get constipated is quite a good way of reducing our excess hormone exposure. I think it's important to mention that our fat cells in our body are also hormonally active. They can produce estrogen. So if we have more of those, then we also have more exposures to estrogen as a result of that, which can affect men as well as women.

But I think that that's a really important thing that, again, is not necessarily talked about much, the fact that our fat is also hormonally active too. And yeah, so I think fiber is a really important thing. It reduces our hormone exposures. It helps us to produce short-chain fatty acids, which is also great for helping our hormone regulation, feeding our gut microbiome, which is important as well for hormone regulation, which is also important for our immune system, which affects our hormone regulation. So all these things are linked. Wait, you're saying it's all related? I am. The root of countless problems in our society lies in a sleeping giant, unhealed trauma. Author and addiction specialist Dr. Gabor Mate returned for his second appearance

on the show and gave us a powerful primer on the ways modern life is driving us apart from ourselves and others and fueling mental and physical disease along the way. All of our afflictions, whether it's addiction, chronic physical illness, what we call mental illness, dysfunctions, they all have a template of childhood wounding. and discrete individuals, but they are representative of a process inside each of us that manifests a relationship to our environment. Most importantly, our early rearing environment, but also the culture that we live in. So to give you one example, it's an obvious example. If you look at the number of kids diagnosed with, say, ADHD, the numbers are going up all the time.

That can't be an individual thing. That has to say something about the culture, the context. Or if you look at the rising incidence of autoimmune disease, the rising incidence of addictions, of mental health conditions. If you look at the fact that, say, black American women, the more experience of racism they have to endure, the greater the risk for asthma. It just tells us that it's not just about individual biology, it's about life in a culture.

Yeah, and on that idea of culture, you use this Petri dish example to illustrate that point, which I thought was really powerful because I'd never really thought of it in that way. Can you explain that? Sure, so when we are studying microorganisms in a laboratory, we grow them in a broth. We give them a broth to nourish them.

You call that a culture, a culture medium. And if the organisms in this culture medium, this culture broth were dying off in great numbers or not thriving or ill, we would call that a toxic culture i'm saying that when in a society like ours more and more people are getting sick more addicted more mentally ill more people are cutting themselves more people are dying of overdoses that's also a representative of a toxic culture and i'm saying that that's what we live in.

Hence the subtitle of the book, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. This culture is not one that supports healthy human growth. And when you say toxic culture, we should probably define that because it's a little bit different than what people might suspect. They're thinking of environmental pollutants and the like,

and that's certainly a contributor to a lot of this, but you're really talking about what's going on societally and culturally. Yes, so that is all true, that it has to do with the physical stuff. There was an article reported just the other day that half of Americans were exposed to unhealthy levels of lead when they were kids. You know, that's toxic.

Right. But you're right. That's not the toxic that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the nature of the culture itself, the very values of the culture, the way we bring up children, the expectations we put on human beings, they're toxic to people's healthy development.

It seems so obvious. And in reading the book, it's like, of course, this is an issue. toxic to people's healthy development. It seems so obvious. And in reading the book, it's like, of course, this is an issue. And yet it's so highly unaddressed or ignored. And in reading the book, I couldn't help but draw an analogy to what Yuval Noah Harari is doing

in terms of how we think about history, like telescoping out and looking at everything from 10,000 feet, which is not something we do when we think about and talk about health. We narrow down to the cellular level, to the microbe level, and the scientific method dictates that we control for variables and look at things in isolation.

And of course, we've made tremendous progress as a society by dint of the technological advances that we can make by utilizing the scientific method. But it's a method that's myopic to the deep interconnectedness of everything. It doesn't allow us to look at things as holistic systems and the interplay that is leading to so many of these problems. Like we can't address these diseases and these conditions on their own without looking at what's contributing to them by virtue of external forces. Well, you know, yes, I agree with your formulation, but I would also argue that there's all kinds of science

that shows the interconnections of things. So that to talk about human beings in a context and that health represents life in a context rather than just a biological event, that's science. And we have literally tens of thousands of scientific studies to indicate how emotional environments affect people's biology, our immune system and our hormonal apparatus and our nervous systems and our guts and our hearts and so on. And how social conditions, how inequality, how stress, how genderism or racism actually has physiological impacts.

They go underneath the skin. They affect our biology. This is not speculation. My knock on the medical profession is we keep talking about evidence-based practice, but we don't look at a lot of the evidence that's already been published, including in major medical journals. So I'm not talking about insight and ideology or spirituality on the one hand and science on the other. I'm talking about science that has actually shown the interconnections. But there's such a wide gap between that understanding and the practice of medicine

or how we treat people in a clinical setting. There's a huge, what we can call the science and practice gap. Right. So the problem is not with the science. The problem is that we don't put the science into practice. Next up, I want to give a spotlight to the queen of all things gut health, Dr. Robin Shuttkamp. A deep dive into antiviral aspects of gut health, this exchange is appointment listening for anyone trying to better understand the intricate connection between our microbiome

and our immune system and what we can all do better to optimize this relationship. One of the things with the book, I purposefully did not put COVID in the title. The book is called The Antiviral Gut Tackling Pathogens from the Inside Out. And while COVID is definitely on the radar, there's a lot in the book as you've read it about other viruses, about polio, about influenza, et cetera. And when it comes to long COVID or post-acute

sequelae to COVID or long haul or all the different names we have for it, one of the things we know a lot about is post-viral syndromes. This is not the first post-viral syndrome. It won't be the last. I think the problem, Rich, is that we weren't expecting it because we were thinking this is kind of like a bad flu virus

and post-viral syndromes from flu are not as common. But think about AIDS. AIDS is a chronic form of HIV. HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, causes AIDS and it causes this prolonged disease. Now we have pretty good antiretrovirals for that, but it's still a chronic condition. You think about hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer in many patients. You think about Epstein-Barr virus causes mono, it's been linked to chronic fatigue syndrome and it's been linked to MS now,

multiple sclerosis, and it's linked to certain forms of lymphoma. So we have lots of precedent. In my world in gastroenterology, we see something called post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome, post-infectious IBS, which is people who have had a clear infectious episode and then lo and behold, maybe they have acute symptoms, diarrhea or something, nausea, episode, and then lo and behold, maybe they have acute symptoms, diarrhea or something, nausea, vomiting, and those acute symptoms resolve, but then lo and behold, they have irritable bowel syndrome

and the GI tract is sort of never the same. So we have a lot of experience. If you think about some of the sexually transmitted diseases like herpes and human papillomavirus, so HSV, HPV, et cetera, we know there are acute and chronic forms of those. And we also know similarly,

who is at risk for those chronic forms. And there are some outliers to that, but we know, for example, in women with sexually transmitted diseases, that the population of healthy lactobacillus bacteria in the vagina that produce acid to repel these viruses, that having lower levels can make you more susceptible to the acute process of after exposure becoming infected, and also to the chronic aspects of that. So post-viral syndromes are not new, but because

this is a relatively new virus, we're getting familiar with what the post-viral landscape looks like with long COVID. And there are now more than 200 different symptoms that are associated. And of course, a lot of this is reporting, everything sort of gets put in, but we know what some of the more common symptoms are, fatigue, respiratory symptoms, brain fog, et cetera. And if we look at that, what we see are clear microbial differences in a lot of these patients. And a lot of this we know from the CFS, ME literature with chronic fatigue syndrome, that researchers at Cornell were able to look at the microbiome and identify people who had ME CFS based on what was going on microbially. And we've seen a lot of

those microbial differences. We don't have a clear-cut microbial signature yet, but we have some hints. And there was a study that was published in one of our GI journals. They followed 106 patients with acute COVID. They found a very high rate of chronic symptoms, about 76%. And in that 76%, they found significant microbial abnormalities in the majority of people who went on to have chronic symptoms versus a minority who recovered very distinct microbial patterns. So it's difficult to sort out how much of that is cause versus effect because the virus itself can induce dysbiosis. This wasn't something we talked about, but the binding of SARS-CoV-2 to those ACE2 receptors can induce microbial changes,

dysbiotic microbial changes. And then of course, dysbiosis itself, as we've been talking about, is a risk factor for having worse outcomes. So they're both sides to that. We know that autoimmunity is an issue. We see autoimmune markers. Many of those patients never had an actual autoimmune disease before, and they still don't have an autoimmune disease, but it's almost like a precursor. And we don't know what's going to happen with some of those patients with the positive ANAs and different nonspecific markers of inflammation. Are they going to progress to an autoimmune disease? Or is that stage where they are, where they have an autoimmune marker, but not an actual autoimmune

disease, a specific disease onto itself? We see EBV plays a role also. Yeah, that was the thing that jumped out to me, that there's a sense that it might be a reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus. And I didn't realize that a huge percentage of people are harboring some amount of that virus. The majority of the population. And EBV is fascinating, the history, because if we look at 100 years ago, they called it idiopathic adenitis. Idiopathic meaning unknown. Adenitis means the glands are inflamed. And then it wasn't until researchers at Hopkins,

a couple of decades later, linked this to mono. And then just recently this year, some groundbreaking research linking the EBV to MS. And the lymphoma connection has been made a few decades ago. So it's still evolving. And the role that EBV and reactivation of EBV may play in long COVID is still, you know, there's still a big question mark there. But again, we have precedent because we have lots of research in the MS world, in the lymphoma world, et cetera. So for people out there who are struggling, you know, I want them to know that even though the virus is novel, the science is not novel. We have a lot of

data. We have a lot of researchers, a lot we do know, you know, there are lots of people working on it. This next clip features New York Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Chaos Machine, what I think is one of the most important books of 2022, Mr. Max Fisher. Max, join me on the podcast to discuss the insidious ways that social media platforms shatter our attention, foment division, and fracture our world and what we can all do about that. In your reporting on this and all the work that you've done and the people that you've spoken to, what is the thing that most shocked you or surprised you about the extent of this problem? I think it was honestly learning that using the platforms, it was what we talked about, using the platforms influences your own sense of right and wrong, even when you're not on them. And it was this sense that it's not just the

Pizzagate guy. It's not just the QAnon people, that it's all of us who are being distorted by it. When I started to learn about that, I really scaled back my social media usage. I turned off a lot of the features and I really felt the change. I felt the change in my mood. I felt the change in how I think about politics and the news that happens. I don't read it through social media. I just read it through, you know, regular old websites or podcasts. And I think that maybe that just shook me the most because it implicated me.

Yeah. You know, probably objectively, I should be most upset about the fact that Facebook played a major role in a genocide that expelled a huge population of Myanmar from the country. But it's hard not to come out of this thinking that I was affected too without realizing it. And that if that is true for billions of people, including like 80% of Americans, then the effect must be pretty profound. Yeah. This mass unprecedented experiment that is being performed on all of us in real time. Right. Without precedent.

I mean, it almost, it's, I'm going to sound like that guy from Dr. Strangelove. It's almost this like pulp B sci-fi movie where they're putting drugs in the water and nobody realizes it and we're all taking it without realizing it. I mean, that's more true than not, you know? Right. So, when we try to understand what the possible solution to this is, it very quickly becomes incredibly complex and tricky. And it seems to my mind that this battle is being fought on several fronts. On the one hand, we have this argument about free speech, right? Free speech being a core fundamental premise of all of these platforms that you track all the way back

to the inception of Silicon Valley and the sensibility of these founders and these engineers. So we have the free speech piece. We have this piece about how everything can be solved through engineering, which brings up the algorithm. We just need a better algorithm to solve this. And then the third piece to my mind is the reluctance of the people who are running these companies to at least publicly acknowledge the problem or the extent of the problem and to get into action in terms of solving it. Right. It's really tough when you think about the corporate incentives because

at some point it's like asking cigarette companies. They're antithetical to each other. Yeah. Right. Right. And it's just the way that our system and our economy works is you're asking these giant companies or we're asking these giant companies to disavow the thing that makes the money to say that not only are cigarettes addictive, but you shouldn't smoke them. Or not only is pumping oil bad for the environment, but in fact, we should probably radically downgrade the amount of energy that we use. This is a question of, I think it's more helpful to think about where you want to end up and then try to figure out how you get there than the other way around. When you start with how do we get there, it's easy to say, well, just tweak the algorithm.

That was the solution after the 2016 election is they said, well, we'll get better engineers to come in and have even more sophisticated algorithms, which, of course, just made the problem fundamentally worse. which of course just made the problem fundamentally worse. And I would ask people who study this, including a lot of people who are still in Silicon Valley and are true believers, what's the place that we should try to aim for to end up? It would always be some version of turn it off, not turn off the entire thing because social media does provide a lot of good

that we don't want to give up, but turn off the engagement maximizing features, turn off algorithms, turn off the, even Jack Dorsey, the former head of Twitter, he for a while was saying maybe having a little light counter at the bottom of a tweet is incredibly destructive to our society and politics, and maybe we should turn that off. Yeah, and the later, I mean, he was kind of late to come around, but in the final stages of his tenure and the twilight of his reign, he had some real epiphanies that ultimately were not made real, right? Right.

There was a period where he was pushing against the financial incentives of his own company and all the other companies were growing by leaps and bounds and his wasn't because he was kind of constraining its growth because he thought that it wasn't healthy. There is a version of social media that like any platform of any kind can have some negative effects to it. But the pre-2008,

2006, pre-newsfeed, pre-likes social media, it didn't have a lot of these harms. And it was something that contained a lot of the good that we hope for and like and appreciate from social media without these distorting effects and without this kind of addictiveness and the changes to our behavior because they didn't have engagement-maximizing features. While I love all my guests, I have to admit that I've never met anyone quite like Sylvia Earle, a marine botanist, oceanographer, and one of the very first National Geographic explorers in residence, also somebody who was named first hero for the planet by Time

Magazine. Sylvia is a straight up living legend. Now 87, it was an honor to talk to her about the majesty of our critical blue waters and the importance of preserving them. State the case for why ocean health is so critical. I mean, you mentioned carbon capture and how vital the oceans are in terms of that, but why should we care? Like, why is this so crucial that we do everything in our capacity to protect and preserve our ocean system? When I was asked that question back in the 70s by a young woman reporting for an Australian publication,

it just flashed with me that, okay, so you don't care about the ocean because you don't eat fish, you don't swim, people don't drink salt water. If the ocean dried up tomorrow, why should you care? I said, okay, you got it. Dry up the ocean. No ocean. What have you got? Only about 3% of Earth's water is not ocean. And that 3 percent is constantly being recharged by the ocean as water evaporates up into the clouds and falls back on the land and the sea it's the biggest storehouse of water start with the water all life needs water ourselves very much included the shorthand version of that is no blue, no green, no ocean, no us. So we're not going to dry up the ocean tomorrow, but let's say you just modify the ocean, warm the ocean, make it a generator of more powerful storms and more frequent storms.

Make it a generator of sea level rise because warm water takes more space than cold water. And that's part of what we're seeing right now is the expansion of the ocean. Change the temperature of the ocean, either make it colder or warmer, and you've altered one of the most basic things that we take for granted, the range of temperature that is suitable for human existence. And if it's just water, it doesn't work either. It's the living ocean that makes Earth habitable. It's taken all preceding history to develop this closely interacting system of systems in the ocean, living systems, mostly built of collaborations, of partnerships,

of this, it's like a giant symphony, and every piece has a place. And what we have done in a remarkably short period of time is to derail, upend, cut swaths through, disrupt this amazing system that, they say it's taken four and a half billion years actually to assemble and literally about four and a half decades to significantly rip apart. And we're doing it with our eyes open, with a smile on our face. We have laws to reinforce it, laws protecting shipping, laws protecting industrial fishing, laws actually giving subsidies to kill the ocean. Right. Yeah, the subsidies are a huge problem. Right. Because they provide the underpinning for all of these systems that are destroying. I mean, one of the more heartbreaking scenes in Mission Blue is when you travel out in the Coral Sea

past the Great Barrier Reef, and you drop in on what was once just an epic reef system and it's completely dead. And just seeing how you're so far out there in the middle of nowhere, and yet- The middle of everywhere. Yeah, yeah, exactly. As you heard one of us say.

Exactly. It's so heartbreaking. And yet you carry yourself with such conviction and a level of hopefulness, despite all of this evidence. You know, you were there many years ago. You've seen this evolution. How do you hold on to that sense of hopefulness? Well, during 2020, when I had to kind of, like most of the rest of the world, sit back and reflect on questions such as this, you know, what reason is there to hope in the face of so much that's so negative?

What reason is there to hope in the face of so much that's so negative? Wars, poverty, hunger, conflict. You could go on and list, and certainly climate and the loss of the diversity of life loom large in my mind. But at that time, I was also in the midst of writing this big book for National Geographic. We have it right here. Ocean, a Global Odyssey, right? And although I had thought a lot about the question, what reason is there for hope? I really had a chance to dive in literally what we now know about the ocean. It takes time to sift through the latest explorations, the latest experiments, the latest reflections, the latest studies on

where we are, and also to reflect on what we don't know, which is enormous. You know, the more we know, the more we know we don't know. I've just been seeing that all my life. But we know enough right now to realize there are things that can be done, positive things. Every individual can take action that together magnifies into a movement, into a change of policy, into a new way of thinking about food. There's evidence that we have done this in the past about smoking, about wearing a seatbelt, about, you know, overnight when we realized that our lives were threatened by a virus. It's not the first time, although for the first time we could quickly identify what it was.

Not so long ago, the existence of viruses was not known. We didn't even know what bacteria were not so long ago in human history. And now we have this ability, based and armed with knowledge, to turn around and, when we get it, to change. It took us longer with seatbelts and smoking, but we got it with COVID-19. We have to get it with climate change and realize that by protecting nature, recovery is possible. When it comes to personal transformation, there really is no one quite like Ken Rideout, a guy who has transcended a litany of obstacles, including opioid addiction, to become one of the world's preeminent master athletes. Crowned world's best marathoner over 50 by the New York Times,

here's a look into the mindset Ken has leveraged to create his improbable success. I heard your interviews with David Goggins. I mean, I've heard a lot of your interviews, but one of the things that he said that really resonated with me that always comes back to top of mind for me is that like, this is what I do. This is just what I do when I get up to run. It's funny because as you build some mental toughness and callous your mind a little bit to the reality that like, this is every day. It's like, you know, like when you're going through recovery, it's like, how the fuck am I going to not drink for two weeks? Like, you don't have to, you only have to not drink for the next hour. And then we'll deal with the next hour. That's the running is

like, you just have to set a real goal. And if nothing else, and I think it's almost easier later in life because I've made so many mistakes in my life and we all have, but today you can start doing the right thing right now. Set a goal. It doesn't, I always want to be mindful of people's abilities and capabilities and say, you don't have to run 10 miles a day, but if you've never run, maybe you're going to start walking one mile a day minimum and set realistic goals. Like, okay, I don't care how out of shape you are. That's not that ambitious. If you have something wrong with you, that's a different story. But if you're healthy, start with walking a mile. Maybe it's running a 5K if you're capable of that or a 10K, but be dependable to yourself.

It's shocking how much that can help you in other areas of your life when you're dependable to yourself. When you know, I know that if the shit hits the fan here, I know I can count on myself to do the right thing when the chips are down. Left to my own devices when things are fluffy and cool and it's easy to make mistakes. But if the chips are down and there's like something incredibly important happening, like I know I can count on myself because I have nothing else. I've proven that to myself. You have to believe it yourself. So back to my point about David Goggins with this is what we do. When I wake up, it never,

ever enters my mind. And I'm so far removed from having a debate with myself of if I'm going to run that I know it might be hard for some people to hear. But like, there's never an inkling of doubt of like, I'm not doing this. I'm tired. I'm going back to bed. I just think, is it rain? Oh, it's raining. Damn it.

This is going to suck. I hate running in the rain, but I'm doing it. And I mean, even when I had the shoulder surgery, it was like a blizzard outside. And I was like, dude, you can't even see outside. It's like a whiteout. What are you doing? I'm like, I got to do this. But I think that with the mindset stuff is you have to prove to yourself that you can do it.

Because I haven't, like you said, I have nothing special. I'm every man. I'm an average athlete at best. I played division three football and hockey. I was like jack of all trades, master of none. I was just willing to do whatever I had to do to stick around and be on the team. If they needed me to fight, I'll be like, okay, I'll fight. But your advantage or your superpower is your mental game. Like I hear somebody who really understands the idea of non-negotiables. Like you're able to commit to something and follow through with action, you

know? So it's not about VO2 max or anything like that. I couldn't tell you any of those metrics. It's just about like, do you ever wear a heart rate monitor by the way? Like, okay. Sometimes my watch measures it and it'll put it on Strava and people will be like,

dude, heart rate of, I don't know, 185, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, that was my heart rate. He knows his audience. But the point being like, that's really like the engine behind all of this is like that mental discipline, right? And that's a muscle just like anything else. That's something you can train,

just like you can train your running or your cycling or what have you. A hundred percent. I wish that that was the one thing that people take away from this is that I think of myself as just a dopey guy who's made a shitload of mistakes like anyone else. Same insecurities, same fear.

The difference is I'm not letting that control me anymore. Fear is such a powerful emotion, whether it's telling your story to someone or a big meeting in work or a speaking gig, the emotions are the same. If you can learn to deal with those emotions and harness that, everyone feels them the same, but the people who are successful learn to harness that and use it as their own tool, whether it's get them more ready or get them to perform at a higher level. And you see it all the time. You don't think that Tom Brady's scared to death in the fourth quarter when they're trailing in the Super Bowl. The difference is he's feeling the nerves, but he's like, let's go. He's using his life. Right. You have a strategy to channel that into something productive as opposed to letting it capsize you. And the boxing for me was my outlet that I was scared every time I went,

every fight, every sparring session, but I kept going because I don't wanna be controlled by fear. And it served me in a lot of ways in life, including dealing with addiction. Cause when I was like, you know, when you're about to go through withdrawals and entering into this like uphill battle, that is recovery, you're like,

I don't want to do it. Let me just put it off for a week. If you have these tools, you're equipped to deal with all these different challenges. And look, it doesn't make you immune to mistakes. You're going to make mistakes, but hopefully if you have these mental tools, and I think you can continue, like you said,

increase the strength of that mental tool, that is mindset by setting realistic goals for yourself and working towards them. Next up is world record-setting adventure athlete, Arctic explorer, and New York Times bestselling author Colin O'Brady, as well as his partner, Jenna Basaw. This power duo graced the podcast to share harrowing stories from Everest and K2, to discuss the power of an all-day 12-hour walk, and share actionable insights on how to tackle limiting beliefs. I know you've talked about it a lot on the show, Rich. I think there's a big difference between belief in abundance and the belief in scarcity, right? Like just that belief.

And I was actually listening to you and Skolnick chop it up on the 10-year anniversary pod of Finding Ultra. You'll have to say the line, but you said something like, when you're living in your truth, the universe conspires. What's the line for you? When your heart is true, the universe will conspire to support you. I mean, I think, yeah, to kind of drill down to brass tacks on that, what I hear in your story, and I've experienced this myself, is that on some level, you have to believe it's possible and you don't have to completely buy into that. You can have rational skepticism like,

wow, that's gonna be really hard. I don't know if I can do that, but what can I do right now? I don't have any money, but I can go do this. And I think the more little kind of steps you take in the direction of that thing that you dream about or aspire to have in your life, there is energy that kind of coalesces around that. And then the next step will be revealed. I think a lot of people just sit around and they want to see how the path is going to unfold all the way to the end or the destination. And it doesn't work that way. Like with each step, you get a little bit more confidence

and you get a little bit more evidence. And like pick Ironman, like Ironman's expensive. Yeah, it's expensive. Well, I wanna do an Ironman. I don't have any money and I don't own a bike, but I borrowed my friend's bike and I rode for a while. And then after doing that for three or four months, this other friend of mine had an extra bike

and he said he'd sell it to me for like 20% of what it's worth. And you just kind of make it work. And then the more that you do that, the more the universe kind of opens up to you and things happen. And that sounds perhaps a bit too ephemeral or mystical and maybe even privileged,

but I've seen it happen in my life. This is certainly the path that you guys have taken. Like things occur when you just keep pushing forward incrementally. A hundred percent. And I think that it comes also back to like your buddy didn't sell you the bike on the first time you thought about having a bike. That might be like when you're thinking about how to get a bike for three months and that finally comes around. Meaning like you didn't like give up on your dream to have a bike after the first. You gotta earn the dream.

Totally, I love that. Through diligence and work ethic, right? And the more that kind of sweat equity you put into it, you know, the more opportunities you're creating for yourself. And it doesn't lay out linearly or on the timeline that you would prefer, right? But it eventually- The person you least expect to open a door for you is the one who does.

And I mean, may Jenna help me tell this story, but we were six, eight months into trying to raise money for the Explorers Grand Slam project and had raised very little. A triathlon sponsor of mine had a guy, high net worth guy named Brian Galloper, who had helped me out for some of our steps said, I'll help you once you show me you can have some proper sponsors. Like, I'm not just going to write your check. So, show me a Nike sponsorship. Show me like a real quote-unquote sponsorship, and then I can maybe, you know, help you guys out. So, that was a big thing, only if we could prove ourselves, basically. Right. But it's like, here's a little shred of hope. Like, okay, there's a crack here. Like, now I have something to work with.

But then six, eight months down the road, we still had raised basically zero dollars. And we finally, by, you know, friend of a friend of a friend had introduced us to someone at Columbia Sportswear who had introduced us up the chain at Columbia Sportswear after five people said no. And we actually get a meeting with Tim Boyle, who's the CEO of Columbia Sportswear based in Portland. And they also own Mountain Hardware and Sorrel and a bunch of the other like, you know, whatever climbing brands. And we're like, oh my God, this is our big shot. Like, this is our big shot.

We prep for the meeting. Jen and I are like, we like read his mom's book about the starting of the company. I mean, we do all the things. We like buy their clothes to go to the office in, of course. That we couldn't afford. And we walk in, he sits down

and he looks at us the first thing he sees he's kind of like who are you guys? and you realize we've been prepping for this meeting and this is like

two minutes in between something actually important that he's taking and we're like oh shoot and we're thinking he's going to give us the time of day

to do the whole presentation and we're like oh we have this website with a video on it and whatever and we play it for him and you can just see his eyes just kind of glaze over and he's like cool cool And we're like, oh, we have this like website with like a video on it and like whatever. And we like play it for him. And you can just see his eyes just kind of like glaze over.

And he's like, cool, cool. Like, hey, good luck with that. Like, good job, you guys. Good luck with that. And we're like being ushered out the door. And Jenna is just a complete savage. Like, I was like, well. I was like, this can't be it.

Like, this cannot be the end of the road for this. Because, you know, in looking through all the different sponsorship opportunities, I was, you know, when you just can feel something is right. I'm like, this is the one we cannot let this slip through the cracks. And I just pivoted and said like, Mr. Boyle, like Colin, here's a local guy from Portland. You haven't even heard his whole story. Give me five minutes to tell you what you need to know here. And I just truly from the heart, like, and I am not one to just like raise my hand and speak up and like, you know, jump into the middle of something. And it just came out so organically and so naturally. I shared exactly what we were trying to do, how much money we were trying to raise. And I think he just- This was for the Explorer's Grand Slam.

This was for the Explorer's Grand Slam, yeah. So we had never done anything before. We literally had no money. We had nothing. And Jenna, she's being humble. Jenna is generally a, really a natural introvert. And just, I don't know, you're not one to just be like, but in that moment to be like, actually, excuse me, Mr. Boyle.

Like he was like, what? Like, I just thought this, like, who's this girl, 27-year-old girl sitting in the corner? And she's like, excuse me, Mr. Boyle. Actually, I think there's a little more. And it's like to this like, you know, high-powered CEO. And she kind of sits him back down in his chair and just like goes in. It's like, there's more here.

So I think it's a combination of that belief in abundance, which is to even get that meeting. It was like, no, no, no, yes. Meet a guy at a coffee shop who could introduce you to here, there, and both of us like doing that. But also in the moment, like you're in this moment and you're like, okay, I could just- These inflection points where you know you have to crush it. Yeah. And the guy's saying no, he's literally saying no. And Jenna's just like, I was even like- I think both of us really live by this quote, a closed mouth is never fed. And it was like, I hadn't even had the chance to ask for what we wanted before getting shut down. And I was like, oh no, this is the moment where you have to speak up and you have to say, at least if you get a no, you get a no, right? But it was a really beautiful

exchange and ultimately led to our first legitimate real sponsorship. Right. So what did you say specifically that turned the tide? It's a good question. I mean, I wasn't recorded, so I don't know exactly, you know, specifically what I said, but I really, I was like, Columbia wants this and needs this. Like, I can see this for you guys as a brand. This is critical to what you're trying to use as a campaign. And they were doing- They were tested tough. Tested tough. Yeah. And again, this was years ago. And it's just like everything that the project was sharing out in the world was exactly the same talking points as this campaign. And I think I just kind of, you know,

gave a little bit of- From my standpoint, she just locked in. It was just like, I'm not taking, like, he was just like, whoa, she's not taking no for an answer. Okay. Well, it sounds to me like- It's like an out-of-body experience.

It was like a vibe shift from, hey, you know, we need this for us to, here's how we can fulfill your need, which is to extend your brand awareness on this messaging that's completely on point with what you're trying to do. And not for nothing, you're not really doing a very good job on it right now.

And in a really unique way, exactly. Like I was like, what we are bringing, you're not gonna get anywhere else. Like Colin can bring this, we can bring this as a team and like you want this. Not in like a, you know, crazy way, but just in a very complete, honest way. And I think he saw that. I think he finally saw the passion and was willing to take a risk on us. And yeah, I mean, that was a huge turning point, but it wasn't going to pay for the balance of what we were doing. It was just to be like, oh, you know, a domino had fallen like, whoa,

Columbia Sporting's project, that allowed us sort of the ability to kind of go out in the world. But then we were still a lot of dollars short, you know, of raising money for this first project. And, you know, basically just kept knocking on doors. And I think, you know, my mom said this to me for a long time.

I don't know if it's her quote. I'm probably not. But she says, you know, luck comes to those who are prepared. And, you know, getting our first project off the ground was the two of us waking up every single day with our mind flooded with doubt, right? Like our mind flooded with all these doubts, like, oh, this isn't going to work. This isn't going to this, but then getting up and doing it. If there was a singular theme to 2022 on this podcast, it's that every single one of us is affected by trauma, though some carry a heavier burden than others.

In one of the most important episodes in the history of this podcast, psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conte teaches us how to understand trauma, how to heal it, and ultimately how to prevent it. Here's an excerpt from our conversation back on episode 705. Give me a sense of how pervasive this epidemic of trauma is, because I think a lot of people, when you say the word trauma, it conjures an image of being sexually abused or being victimized by some very violent act. When in fact, there's a broader definition at play here. I just know that my kind of introduction to these ideas

came at the hands of Gabor Mate. We had a podcast and he did what he does, which is he flips it and it becomes like a session. We start talking about my upbringing and I grew up, you know, my parents took care of it. Everything was pretty good. I have nothing that I can point to in my past that would ring a bell and say that was a traumatic experience. But the more I've kind of excavated that, the more I realized that, you know, I did suffer. My parents are good people and they're well-intentioned, but there were some traumatic experiences there.

And it's really reframed how I think about trauma in terms of how it lies on a spectrum. So talk a little bit about that. Sure. So remember going back to the very first aspect of this conversation, trauma is something that leaves the brain different going forward.

So it's not just anything negative that happens. Because people say, what about post-trauma resilience? Well, yes, if we define trauma differently. Something that really hurts us inside isn't something we're built to be resilient to. Something that doesn't do that, that strikes us as, oh, that was negative, we can respond to with resilience. But what you're talking about and how we're framing this is there's a neurobiological anchoring to trauma in that it overwhelms us. And then we are different going forward, right? And nowhere is it written that like, oh, that only happens if you're in a terrible accident or if a loved one dies or if someone assaults you, right? Those brain changes can happen in other situations as

well. We know that to be true. So for example, chronic trauma. So if we could break it down into there are acute traumas, chronic traumas, and vicarious traumas. The acute, of course, more easy to understand. But the chronic trauma of, for example, being framed as less than in the world, whether that's because of sexuality or socioeconomic status or immigration status, whatever it may be, that often is imposed upon people that where there's just a constant message that says you're less than, right? Or of course there's equality, but then there's a wink that says, but not for you, because you're this, whatever the minority characteristic is that the majority is looking down upon and stigmatizing, right?

And it's just so clear that if you sit with people who've been subject to that for a long time, not all of them, but a significant subset have the same kind of clinically evident brain changes as people who've had the acute trauma. Now, the world is not a safe place and you don't quite really believe anything positive. And even if it seems like everything is positive, it's still going to go against you, right? And then all of this is internalized. Why? Because that chronic trauma can change the brain the same as acute trauma. And sometimes it can even be things that are seen as positive, right? So the idea of the quote unquote special child who's like, wow, you're so good and you're so smart and like, you're going to go so far.

And like, there's all these expectations, right? And then it becomes very hard to shoulder when there are disappointments around their things. So then a little bit of shame becomes a lot of shame. And then the thought of like, oh, I've been less than perfect or I've messed something up or whatever there may be can be intolerable to a person, right? And I think that was part of my problem having been like a firstborn child

of a firstborn child and then having been pretty successful in school and the thought was like, oh, you're just going to do great things. Like everything's going to be great, right? Well, everything wasn't great. And I needed to realize like, look, everything cannot be great

and I can still go make a good life for myself, right? So I think it's part of why some of the things that happened to me made those changes because I was sort of set up to be intolerant of anything less than perfection in myself, which came from a good loving place, you know, in the people who nurtured me, but nonetheless set me up to be very intolerant of anything that was less than how I thought it should be. So yes, the chronic traumas can come from lots of places. And we know that this can happen through vicarious trauma. Thank goodness we have empathy as humans, so we can feel for one another. And it's part of why we want to help one another, right? But empathy also means we can feel

sometimes in very deep ways, other people's trauma, you know, which is why in the last, I don't know, five to 10 years or so, I've found myself, and I think a lot of clinicians have found themselves much more saying to a person like, look, my prescription to you is no more news, or check the news so that you learn what's new. But why, you know, why is the person checking and rechecking and rechecking and rechecking? Because there are all these messages that tell us like we are not safe. And then the parent is reading over and over again, the story of the parent who lost a child in a school shooting. I mean, things that are immensely difficult to shoulder. And they're out there and we become fascinated

because we want to think inside like, look, I could survive something like that, right? So we're fascinated with it and find it to be so abhorrent and unimaginable, but drawn to it in a way that if we can have more of an understanding, maybe there could be some sense of like, right, if awful things happen to me, I can survive them. But inadvertently,

what we often do is just bring more and more and more trauma and more and more and more lessons, so to speak, that say, you just can't keep yourself safe in this world. Perhaps a few words for the person that we've kind of walked to the edge of the cliff here. You know, I'm thinking of the person who hadn't really thought too deeply about these issues and now is in a place of thinking, maybe there's something I need to look at here. How do I begin to do that? Perhaps some encouragement and maybe a few really basic tools to help that person wrap their arms around, you know around the fantastic journey to come?

Yeah. You know, I would say you don't have to be afraid of what's inside of you. And we often get very afraid of what's inside of us, especially after trauma, when the trauma itself makes fear and can make shame. We become very afraid as if there's something magical just off I can't see in my peripheral vision. And if I really look at that, that's the

I'll start crying and never stop or I'll stop functioning. And it's just not how it works. It's just not how we work. That if we're careful about it, we don't want to say just go talk to everyone about it, but we're thoughtful. What's going on inside don't want to say, just go talk to everyone about it, right? But we're thoughtful. What's going on inside of me? Can I put words to it? Could I talk to someone? And running current to like the strength of what says, no, you can't do that, right? Everyone will be ashamed.

No one will look at you in the same way. You won't be able to function, right? Like, you know, as we talked about much earlier on, it's in the surface of survival, right? But that's through an aspect of human evolution that's not applying now in human evolution that's not applying now in the ways that we're talking about. So if we honor and validate that that's in us, but also recognize that it's not actually true that confronting the thing that makes shame or

fear is going to make us fall apart. And in fact, quite the opposite. I mean, there's so much data and clinical experience telling us the exact opposite, that we don't have to be afraid of it. And we don't have to rush headlong, that we can be careful and judicious. And, you know, you can talk to somebody a little bit, or you can write a little bit, you know, we don't have to be afraid of it. You know, it's not some mystery that makes us deer in the headlights and then we can't function. It's just, we can approach it like anything else, you know, judiciously, carefully, reflectively. That's how we can approach it like anything else, you know, judiciously, carefully, reflectively. That's how we make ourselves healthier.

This next clip is courtesy of Ed Winters, a vegan advocate and animal rights activist globally known as Earthling Ed on the Internet. Ed is an educator, he's a public speaker, an author, and content creator with a large cult following on YouTube. I think he's in residency at Harvard University right now. In any event, this conversation was a tremendous breakdown on veganism from all vantage points for both skeptics and the converted. Here is Earthling Ed. One thing I often ask people is, you know, are you against animal cruelty? And we all say that we are. People who commit cruel acts to animals are seen as some of the worst people that can exist. And we really look down upon violence towards pets like dogs and cats and such.

But we turn a blind eye to the cruelty that's inflicted on farmed animals and indeed animals that are exploited in other ways as well. So when I ask people, are you against animal cruelty? What I'm trying to do, I suppose, is highlight that contradiction of values. You know, when we say about cruelty and I say to people, can you define what that means to be cruel to someone? You know, people will always say that it's about causing physical or mental, you know, emotional harm. It's about doing something unnecessary that negatively contributes to someone else's well-being. And then when we think about what we do to animals, of course it's cruel. You know, we mutilate them, we exploit them, we forcibly impregnate them,

we take their babies away from them, and then we take their life from them prematurely for an unnecessary reason. I mean, to me, that's like the definition of being cruel to an animal. So I realized that in that moment, thinking about the KFC, thinking about the chickens and realizing that there was this kind of disalignment in the person I thought I was when it came to animals and the person I actually was. And so I kind of reached this fork in the road, if you'll pardon the pun, but this fork in the road where I could choose to kind of bury my head in the sand and hopefully repress those feelings and just get on with my life and not worry about animals anymore. Or I could accept that something not quite right

with my values and my actions. And I chose the latter and went vegetarian because I didn't know anything about dairy or eggs. And then I saw Earthlings, which is a documentary that exposes what happens in US farms and slaughterhouses. The movie we all begrudgingly watch, right? We have to get dragged to watching it and then we're never the same.

It is a hard watch, isn't it? It's like an hour and 40 minutes of objective, I guess, undercover hidden camera footage that just shows what happens to animals. And after that, I went and spent time with Rupert the hamster, who was my first real pet. And I don't like to use the word pet so much, but more like companion animal, you know, he was kind of my companion. And I had Rupert in my hands and I was looking at Rupert the hamster and I gave him some broccoli because broccoli was

his favorite food. He loved broccoli, absolutely loved it. So I gave him some broccoli and I was looking at Rupert eating this broccoli of his cute little paws. He always looked so adorable. And I was looking at him thinking, there's so much about Rupert that creates moral worth for him. He's an individual, he has likes and dislikes, and he loved the broccoli, but he didn't like other things like kale, for example. He had likes and dislikes,

things that made him Rupert the hamster. And I thought about all the animals who were exploited and all the different ways that we exploit them. I wasn't eating meat, but I was still consuming dairy and eggs. I was still perpetuating systems that exploited animals in other means. And it really dawned on me in that moment

that the issue of what we do to animals isn't just really about food. You know, food is a symptom of the problem. The problem is a mentality that creates the justification for these systems to exist in the first place. The fact that we view non-human animals or these non-human animals with such little worth that we can then justify doing everything that we do to them, that's the problem. And I realized that veganism isn't just about eating plant-based food. It's about challenging that mindset that

values non-human animals as having such little worth that we can do these unspeakably cruel things to them and not bat an eyelid about it most of the time. A lot of people have an analogous experience where they're witness to some type of animal cruelty and they're compelled to kind of reckon with how that measures up against their value system. But not that many people use that as a lever or tipping point to actually make change. I mean, there's so much packed into that. There's the level of cognitive dissonance, this idea like, you know, we all flinch

and look away from things like earthlings and slaughterhouse videos and stuff like that for the very reason, and you talk about this, like the very reason that it will compel us to confront that dissonance. And if we do that, then perhaps we either need to make that change thatance. And if we do that, then perhaps we either need to make that change that we don't wanna make,

or we have to live with that level of disconnect, which creates kind of like, you know, just a lack of integration with just being human, right? So you had this moment, like what was it about your background or, you know, leading up to that, that you were kind of primed to make that change that so many struggle to make?

Well, I think that we often, as vegans, we often think of this one moment. I saw earthlings that made me vegan, but what we forget or don't often realize is that for our whole life, there are all these little moments that are building up to this kind of realization. And so throughout my whole life,

I was raised with this mentality that animals should be cared for, that people that do bad things to animals are wrong, that we should, you know, try and protect our environment. You know, I was raised with these values and I was raised with the, I guess, the concept that a world with reduced suffering is preferable. So this was kind of like the mentality I had, but I'd never really connected all of these components with, you know, being vegan or with the consequence of not being vegan. So for me, it was just like this, I suppose, domino effect of thinking about these different points in my life. You know, for example, I stopped going to zoos before I stopped eating meats and dairy and eggs. And the reason I stopped going to zoos is because I had seen the documentary Blackfish and the documentary Blackfish made me not want to see, you know, go to aquariums.

But then I went to Barcelona Zoo and in Barcelona Zoo, I saw a bear and this bear just looked so solemn and so sad. They were just sat down in this very small enclosure looking around and I kind of followed their eyes. They looked around the enclosure and looked at the four walls they were trapped in and it dawned on me that these animals

are also being kept in captivity like the or walls they were trapped in. And it dawned on me that these animals are also being kept in captivity like the orcas at SeaWorld are. So then I left Barcelona Zoo and never went to another zoo after that. So I had these kind of moments that made me realize that what we're doing to animals isn't something that's good for animals, it's definitely not,

but also is something that contradicts kind of the values that I have towards how we should treat them. And really just this last piece of the puzzle was just being kind of confronted, if you like, with the objective reality of, you know, this is what you're paying for. When you go into a supermarket and you buy this,

we may view these decisions as being unconscious because they are unconscious, but they have this very real tangible consequence that we often don't think about. And so I was forced to go, when I go into a supermarket, I go into a restaurant or wherever it is, and I give my money to these industries, I am personally funding these very things that I'm feeling very upset about to continue. And how do I, as a person who wants to reduce suffering, who thinks that a world that, you know, obviously we're never going to create a utopia, but a world that is trying to reach that utopia as much as we can. How does pain for slaughterhouses to exist? How does that work in

this kind of vision of the future that I would like to live in? It doesn't. So it was all these little moments, but then just this overarching realization that I'm not living in alignment, that I'm fundamentally a hypocrite when it comes to my treatment of animals. And that was the final piece to go. There is a problem here that is bigger than just this food problem. It's a mentality issue. And as a consequence of that, I have to be that example of what I want to see. A hot topic of 2022 was aging and longevity. And Chip Conley graced us back on episode 681 to teach us how to reframe aging, on episode 681 to teach us how to reframe aging, not as something to fear,

but rather as something aspirational, an opportunity to share accrued wisdom and leverage it to make your life and your relationships more meaningful. The narrative we have about aging is you age, you work, then you retire. You have three stages in life. You learn till you're 25, you earn till you're 60 or 65, and then you retire till you die. And if you look at a millennial today, they're like, what the hell is that tyranny of the three

stage life? I want to actually learn till I'm 20 or 25, and then I'm going to work for 10 years, and then I'm going to take a year off. I'm going to do a gap year. And then I'm going to go get a master's. I'm going to learn again. And then I'm going to go retire. I'm going to take a year off. I'm going to do a gap year. And then I'm going to go get a master's. I'm going to learn again. And then I'm going to go retire. I'm going to work for 10 years and start a company and then retire and then go back and get a PhD. And, you know, it's more episodic. It's not like you have these three stages of life that are age defined.

So that led us, MEA becoming very popular and led us to creating regenerative communities and these idea of, let's get rid of the idea of retirement communities. Yeah, this is the real exciting part. Rich, are you going to live in a retirement community someday? It's the most depressing, horrific aspect of our culture to just warehouse old people and hide them. It's a form of age apartheid. Let's like take those people and put them in a place where we can't see them so they're with each other. And let's also recognize that, frankly, earlier generations sort of saw it and, you got to 60 and you said, thank God I'm retiring because I can't do the factory floor work anymore

or I'm just so tired of this work or being a house cleaner or whatever it was. And we have a lot more knowledge workers today. And I think we have a lot more wisdom workers. That's a phrase that I think is gonna come into being. But the knowledge workers, they can work till their 70s or their 80s or whenever. It's not physical labor

that actually defines how they get paid. And so more and more of them are of the mindset, like, I don't wanna retire or I can't afford to retire. If I'm gonna live till 90 or 95, I can't retire at 62. And also that generation is far more inclined to be pursuing work that has personal meaning to them than, you know, our legacy is that three chapter kind of approach to life.

That's what our parents did. And we kind of were reared with that sensibility. And now we're in our fifties and sixties. And a lot of us are having those kind of crisis moments. But over the course of those many decades leading up to it, there is a calcification around mindset. This is who I am. This is what I do.

Here's what I can expect for my life. Here's how I see the world. This is the people that I vote for. And this is, you know, these are the things that I talk about. So one of the critical kind of tools that you leverage at the Modern Elder Academy that I want to hear a little bit more about is just getting really clear on what your mindset is so

that you can begin the process of deconstructing it and perhaps telling yourself a new story. Yeah. Well, so there's four key pillars of our curriculum. The first one's reframing aging, helping people to see that maybe their best years are ahead of them. Right. Can this be aspirational? It can be. And some things get better with age. I love that your listeners and your community is very much about keeping the body alive, but certain things get actually better with age. Your emotional intelligence grows with age. Your spiritual awareness grows with age. So there's a lot of things that actually get better with age. And yes, if you work on your body

and your health and your nutrition, it might get better with age as well. You're a great example of that. So there's that, reframing aging. Then there's mindset. So there's growth and fixed mindset. We're big fans of Carol Dweck's work at Stanford. And so a fixed mindset is when you tend to think of life

as I'm here to prove myself and I define success as winning. The problem if you have that point of view as you get older is you stop playing the games you can't win. And that means your sandbox gets smaller and smaller. And as it gets smaller, you actually get more bored because you're not trying new things. So moving from a fixed to a growth mindset means moving from

proving yourself to improving yourself. Instead of focusing on winning, you focus on learning. And so you move into this way of thinking and way of being of, okay, I am just a learning machine. I'm not a machine. I'm a learning human. One of the questions we ask at MEA is, what is it that you know now or have you done now that you wish you'd known or done 10 years ago? Think about that for a moment. And then ask yourself 10 years from now, what will you regret if you don't learn it or do it now? And this is how I started to learn how to surf at age 57, because I live on a beach near a surf break, somewhat famous one. And I was like, ain't going

to be any easier at 67 than 57, Chip. So I got to start learning that. I also started learning Spanish. Again, the mantra in my head, the mindset was, I'm too old for this, too old to learn language, but harder to learn the language, but harder to learn at 67 than 57. And I knew that I was going to be living in Mexico, so why not learn it? So the first is reframing aging. The second is shifting your mindset. The third is learning about transitions. None of us were taught and got a master's in TQ, transitional intelligence, but midlife is full of transitions. Life is full of transitions. Life is liminal. You're usually in between two things. And yet we've never really been taught

what's the anatomy of a transition and how do I architect moving through a transition, whether it's getting divorced or changing where I live or changing my career or retiring or seeing my parents to passing away or becoming an empty nester or going through menopause or men go through andropause. There's a lot of transitions in midlife and learning how to understand the three stages of a transition is a big part of our program. And then the final piece of the curriculum is regeneration

in all its forms. We have regenerative cell therapy. I mean, stem cell work, regeneration through understanding a regenerative purpose, but also, and this is where Paul Hawking comes in, regenerative agriculture and farming. And that's what leads us to our regenerative communities. Our first one being in Baja with 26 homes around a regenerative farm. So instead of living on a fairway, wouldn't you like to live on a farm. So instead of living on a fairway, wouldn't you like to live on a farm and go out into the farm and go harvest with your neighbors and do a potluck once a week? And so now we're taking this to Santa Fe and we have three different properties in Santa Fe, two of which will be academies,

one of which will be a regenerative residential community. And I do believe that we are creating something that is meant to disrupt senior living. Okay, that's it. That's a wrap on 2022. I really hope you guys enjoyed that reflection in the rear view and found these past two episodes uplifting and inspiring. Thank you again for all the love, for all the support. This podcast really has been an amazing journey

and I'm just so grateful you're on it with me. And I look forward to growing and learning together in the new year ahead. So happy new year, everybody. Until 2023, peace. Bye. Bites. Thank you.