The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best Of 2023: Part One

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

It's time to reflect. Share gratitude. And indulge in tradition. Each year we close things out with our ‘Best Of’ series, a 2-part compilation of the most enlightening excerpts from the previous 12 months of the show. 2023 was packed with an astonishing array of guests—we learned from scientists and doctors conducting cutting-edge research in the fields of nutrition, longevity, and disease prevention. Artists and actors showed us the power of living a creative life. Athletes reported back from the outer edges of human capability. And individuals who experienced phoenix-like transformations gave us actionable advice on what it takes to truly change your life wholesale. For our devoted podcast fans, think of these next two episodes as a recap, a way to remind yourself of the most impactful lessons from your favorite guests. And for those newer to the show, may this episode entice you to mine through the catalog and dial-up conversations you may have missed or skipped. I believe in the power we all have to do, be, and live better. To step into our best, most authentic selves. And in turn, contribute positively to a greater world. May this episode inspire you to believe the same. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL AG1: DrinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Athletic Brewing: AthleticBrewing.com Inside Tracker: InsideTracker.com/RICHROLL Birch Living: BirchLiving.com/RICHROLL On: On.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich

Be specific, not this mediocre generalist. The key to all of our issues is love. Just keep stacking days. As long as you keep stacking days, you will see the change. Don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only. The single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. We threw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. You've got to

train and prime your brain to think of happiness like a practice, like a habit, like something you invest in. Then being happy leads to doing great work and the great work leads to having big success. leads to doing great work and the great work leads to having big success. Hey, everybody. Greetings and happy holidays from me and the entire team of super talented people here at the RRP studio. As the year comes to an end, we like to close things out here with a little bit of a gratitude check, a celebration with this annual tradition that we started many years ago, the Best Of series. And this year, 2023, is going to be a two-part compilation of the most enlightening excerpts from the previous 12 months of the show. 2023 was just packed with this astonishing array of guests. show. 2023 was just packed with this astonishing array of guests. We learned from scientists and doctors conducting cutting-edge research in the field of nutrition, longevity, disease prevention,

and more. Creative masters shared the wisdom behind their craft. Athletes reported back from the outer edges of human capability. And individuals who experienced phoenix-like transformations gave us actionable advice on just what it really takes to truly change your life wholesale. For all of you devoted podcast fans out there, I think you should think of these next two episodes as a bit of a recap, kind of a way to remind yourself of your favorite lessons from your favorite guests. And for those newer to the show, perhaps consider this as kind of a SparkNotes or a CliffNotes version of the show, a bit of a crash course to entice you to mine through the catalog and dial up episodes you may have missed

or perhaps skipped. And with that, I'm excited to share these premiere clips with you, starting with the great and wise Seth Godin. Seth is not only the author of 19 bestselling books, he's also a leading authority on all kinds of subjects, everything from creativity to marketing, who has also been writing every single day since 2005. Here's some wisdom on how to stay committed to your craft and be the best at what you do.

If you are a pizza lover and you think about the great pizza places in the United States, none of them are full-service restaurants with big menus. They make a thing and they make it the best they can make it because it must be done with care or it becomes mediocre. And we have created an entire generation of wandering generalities, as Ziggs would say, instead of meaningful specifics. And to be a meaningful specific, you have to say, this is what I do. You can't say, and, and, and, and, and, because then you have an excuse for everything being sort of average. And if your slogan is you can pick anyone and we're anyone, then someone else is

going to win. You want to be in and of yourself, the one and only version of that. So I think that's a universal law. I think that if somebody is more focused than you, they're going to put in more cycles than you, and they're going to learn more than you. And inevitably, they're going to become better than you when you have enough competitors. With that said, you got to say, well, the only way that's going to happen is if I say no to all sorts of attractive things. In my case, as somebody who has a certain kind of willpower, it means no Twitter, no Instagram, no Facebook, no LinkedIn, almost no travel. There are all these things I don't do because I don't want to reconsider every time because it would be a huge number of cycles to say,

oh, but this one's really special. I should open the door and think about that one again. But is this a function of not wanting to fall into the kind of pleasure trap of scrolling? Or is it because you don't want to be influenced by what other people are saying or their reaction to your work? I'm not reading them,

but I'm also not writing on those platforms. So when Twitter came along, it was early days, I saw it. I said, I could probably have a lot of people following me on Twitter. Yeah. But if I got good at Twitter, I would have to become mediocre at blogging.

So I don't want to do that. I want to be really good at the thing I do and not do the other thing. So that's part A. And yes, as you pointed out, listening to anonymous trolls makes nobody better. I've never met an author who said, I read all my one-star reviews on Amazon

and now I'm a better writer. So 11 years ago, I stopped reading my reviews on Amazon. I haven't read a review once since that day because I'm not going to learn anything from a one-star review other than it wasn't for me. Well, you just told me about you, but you didn't tell me about my work. So I get it.

It wasn't for you, but that's not what I need to learn to get better. I think many people fall into this illusion that whatever they're creating is for everybody and they don't have that clarity around who specifically they're writing for or creating for. And as a result, the work suffers, right? And this is something, this is a drum you've been beating from the beginning about all the way back to tribes, et cetera, about like having that definitive sense of who you're serving.

And I think we're in an interesting time now because the internet has fractured the monoculture and everything is about tribes now. It's very unlikely that we're gonna see, only rarely now do we see gigantic creative offerings that move the entire culture. Yes. And because of that,

it's created opportunity for many people, but I feel like people still fall under the delusion that they need to be like Taylor Swift or George Lucas or somebody like that instead of appreciating. Taylor Swift isn't like Taylor Swift. Yeah. This is, I gotta interrupt you. So disabuse us of the fact that like, yeah.

I gotta interrupt you. This is such an easy thing to describe and a hard thing to embrace. So about seven miles from here is a four mile trail where you can go an estate park into the woods and find out where they filmed MASH. Like you're in the DMZ. It's my backyard trail.

It's a real, I was there yesterday. And I took pictures and sent them back to the family. And my wife's like, that's really cool. And the kid's like, what's this? So MASH was the most popular TV show ever broadcast when it went off the air.

The last episode, 70 million plus people saw. So to compare 70 million people to a show like The Sopranos or Mad Men or whatever, which got seen by 3 million people when they were broadcast, one-twentieth the number. Or if you think about anything that your friends, people, in quotation marks, are talking about on Netflix,

a million, 2 million people are seeing it when it's first coming out. What it means to win on the long tail is you're just a tiny drip in a giant bucket, and that's enough. So I had 20 bestsellers in a row, and not one of them has sold to more than 1% of the US population, which means that 99% of the US population said, nah, not interested, no idea who you are, see ya. That's not failure. That's success. So writing for all these people who are never going to engage with you, making a TV show

or a podcast for everyone. No, don't make Serial because Serial ends up being popular because something had to win that day's lottery, but it's probably not going to be you. No, and it's very specific in what it is. I don't think anybody involved in that program anticipated the success, nor were they making it for the purpose of impacting culture on a mass level. Right. But if you copy them and say, well, this is going to be the next blank, you've lost why you're doing it.

The thread, you're saying, someone's going to win the lottery, it's going to be me. And we see struggling people, struggling with income, tricked into buying lottery tickets for that very reason. And it's a dumb investment. And instead, put ourselves on the hook and say, no, I'm making this for the vegan community of Agora Hills, California. And if they don't like it, I have failed because it's for them and that's who it's for. So I put myself on the hook when I say that. Whereas if I say, I'm making the best thing I can

and hopefully lots of people will like it. Well, then when a few people don't like it, you can just say, well, I'm waiting for the next people. I'm waiting for a lucky break. How do I hype this? And so putting yourself on the hook, that's how you get funding for your project. That's how you hire people.

That's how you get a job. Be specific, not this average, mediocre generalist. From going plant-based in her 40s to starting a restaurant in her 50s, Chef Babette Davis is a living testament to all late bloomers that it's never too late to change. At 72 years young, she is the absolute model of fit, ripped, and absolutely radiant. And here is an excerpt lifted from episode 731, one of the most viral episodes of the year.

It's very important to me now to take responsibility for myself and my feelings. No matter what, I take responsibility for those things in particular. But it wasn't always like that. I did a lot of finger pointing. And if it wasn't for you and if it hadn't been for that and if I would, you know what I'm saying? The victimhood. The victim. And it doesn't been for that. And if I would, you know what I'm saying? The victimhood. The victim. And it doesn't really serve me in my life to be the victim.

I don't need to hold grudges. I take responsibility for me. And I just think it's important for each and every one of us to do that and to understand that they're all learning experiences. I just appreciate this human journey so very much because from whence I came to where I am now and my voice being bigger and bigger, I would have never thought anybody would ever even listen to me. ever even listen to me. But to now share that human experience and embrace love, that is the key to all of our issues, is love. It really is. I can't say it enough. Yeah. You understand? When each of us takes on the responsibility of embracing love and understanding that there is no separation.

It's like I am just an expression of my creator, period. It's like I can't make that amazing mac and cheese I made today before I left the restaurant without it being also an expression of me. And so I know that I believe I was created in and of this power of love. And so I feel better in that space than I do anywhere else. I feel better in that space than I do anywhere else. What really impacts people the most is when they see somebody who is a living example of a certain lifestyle and they're doing it in a way that is aspirational, but still not so far out there that they can't see themselves in that person. And I feel like you serve that role beautifully in many categories. I mean, first of all,

as somebody who's been eating an organic plant-based diet and I don't know, probably predominantly raw for like 30 years right now, you're on the cusp of turning 72. You're, like I said earlier, you're just, you're radiating positivity. Your skin is insane. Like you, I mean, it's crazy that you're radiating positivity, your skin is insane.

It's crazy that you're 72. You look like, I don't know, you look like you're 36 or something and you're totally jacked. You got like veins coming out of your arm. You can do pushups all day. And on Instagram, you're sharing these videos of you doing your exercise routine. And it's very inspiring and it's very empowering,

like reframing how we think about aging and having this conversation around longevity and the relationship between the choices that we make, the things that we put in our body, the choices we make about how we interact with other people. Like it's more than just, oh, here's a salad. It's about that self-love piece. It's about exuding love.

It's about like, how are you being of service? How are you contributing? All of these things that you're about without being preachy, you're just an example. And they say, I know for myself even, it really helps you rethink about what our relationship is to getting older and what that means. The beauty of it, the beauty of the aging

process. And after that's this entire journey to be able to say that I'm 72 and enjoy each and every moment of my time on this planet in this form. It's just amazing and i'm so grateful to life i really am i'm so grateful to have this opportunity to do what it is that i do and love it so much um wow you said a mouthful there let's let's walk through the fitness routine i want to know first of all you don't sleep. We can talk about that. Like I've read that you get up at like 2.30 in the morning. But I go to bed. I don't know about that.

I go to bed at 6, Rich. I go to bed at 6. Come on. All right. They left that part out. I get plenty of rest, trust. I'm very, very still and quiet at home most of the time. I'm to myself.

I live alone. I enjoy that. at home most of the time. I'm to myself. I live alone. I enjoy that. To be able to share that and let people know that, man, part of the whole self-loving thing is to be a part of all of this, to be able to move. If I want to run a hill, I can run a hill. I don't want to have a life alert. I don't want to get in the bathtub and can't get out. So I force myself to take baths sometimes. I'm not always taking showers. Make sure you can get your butt out the tub.

That's the whole thing when you get older. It's all about if you fall down and you can't get up. That's what people need to really understand. Now, of course, sometimes we have accidents that it's not any fault of our own. But when we just sit down and just let it go, that's generally what will happen to you. You lose strength. And another thing that I think is I'm not a superficial person. I enjoy the aging process. I don't look like I looked when I was 60. You know what I mean? But however it is,

however this look is going to be as I age, I embrace it. Because just think, as I age, I embrace it. Because just think, I've lived an entire lifetime looking different. So you know what I mean? It's not a bad thing to have the crow's feet. I don't care to use anything to get rid of that. I'm okay with it. I want to see what it's going to be. I saw one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen before. She had lines like in this table. But she was beautiful. She was beautiful. And just to experience. Because she owned it and she's comfortable with who she is.

Oh, she was just gorgeous. And that is how we should all be because it's each step of the journey that we embrace and appreciate. Mm-hmm. of the journey that we embrace and appreciate. What role does emotional health play in longevity? Well, physician, engineer, and Stanford Medical School grad, Peter Attia, MD, returned to the podcast to answer this question and much more in episode 743,

which is this really powerful primer on the role of trauma and it's untangling and how that plays into both wellbeing and longevity. One of the things that I never thought could go away, I talk about this in the book, is the whole Bobby Knight thing. This was one of the most important realizations I ever had when I was at PCS, This was one of the most important realizations I ever had when I was at PCS, which is what my inner monologue sounded like. And it sounds, well, it's a little hard to believe I wasn't aware of it, given that it wasn was not just in my head. It was verbal. It would come out. And it was awful, right? The reason I called that Bobby Knight is that's who it was modeled after, right? It was coach Knight is going to strangle you if you make a mistake. And it was anything, right? It didn't matter. If I screwed up making dinner, if I screwed up a shot, if I screwed up anything,

if I was late to a call. I remember one morning I woke up and there was a call on my calendar at six that I had forgot about. And when I woke up, I did a whole bunch of other things before and I missed the call. I mean, instead of just emailing the person and saying,

hey, I'm really sorry. I mean, I must've beat myself up about that for a day. Uh-huh. And this exercise that they had me do there was one of the most powerful things I've ever done. And when they suggested it, I thought, that seems kind of dumb. Like there's no way that's gonna work.

And they were like, every single day, two or three times, something is gonna happen that's gonna prompt you to wanna scream at yourself. Take out your phone and record a message, but look into the eyes of your best friend and pretend that they made that mistake. What would you say to them? I mean, the first few times I did this, I was in tears because it was such a shift of how kind I would speak to that person. You know, hey, Peter, I know it's frustrating. You just, you know, didn't have a good drive today.

But, you know, I think there's a lot on your mind today. And, you know, you did okay, but, you know, you got to watch the apex going into this corner. And like, I literally, I was like talking like I was a kind coach and there was an accountability where every one of those I would send to my therapist. So she'd get like two or three of these voice messages a day for four months. And it only took about four months for that to go away. That is really amazing to me. Yeah. That's powerful think of how old i am and think of how many years i had this ingrained pattern of screaming at myself and i mean i don't even want to repeat

the stuff i say because it's so vile but like it's not like you idiot no no it's much harsher than that and in just four months of being mindful of this every single day, I don't even remember. It's so hard for me to remember Bobby's voice. It's pretty unusual for someone who's out of shape to not know they're out of shape, right? You know, if you're having a hard time walking up a hill, if you're having a hard time climbing stairs, if it hurts when you get out of bed in the morning, it's hard to not know that. It's really easy to be emotionally broken and not fully appreciate it, or more to the point to be like me and be in total denial. I think the single most important thing a person has to do here is,

if for no other reason and to no one other than themselves, start asking questions like, are you living in a way where your relationships with other people are healthy? What was modeled to you? What did you see? And if you go back and reflect on that, do you think that that represents the best version of how people can interact? There are lots of tests people can take. For example, you're probably familiar with the Adverse Childhood Event Score, the ACE score.

This is something that's readily available online. I do recommend people take it, right? If you're sort of sitting there thinking like, I don't know what trauma is. Well, this is a checklist of 10 things, some of which are really obvious. Like, you're raped, that's trauma. But your parents going through a divorce when you're a kid is trauma, right? But your parents going through a divorce when you're a kid is trauma, right? So, you know, when you kind of go through an inventory like that,

it at least gives you some sense of vulnerability. I think that we talk about this a little bit, that it's a little harder for men to do this. But whether you're male or female, I think you've got to ask yourself the question, do you have someone you can really confide in? Do you have a friend that you could tell anything to? There's a test for it they call it. Do you have someone you could call in the middle of the night if something was wrong? If you can't answer yes to that question, I wonder why, right? Is it because you don't feel comfortable that you can share that? Or is it because you really don't have that person in your life? I think everybody benefits from psychotherapy and I don't think it's very sexy. What's very

sexy today, what's very in vogue today is like psychedelics, right? Like, you know, all you need is a trip to Peru with a shaman and everything's going to be fixed. And I talk very briefly about this in the book, but I've had most of these experiences and some of them have actually been very positive, but they aren't the healing process. They are just disruptive, right? They just disrupt your psyche enough that they make you open to the change. But the change has to come from finding a therapist, in my view, who you are comfortable enough

to be able to speak with. And I think it's rather agnostic to the specialty or discipline. The important thing is that you are engaging with some modality from a place of openness and honesty. Yeah. And it's just as we would say, look, you got to go get a blood test. You got to go get this test done. You got to go do these certain things. Like you should know your VO2 max. You should know your bone mineral density. You should have a DEXA scan. I think we should take the same approach here, which like you should know your VO2 max, you should know your bone mineral density, you should have a DEXA scan.

I think we should take the same approach here, which is you should be able to have someone that you emotionally check in with and someone who can ask you questions and get you thinking and provoke you a little bit and figure out what your state of emotional health is. This year marked the return of one of my favorite teen whisperers, Dr. Lisa DeMoore,

a Yale-educated psychotherapist and best-selling author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. Lisa joined me to decode today's teens and their most pressing issues. When kids come our way to tell us they are upset, which they often do, teenagers, especially talkers, are good at this. Overwhelmingly, all they want and all they need is for us to listen and be empathic in response, for us to really tune in. The way I try to do this as a parent is if one of my daughters is telling me she's upset about something, I'll picture she's a reporter and I'm her editor. And she's reading me the article of her distress and that when she gets to the end of the article, I just have to produce the headline. Like I have to have listened so intently that I can distill it and summarize it and add nothing and give it back to her.

So really all they want is that level of listening. And then truly, Rich, like the number one thing I say in my home more than anything is like, oh man, that stinks, right? Just sitting and empathizing in response. That is overwhelmingly what teenagers are looking for. And so often, and I do this too, what they get instead is advice. And so often, and I do this too, what they get instead is advice. They tell us what's wrong and we're like, well, you know. And my younger daughter said to me, she said, mom, I can tell from the look on your face when I'm talking to you, when you stop listening, you've come up with the thing you're going to say to me by way of advice and you're now just waiting for me to pause. Right, right.

You're just like, okay, let me just wait until this is over and then I'm gonna throw the zinger. Drop some wisdom on you. So what I would say is, it's very rarely what they're looking for or what they want or need. And it usually actually ruins a moment that could be going quite a bit better. So curiosity plus empathy or just empathy

is I would say overwhelmingly the most effective and also wanted response when teenagers come our way with their distress. One thing I was so delighted to discover in writing this book is something that was happening in my home and that I think a lot of families think is just happening in their home is that the kid who tells them nothing after school, at dinner, asking great questions, parents getting nothing, waits until the parent is in bed and then is suddenly standing there as chatty as can be. And when I realized this was like near universal, like this was happening in so many homes, I thought, okay, well, this is fascinating. And what I think is happening is the teenager is satisfying two needs at once. They want to be autonomous, but they want to connect with the parent. And so if they wait till we're in bed, they decide if there's going to be a meeting, they decide the content of the meeting, because they know we're not going to bring up new topics

at that time. And they decide when it ends. So what I would say is maybe your kid's not a nighttime talker. But I have become increasingly aware there are kids who don't want to talk when the parent wants to talk, but they will text with the parent or they will have conversations in the car, that they need a lot of tight control over the conversation in order to have it. The other scenario that comes up is that the teenager doesn't want to talk because the parent stepped in it. The parent did something when they did talk that made the kid uncomfortable about opening up. And when I've asked teenagers, like, you know, you know that thing where you're clearly upset and your parent's asking what's wrong and, you know, you're just shaking them off, shaking them off. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, what's the deal? What's the deal? And they're like, well, there's a few different reasons. So the reasons they give me, they say, well, sometimes it's because we know what you're going to say. So I'm upset because I messed up my math

test. And it's the math test that you asked me if I was ready for, and I told you I was, but it turns out I was not. And so if I tell you that that's the issue, I'm going to basically get an I told you so, and I don't want to hear it. So I can't tell you. Another reason they'll give me is they'll say, you're going to blab, right? So I'm going to tell you about something that's happening for me or a friend. And then the next thing I know, you're going to be on the horn either with the school or with the neighbor or with your sister. And I did not mean for this to leave the house. And so I'm not telling you stuff.

And then I thought this was so beautiful. A girl said to me, here's the deal. By the time I get home, I am 90% of the way over whatever I was upset about. And rehashing the whole thing from my parents is not going to help me feel better. So I think we sometimes want to be attentive that like they know us, we may have stepped in it. And if we have, we have to apologize and try to, you know, repair that. And I think teenagers can be pretty forgiving. You know, if you're earnestly apologetic, I think you can open channels of communication. There's so much in that. Yeah. I mean, allowing the teen to set the parameters

for these types of discussions, not trying to force them, trying to refrain from judgment or, you know, stepping into the, you know, on these landmines that are typically the things that cut off communication, right, resisting the urge to try to solve the problem or step in and intervene, or like tell some story about what happened to you when you were that age, which is like the worst, right?

You wanna end a conversation. I would say like- That's the last thing they wanna hear, right? When I was a teenager is like the most conversation ending thing you can possibly say as a parent. You know. When I was a teenager.

I mean, I've just learned, conversation ending thing you can possibly say as a parent. You know. When I was a teenager. I know. I mean, I've just learned, cause we have a quieter child and it's funny cause just the other night, like that exact thing happened, like right when I was going to bed, you know? And you have to just like, you live for those moments because you can't compel them.

So you have to like be in a place of sort of surrender around it. And then when they happen, you have to have the awareness like, oh, okay, I have to turn on now because this is a fleeting thing. It doesn't happen that often. It requires a lot of patience. It does. It really, really does. So here's how I think we summon that patience. First of all, this is really short-lived.

And one of the things I'm so glad about is that I was practicing before I had kids, and I had so many people I was caring for. So many parents say, oh, my gosh, it goes so fast. Like, they're out so fast. Because my personality is a bit more on the controlling side. And I know that if I didn't have that professional reminder all of the time of how short-lived this would be, I know I would have been like, clean up your shoes, they're in the wrong place, and let me go to sleep. I mean, I know I would have demanded more in that way.

And now I have a kid in college, right? And it's true. And so for me, in those moments where I'm like, oh, really right now? I think, you know what? In three years, I would give my left arm to have you come to talk to me, right? Like, I'm not going to know where you are at 11 o'clock at night. So I think that helps. And then the other thing I think is more important than it's ever been is that the single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. So we have to meet them more than halfway.

We just have to. Don't go anywhere. We got a lot more on the horizon. But first, a quick word from the partners who make the show possible. A quick word from the partners who make the 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.

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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. recovery.com. Globally renowned epidemiologist, geneticist, and co-founder of the data science company Zoe, Tim Spector dropped by the studio to bust diet myths, share the importance of plant

diversity in one's diet, and teach us how to optimize our microbiome for whole body health. In general terms, the microbiome is the term we use for the community of microbes, microorganisms that live in our bodies. And we generally refer to the 99% that live in our lower intestine, our colon. And the microbiome really refers to the genes of those microbes should technically be called the microbiota but we just use the most microbiome because i'm not fussy about words and everyone now understands that so these there are some dispute about how many there are but they're probably a hundred there are certainly trillions, maybe 100 trillion or so, roughly the same numbers of cells in our body. Most of them are the ones we know about are bacteria, but there are also these other related species called archaea.

And there are fungi and yeasts. And there are viruses, five times as many viruses as bacteria that feed off them called phages, which also have a role in health. And there are even parasites that virtually all of us have to some extent in our guts and some of which turn out to be beneficial as well. So it's this whole community, a bit like an ecosystem that is living within us. And it best considers a virtual organ stick them all together they weigh about two kilograms same as your brain and they're basically as i said these mini pharmacies pumping out chemicals which send signals all over a body but particularly to all the immune cells the majority of which are immune cells, are actually lining our gut. And so they interact

with those immune cells on a constant basis, signaling whether to be aggressive or be passive and modifying them, tuning them up and down. That helps fight aging, helps fight cancer, sorts out allergies, et cetera, et cetera, fights infections. And they also produce lots of chemicals that might go to our brain, responsible for serotonins and many other pathways in the brain as well. So it affects our mood and obviously our metabolism and how we digest food amongst others. Right, like so many things, right?

Infinite things. If there are any kind of concrete rules or recommendations, how we digest food amongst others. Right, like so many things. Infinite things. If there are any kind of concrete rules or recommendations for the person who's brand new to the idea of the microbiome even being a thing and who's grappling with the idea of making healthier choices for themselves beyond the 30 kind of plants a week,

what are some other principles, top of mind, you know, what sits atop the kind of most important of those? Well, we've covered some of them. So obviously eating the rainbow is, you know, the colors are there for a reason and they're actually really good. So, you know, don't eat beige. Yeah, don't eat beige.

Yeah, go colorful. That's the title of this podcast. Go bitter. Many bitter things are actually good. You know, one reason coffee's so healthy for you is it's got full of polyphenols. And, you know, I recommend coffee over orange juice anytime as a health drink.

It should be in the health section. Dark chocolate's another surprising one. Cook with extra virgin olive oil rather than any other oil. Don't believe all this nonsense about heating points. Yes, all that stuff, that's all rubbish. The way you eat is also important. So we've talked about what to eat, but time-restricted eating we've discussed. We didn't discuss that actually has a really big benefit on your gut microbes. So all the studies show that if you leave a big gap overnight, so your gut is rested just as the hunter-gatherer tribes did.

They're not nibbling snack bars or protein bars at night. They're resting just as they're sleeping, giving that full circadian rhythm, real chance to real synchronize. So I think that's an important part. So there's reducing the snacking time less meals giving yourself you know at least 12 hours overnight ideally 14 is a good way for your gut to to repair itself and enhance um eating more slowly um we all eat too fast i think one in five American meals are consumed in the car. It's difficult to have a leisurely meal in the car.

Just wait. Do like the Mediterranean countries. Just don't have snacks. Wait and have a proper meal. Make it a social good occasion. Enjoy the food. good occasion enjoy the food um and uh you know learn to try something new every every week you should be aiming something something new as extra so part of this 30 plants is to discover new things you haven't eaten and you know get your taste buds to try

something something new all the time and introduce that to your family and make, make food something exciting rather than a chore, because we all get into these ruts in our choices. We find something we like and we think it's healthy. We have the same thing. Well, that, you know, our microbes don't like that. We, you know, they like to be tested all the time. So I think it's all about an adventure, experimenting, find out whether you're someone who does well, you know, with this long overnight fast and not snacking or whether you are someone who does need to eat. There are different people.

Are you an early morning person, a late morning person? Try skipping breakfast. Try changing your breakfast for, you know, from a high carb one to a high fat one. See how you feel. Try and just think about how your body's working. Don't accept that everything's the same for everybody. And I think the more we can all experiment and understand our bodies, the better we get to understand food and live with it. And

always think about your food now, again, in these food choices. If you care about the planet, really think about those food choices you're making. Because as an individual, it is the number one thing we can all do to save our planet. And I think it's not about that one thing that you do or you don't do. It's about the holistic view of that. What can you get on your plate? Clearly, if you've got a big, if three quarters of it's filled with a giant steak, there's not much room for your plants.

Right, so the top level rule just being 30 plants a week and diversity of plant life in your diet on the most consistent basis possible is producing the diversity in that gut microbiome ecology that is going to be, you know, the sort of front lines of keeping you healthy. Yeah, and it's a nice simple rule that means you don't have to be too strict

about anything else, because if that's your number one rule, then everything, you know, follow. Yes, it's nice to have, know the rich colorful polyphenol rich foods it's nice you know the fermented foods uh we know are good as well avoiding ultra processed foods uh etc but that to me is still number one and i think that's been a a good you know a really good way of communicating it also to the public about understanding why you want to feed your gut,

why feed your gut microbes. You do it by eating right. For anyone in any creative pursuit, weathering rejection is one of the most difficult parts of making your dream manifest. So here to give us guidance on how to build creative tenacity is writer, actor, and director Zoe Lister-Jones, who joined me this year to talk about the creative process

behind her newest binge-worthy comedy, Slip. When you look at the studio system, there's such an attention to creating something for a mass audience. And I think what's misguided about the process a lot of the time is that the idea is that you're supposed to water it down. And when you see a company like A24, who instead is sharpening the singularity of a vision, And that's what's actually speaking to such mass audiences. Like, what a great lesson. I also think like making something with an audience in mind, to me, is always sort of like the death knell, you know?

Like, make something that you want to make. Like, what is the story you want to tell? And that's what you put out into the world. Because when you start to be, I think, product-oriented over process-oriented, yeah, it can get you into some trouble. There are people sitting around conference room tables trying to figure out if it's gonna work in China or it's gonna work in this other place. And those are the things that dictate budgets. Yeah, I mean, when I say it's like, figure out what story you wanna write.

If I was talking to like a filmmaker, I would say, figure out what story you wanna write, what story you have to write. And then think about a way to make it cheaply. You know, like I'm not taking business out of the equation because I think you do have to be pragmatic. If you're a first time filmmaker and you write some huge epic, it's never going to get made. And that might be the story you think you need to tell, but what's, if you distilled that story down, what's the contained version of it? And then go, you know, figure out a way to make that.

Because every single project I've ever made has had 1,000 no's before there's been any yes. So how do you like weather the rejection? Because you're in a business, you've become very successful in this business, but it's a business of, like you said, mostly nose. Yeah. And being able to kind of like hold true to yourself

and what you're doing and not get overly dissuaded by that. I guess it comes back to confidence, which is hard, right? Like, because nose will diminish your confidence. I've always had something where I don't believe them. It doesn't mean that I don't take notes, right? Like if someone says no, I have to look at what they're saying no to and what I can shift. But it requires such tenacity to keep going. And that tenacity is ultimately like an unwavering sense of self or a sense that you have something that deserves a voice um and i don't know i don't know how how how to cultivate that necessarily except for to just keep going i think you just have to keep going and i think making your own work is really important. Like Daryl and I made work in the face of 1000 no's by just going and doing it ourselves. And, you know, that's a real stress test of the work. Yeah. I feel like, um, just in looking at like the projects that you guys did together, you, it feels like you just pulled the shit out of your ass.

Like you're like, well, we're gonna go make this movie. And I'm like, what? And then like somehow you're like out in the street, like shooting, like you just, you progress as if, like even if all the pieces aren't together, like you're just in motion moving forward. And when you create that momentum, somehow everything else,

those other problems that seem insurmountable start to get resolved. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like manifesting, I guess, one-on-one is like, I am doing it. You can tell me no, and I can take a note and shift something. You can tell me no and say, well, we have something else like it, take a note and shift something. You can tell me no and say, well, we have something else like it, which is what you're always hearing. And it's like, well, but do you?

And can't there be many things that are in the same world but have different voices behind them? And I guess the best advice I ever was given was by a producer named Alex Madigan, who took me to coffee and said, you should direct. And I didn't know that. And it's like a wildly simple piece of advice. But I think that it does take sometimes, I think for many people, but especially for women and especially for women in film, like this sense of confidence, even if you don't know, or if you haven't gone to film school,

if you don't have every answer, you don't know every lens, that someone saw that and said, go do it, you got it. And that's really all it took. To have that outside external voice, see something in you that maybe you're not ready to see in yourself. Yeah.

Even when I was in high school and I was acting, I was in the chorus of a musical. I had no confidence as an actor. And some parent in the PTA was like, you're really good. You're the one I'm watching in the background. And so I guess tell people when you think they're talented because it's really meaningful and it's a really hard world across all industries. And those are really character-building moments in terms of giving someone a sense of value

in the craft they might be interested in, but too afraid to pursue. Everyone wants to be happy, but why does it feel so complicated? is the author of a series of books on all things awesome, my friend, Neil Pasricha, who just delivered this amazing, powerful primer on how to build a life of purpose, how to cultivate fulfillment and allocate your time here on earth more intentionally. Here's a piece. So just zooming out like a huge level before we get into like my views, let's just remember that 2,400 years ago in ancient Athens, Aristotle at the world's first university, Plato's Republic, had a very famous quote, happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of

human existence. That, if you want to talk about people that have made a career out of happiness, there's the OG guy right there. Yeah, he's the original happiness influencer. But before that, it was like survival. We just got to make it through this thing. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. The whole purpose is also, we got to enjoy it too. 2,400 years ago, they put that down, right?

Then flash forward 2,000 years, they write the Declaration of Independence. You know the famous phrase they put in there. Everybody gets life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But you're a lawyer, Rich. You know it's the legalese in there. You don't get happiness. You get to pursue it.

You get to pursue it. You get the pursuit of it. Life, liberty, you get those for sure. But happiness, you just get to chase it, right? So now we flash forward all the way up to 1998. Let's say Martin Seligman and Mihal Csikszentmihalyi are co-founders of a new field that they invent called positive psychology, right? And for a lot of your listeners who have heard that phrase before, positive psychology, we should remember that phrase didn't exist in our culture before 25 years ago. So that's still a relatively new phrase.

So from 1998 to today, hundreds and hundreds of studies have been done applying the scientific model to the study of happiness, right? Carol Dweck on growth mindset, Slasher and Pennebaker on journaling, Emond McCullough on gratitude, Sonia Lubomirsky at University of California. There's this massive, huge, emerging body of work and literature.

So I just use those three points to just say like, just let's look what's happened here. Like 2000 years ago, we say this is important. Then we write it into the declaration. We got to chase it. And now we're like starting

to actually study it only really 25 years ago. Now, I think that the underpinning of how we think about happiness in our society is totally backwards, okay? When I was a kid, what my parents said to me was, we've already talked about this a few times, but it's like, come on, study hard, get straight A's and you go be a doctor. The model therefore is great work leads to big success leads to be happy, right? And that model is also, if you're listening to this and you're a parent, it's like, don't you say to your own kid, come on, we want

you to get into a good school. Come on, we want you to get a good job. Come on, we just want you to be, that's common parental wisdom and it's totally false. So after combing through all these studies, there's a really formative study done by Sonia Lubomirsky with Ed Diener and Jane King. And they show that actually that model is totally backwards. It's not great work, big success, be happy. It's the opposite. It's you got to train your brain to be happy first. Then if you can do that, if you can think of happiness like a practice, like a habit,

like something you can invest in, you invest in your physical health so beautifully. We see that we aspire to it. We see that you're a model. But how many people do you look around and you see them investing in their happiness the same way? We don't, we aren't as a culture doing this yet. Then the great work follows. Happy people are 31% more productive. They have 37% higher sales. They're 300% more creative. You can go down the litany of all kinds of things that happy people show up better. They're more connected.

And then the big success comes at the end. What kind of success? Two kinds. If you want to go on the career point, which I was on for a second there, happy people are 40% more likely to get a promotion in the next 12 months. But just zooming up a level,

there's this really famous study called the Nunn Study that shows, you know what? Happy people also live longer. And if going back to our earlier conversation, you only got 30,000 days here. Well, if I told you, if you could get 3,000 more bowls of ice cream, kissing your kids goodnight, watching the sunset,

running on the trails behind this place, wouldn't you do it? So again, it's not great work, big success, be happy. It's the reverse. You've got to train and prime your brain to think of happiness like a practice, like a habit, like something you invest in. Then being happy leads to doing great work and the great work leads to having big success. And on top of all that, a lot of the practices that it turns out that do help you cultivate happiness have got real bad ad campaigns.

They don't have the benefit of anyone advertising trees. No one's advertising trees right now. Well, because you can't profit from it. That's exactly what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. The vast majority of things that I'm about to tell you about that can actually imbue our lives with a bit more happiness, They don't have great giant ad campaigns and we aren't talking about them.

What our culture is trying to teach us is that you got to buy more stuff. You got to click more links. You got to buy more things. And that path to happiness is, you know, whatever's on a billboard that looks pretty, that, you know, someone's smiling,

that implicit thing is that that's going to lead to happiness. It's not. Zooming up a level, look, you're a paragon of this, Rish, but just getting outside and being in nature. And by the way, I'll just preface this point by saying, we have the lowest ever levels of nature exposure

in our children in history. According to the American Time Use Study, 7% of a kid's day right now is spent outside. 7%. Well, do the math. Multiply 7% by seven days in the week. That's 49%. It takes a kid a whole week to get half a day outside now, right? So what's the solution? Michael Babich and a team of researchers have shown that even three 30-minute exercise or outdoor windows a week ultimately results in higher happiness levels than people taking antidepressants or people doing both. They compared it to a subgroup doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants. So this, I said trees have a bad ad campaign. and taking the antidepressants.

So this, I said trees have a bad ad campaign. It's like we're missing the amount that we really need to be outside. And one of the biggest ways I tell people to do this is if you have a meeting on your calendar with someone you know that you like already, that you trust already, whether it's your boss, whether it's your direct report, whether it's a weekly meeting that you always have,

just say to the person, let's both do it outside. Let's just both do it outside. The average person walks six kilometers an hour. You move one hour meeting a week outside, you get 6K of walking. Move two, you got 12. Move three, you got 18. It's a simple way to just introduce

a little bit more outdoor activity in your life. It doesn't cost you anything and it has a huge positive disproportionate effect on your happiness. How do we access our intuition? How do we make decisions from a place of inner peace? And how do we become more integrated and healed humans? Answering these important questions is the life's work of Dr. Richard Schwartz, author of No Bad Parts and creator of something called Internal Family Systems, or IFS.

Here's a glimpse into our powerful exchange. What is Internal Family Systems, IFS? Set the stage and explain your perspective on your particular modality of treating people. Okay. What it is, it began as a form of psychotherapy, and it's kind of expanded to being more like a life practice or a way of understanding human beings that's a bit of a different paradigm. And, you know, the basic assumption is

none of us are unitary personalities. It's the nature of the mind to have lots of different what I call parts, but other people call other names, ego states, things like that, subpersonalities. That it's natural and that those parts are all valuable. So I wrote a book, No Bad Parts. I've been doing this 40 years, and I've done it with people who've done heinous things. And even those parts, if you listen to their secret history,

will reveal how they're just stuck in a place in the past, and they're trying to best protect the person, and they carry this energy of their perpetrator and so on. So in that sense, it's quite a radical shift in paradigm. Right, given that the conventional, traditional, psychological paradigm is one of mono-mind as opposed to this multiplicity of minds that is kind of the pathway

into understanding your perspective. Yeah. And when I started talking about multiplicity, the big paradigm was from what's now called the DID literature, which would be multiple personality disorder originally. And they would acknowledge the existence of these, what they called altars, but it was thought that they were fragments of the broken vase, that you were initially unitary, and then trauma produced all these fragmented personalities that took on a life of their own. And so I've been fighting that paradigm for a long time too, because for me, So I've been fighting that paradigm for a long time too because for me, they preexisted the trauma, and then they got into extreme roles because of the trauma, sometimes just because they were trying their best to keep you safe when you were young when it happened.

But they exist. They're real. It's not the product of the trauma. So in other words, there is this, I guess for lack of a better word, immutable, there's an immutable self. And ancillary to that immutable self are all of these parts that are swimming around

and they're in relationship with each other. And they're performing various roles depending upon things that happen to you, et cetera. And your way of kind of approaching this and trying to understand it is premised on a systems approach, like trying to understand it like a technology or like code, right?

So walk me through, what does that mean when you say family systems? Family systems therapy is, so if you're working with an acting out kid, for example, you assume that that kid isn't just whatever diagnosis he carries, but that in some ways he's serving a function in the family of distracting or he's trying to protect himself from something serving a function in the family of distracting

or he's trying to protect himself from something that's happening in the family. And that our assumption was we could reorganize the family and try to improve whatever relationships were producing his symptoms and that he would stop doing that. And a lot of times that worked. But as this family therapist, I was determined to doing that. And a lot of times that worked. But as this family therapist, I was determined to prove that. I was in a department of psychiatry and decided to do an outcome study with eating disorders because my hero at the time was a guy named Salvador

Mnuchin who had used his structural family therapy with anorexia and claimed a lot of success. So I was going to do it with bulimia and found, to my dismay, that we could reorganize the families just right. And still, a bunch of my kids didn't realize they'd been cured and they kept going. How dare they, right? So this is sort of an external family systems model, right? That's right. How dare they? I know. Right?

So this is sort of an external family systems model, right? That's right. Organize the people around the person afflicted with the condition you're trying to treat. That's right. And resolve with less than stellar results is what you're saying. Yeah. And then out of frustration, I began to ask these kids, why are you still doing it? And they started talking this very weird language to me at the time, talking about these different parts of them and how they were doing

all this stuff inside. And so, you know, an example would be something happens in my life, it triggers this critic who's brutal and makes me feel horrible. And that brings up a part that feels young and empty and alone and worthless. And that feeling is so distressing that then this binge comes in to get me away from it. But the binge triggers the critic again who's calling me a pig on top of the other names. And that goes right to the heart of that empty, worthless, young one. So the binge has to come back. And I was lucky. I had a couple of clients who were extremely articulate about that whole thing. And at first, because I didn't know from parts, at first I thought,

these kids are sicker than I thought. Maybe they have multiple personality disorder. And then I listened inside myself and, oh my God, I've got them too. order. And then I listened inside myself and, oh my God, I've got them too. And I've got this critic and I can binge on food sometimes and other things. And I have a piece of worthlessness in there. And so then I calmed down and got really curious and just started to ask a lot of questions about how do they relate to each other and how does it work in there. And, you know, I was lucky that I hadn't studied any psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapies. So I came with fresh eyes. Right, like a beginner's mind approach. Beginner's mind, I was just going to say that.

So I really had to trust what they were saying about the phenomena. And that's partly why this is different, I think, than a lot of things. phenomena, and that's partly why this is different, I think, than a lot of things. Both that and the systems frame, where rather than just focusing on one part, trying to figure it out, I was really trying to understand the way this whole network operated as a system, and that's what we go to change. We're trying to change the whole network rather than just one at a time. And my contention is these aren't just little voices or thought patterns or emotions. Those are the manifestations of these parts. But if I were to have you focus on one of them exclusively for a second and get curious about it and just ask, you'd find out that it's a full range personality that really has a

lot to tell you besides the little thought it's giving you and that it's stuck in an extreme role often if it's an extreme part because of something that happened in your childhood maybe or yeah and that through trial and error over time we found out how to help all these parts change and to actually leave their extreme roles and become who they're designed to be. So that's the goal of the model. A lot more still to come, but first. Also returning to the podcast this year was the wise and gentle rain wilson he came on board to wax and wane philosophically on the positives and the negatives of religious belief how to of change and why spirituality is a necessity.

We threw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. So in our kind of, especially secular left, urban, contemporary America, we have rejected anything and everything having to do with religion for a very good reason. For a very, very good reason. Let me underline that. For very good reasons, religions have brought some of the worst pain and suffering and grotesque aspects of human nature to bear over the last couple of thousands of years that you could ever possibly imagine. And every decade you read about some new horror that the Catholic church or that evangelicals have engendered. But I do think that we are missing something by throwing out religion categorically. which is purpose, meaning, community, and a sense of the transcendent, the sense that there is something more to strive for. There's a lot more to the very best of religion.

And I try and I have a chapter on kind of the universals of religious faiths, why Buddhism and Islam and Christianity are, why and how they're connected, the essential ideas that bind them together. And they even have a chapter called, Hey kids, let's invent a new religion where I'm like,

let's, let's take the very best that religion has brought humanity over the last three or 4,000 years. Let's take the best ideas from that, put it together in a jambalaya and make our new religion because we which you call soul boom i call it soul boom trademark um but i also refuse categorically to be any kind of guru or leader of the soul boom religion but i i posit it kind of jokingly but at the same time there are some by throwing out religion and we see this current mental health

crisis and if you have you have you read the work of dr lisa miller uh the awakened brain yeah i had her on the podcast oh great okay she's amazing sorry i missed that one yeah i love that come on she's great but there's hard data that supports how spirituality and religion itself makes people happier, greater wellbeing, greater community, more resilient, which, you know, resilience is one of the big factors in the mental health crisis. So it's something to be explored, you know, and I can already hear all the people right now,

switching off the podcast and like throwing things across the room. Fuck that. I'll never be a part of religion. That so evil and it's like i get it i get it it has been it's true but there are some universal beautiful truths in religious practice and let me say this spirituality there has to be some kind of systemic sensibility to spirituality if we want to achieve social transformation. If we want that Star Trek world, there has to be some kind of systematic practice that leads in that direction. So that's how I would say different,

that the Baha'i faith offers some, again, I'm not trying to like convert people, but what I love about the Baha'i faith is that it fosters grassroots community spiritual movements in a systematic way. Right. And I think, sorry, go ahead. People gathering to pray together, bringing diverse people together, being of service together, children and youth classes that are focused on spiritual virtues, divine virtues, you know, the very best kind of character and leadership qualities that humanity has to offer.

These are ways of building a grassroots community movement that you don't have to be a Baha'i to partake in this, but some kind of systematization other than a, like you say, bespoke spirituality, I think is crucial to move forward. Why do you think it's worthwhile and meaningful for somebody to cultivate a spiritual connection or to really grapple with these ideas

that kind of transcend the material world in which kind of predominates our daily experience. For somebody who's listening to this or watching it, for whom maybe they have a negative reaction to religion because of the way they were brought up or they have an allergy to anything spiritual, make the case for why this is worthwhile for somebody to kind of mine or explore?

Gladly. Thank you. Great question. So the first thing I will say is the reason why spirituality is important is because it is reality. So what is reality? I am fully in agreement with Teilhard de Chardin who said,

we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. I fully know, it goes beyond belief, I fully know that I am a soul and that I am inhabiting or attached to or in connection with a bodily form for who knows how long, 60, 70, 90 years. I'm not sure how long it'll last. And that is my reality. And who I am and what I am is not my body. It's not even my personality.

It's not even like the background that I, it's not the trauma I suffered. It's not even my personality. It's not even like the background that I, you know, it's not the trauma I suffered. It's not what I've been through, that there is a little spark of the divine inside of me, or that is part of me that is reflecting the majesty of the divine of God, the divine presence, the creative force, just like a sunflower turns to the sun and follows the sun throughout the course of the day. That is reality. So for me to deny my reality is not beneficial to anyone, at least if not myself. So now if you are a hardcore atheist and you're like, that's bullshit, prove it to me. Prove to me this divine spark of which

you speak. I want to see it in a laboratory or in an algorithm or on a computer screen. Well, that's not quite how it works because every spiritual tradition will show you that we live in a matrix, that we live in an illusion. And when we wake up from this corporal form, we're going to be in some greater reality. And this has come from the atheists, this idea that perhaps we're living in an avatar. The simulacrum. The simulacrum. And we're living in a fleshy avatar and we're going to wake up to some greater reality. But putting all that aside, I would say to the atheist or agnostic that try it and see if your life is better because there is hard, we talked about Dr. Lisa Miller and her work. There's hard data that shows around mental health and wellbeing that having

serenity, meaning, purpose, focus, a sense of service to others, a losing of oneself to a transcendent self of the divine, the transcendent, the abundance that's around us increases greatly the quality of our lives. When we see ourselves in true humility with the size and scope of the universe and whatever infinite universes are beyond this

universe, that it makes the quality of your life better. So cost-benefit analysis, putting in a small amount of time every day, I'm talking about 40 minutes in your day to some kind of spiritual spiritual opening and or practice has incredible benefits. This has been found time and time again. It's found in the 12-step programs. It's found in Buddhist meditation. It's found in the most ancient texts that humanity has ever created, the Vedas and Upanishads from 3,000 years ago,

this sense that we are a wave on the sea of creation and the wave crests and the wave falls. We're a part of something much greater and much more beautiful than ourselves. And in living in that state can greatly enrich your life. How is that? Boom. Next up is one of the greatest music producers of all time,

founder of Def Jam Records and a former president of Columbia Records, Rick Rubin. Rick shared his deeply spiritual approach to artistry, one that is gloriously explored in his deeply impactful book, The Creative Act. Here is a slice of that exchange. For me, the success happens when we sign off on a finished thing and say, okay, send it out into the world. That's the moment of success.

And once that happens, I don't look back. On to the next. On to the next. Yeah. Because that's the only part I have any participation in. That's the only part I can control. because that's the only part I have any participation in. That's the only part I can control. Everything else is based on market conditions, on stars aligning.

One of the stories we heard today in what we were doing was many of the people whose music came out on 9-11, their music got lost and their careers never recovered just because it happened to come out on 9-11. And it's fascinating and that's out of everyone's control. And that's, again, it's a, it's universal intervention. We don't know how it works, but these are all, um, one of the things we talk about in the book is watching these occurrences. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, and thinking of it as riding a wave. And that these universe is pushing us in a direction and we can ride with that energy.

And like when you're surfing, if you really try to fight the wave, it's probably not going to work. We try to use the power of the wave where we're almost dancing with the wave, not against the wave. And that's the work of creativity as well. Certain projects come together very easily and they happen quickly and they have a momentum to them and others are a real fight. And sometimes we fight that fight and other times we decide, is there another, a path of less resistance around this? Is there a better way in? Let's rethink, well, if it's so hard, something's up. Not supposed to be so hard.

Again, it's wildly time-consuming, takes a great deal of focus, takes patience. But if there are no signs that something's working for a long time, that might be a time to step back, step away. There's so much packed into what you just said. I mean, first off, it being very counterintuitive or opposite to this notion that if you wanna be successful,

you push, you hustle, you force things into existence. In the book, you say the work is the work, right? What is the work? The work is lots of things. The work is hard, but it's play. It's about sharing and it's about passion. It's about structure, of course. It's very elusive and it is ephemeral. So it's understandable. You're like, I don't know what it is, but I know what it's not. Yes.

And I don't know how to do it. That's another thing. Like before I start any new project, I always have a lot of anxiety because I have no idea what's going to happen. Now I have a lot of experience that helps now, but that doesn't make it happen. It takes a tremendous amount of patience to wait for it to reveal itself. And I guess now I have the wisdom to know this,

that be patient. And I have the discipline to stay with it for a long time. And I want to make that point because we were just talking about sometimes you have to bail. But while you're in it for a long time, there are usually clues. And it might be a radical course change. You could start out. You have a moment. Something beautiful happens. You think, ah, this is what it's going to be. And you start running, you have a moment, something beautiful happens, think, ah, this is what it's going to be. And you start running in that direction. And then you realize we're going in the wrong direction. And then you have to set a new course.

Be nimble enough to be able to walk away from that, even when you've invested some ungodly amount of time and effort into that direction that's not functioning. It's something that we see often is the initial moment when an idea springs forth, that first sketch, the first demo, the very first rough, often has some energetic charge in it that's really compelling. And we hear many stories in music where records come out and people don't respond. And then they go back to, oh, well, but we missed it. It was all in the demo.

The record screwed up. And being aware of that's helpful because you can, just because you put more time in, like from the time you've made the demo, you may put in, let's say we'd work for a month after we've made a demo, we work on something for a month. Might work on a song for a month. We might realize at the end of that month, if we listen back, which is the key, always checking back, see, I know we're putting time in,

but are we progressing? Right. Is it different or is it better? Right, just because you're working on it a lot doesn't mean that it's better and after hearing it you know 10 000 times you're so close to it and you and and you become like sort of immune to its allure and you think there's something wrong with it yes so you tinker and then you actually end up dismantling the whole thing. It's true. Yeah. Many just get overdone. So in the cases when the demo is the best version,

luckily we recognize it and that ends up being the version. Now, you know. But it takes discipline, confidence, and experience to recognize that the original GarageBand version of it is actually better than the highly polished studio version. Yes, and even if it has mistakes, sometimes you hear mistakes, you fix the mistakes, and it's not as good.

Right. You wouldn't expect that. It's drained of its energy. It's drained of its humanity. And we don't know, this is the other part, we don't know why it's good. You hear it. That's the thing.

There are no metrics for this. The idea that one person says, my art is better than your art, it's an insane idea. It's like they're all, it's always apples and oranges. It's like saying, my diary entry is better than your diary entry. It's insane. The things we make are a reflection of who we are in this moment. And that's all it is. It's not more than that. It can go on and mean more than that, but that's not in our control. And that's not the reason to do it no and it's something that cripples artists thinking i have to make the greatest

thing ever made to humankind and then they uh basically psych themselves out of being able to make something good that they give into the pressure of thinking it's more than it is. So one of the things we talk about in the book is lowering the stakes where we're not setting out to make the greatest album of all time. We're not setting out to make the greatest song of all time. We're there to have fun in the studio. We're going to entertain each other. We're going to see if something happens that's interesting to us. We're going to see if something happens that's interesting to us.

And there's no better, I found, luckily, over the course of my life, that the things that I truly believe in, that really feel like something to me, other people resonate with. I don't know if that's the case for everybody, but I don't know of a better metric to use for anyone than I really feel this. If I really feel it, it's much better than I think someone else might like this. It's not really from, you know, it's not really me, but I think someone else might like it. It's a losing game. The audience comes last in service to the audience. The audience wants the best thing.

They don't get the best thing while you're trying to service them. They get the best thing when you're servicing yourself. Beneath countless problems in our society lies this sleeping giant, which is this profound disconnect that we have with nature. So here to remind us of the important links between human biology on the one hand and planetary biology on the other is none other than my friend, Dr. Zach Bush, who joined us for his, I don't know, umpteenth appearance on the podcast back in episode 751. I want to maybe come back to that thought of, you know, some of these technologies are good and doing things. I think we can't actually make any real honest or accurate judgment on

any of our technologies being good or bad until maybe a few more thousand years goes by and we have a different perspective because there's so many unintended consequences of human engineering that is outside of biology we and and it's it's scary for me to think that that we're making judgments and that's a good technology or bad technology is ai a bad technology i don't know we'll find find out. I mean, human innovation is the story of unintended consequences. It's the story of unintended consequences that are born out of a fundamental disconnect

from nature at its beginning. Well, and also a hubris. Yeah, obviously the hubris is the result of the ego that steps in to protect the individual that thought it got rejected, right? And so our original wound was rejection it was we all have an abandonment disorder at our root and then we developed an egoic mind and you know social behavior to try to staunch the fear guilt and

shame cycles that happen once you're in that abandonment disorder that keeps us addicted great work on addiction that i'm fascinated by is T.J. Woodward's work around conscious recovery. And he's really good at helping people get down to this root of abandonment disorders. The reason they have addiction to anything. I've never heard of him. That's fascinating. Oh, he would love to have him on.

Does he have a book or what? Yeah, he's got not only books, he's got an incredible curriculum that kind of comes alongside AA as like a much more robust look at kind of what is the root cause and then what is your relationship back towards addictive substances. survival of a species that's in this deep abandonment disorder for an individual that's in deep abandonment disorder from their parents that rejected them, the father that abused them, whatever it is. And so it's a beautiful model of, again, fractals of what we've done to nature down at the individual level. But what you see when you're working through T.J. Woodward's work is,

oh my God, this is the whole human condition. We're all addicted to something. And right now, a lot of us are addicted to our biohacking data. And so we are so addictive because we have this fundamental abandonment disorder way upstream. What I love about this simplicity is then rethinking the word technology. We think of technologies of things that we can build that are not of nature. That's our current concept of technology, which discards the possibility that a human cell with trillions of atoms that have self-organized into this thing is not a technology. That diminishes the possibility

that my 14 quadrillion mitochondria are not technologies living inside of myself. I believe we are the greatest technology expressed by nature so far. This human body is the greatest technology that's been made by nature this far. I have a high degree of confidence of that. My trust in that supersedes anything that I can make that looks outside of nature. We've defined nature that way even. If you go to the Oxford English dictionary, nature is defined as everything on the planet, minerals, plants, animals, everything except humans

or things humans have made. Really? Not only wrote ourselves out in nature. It doesn't encapsulate humans as part of nature, which is a perfect encapsulation of the problem, the dualistic nature of how humanity, yeah, like contemplates our role. So what if the greatest technology ever made

is this human body? What is it capable of doing to shift from victim perpetrator into this true creative state where it can create universes? Is there an opportunity for me to tap into something so much deeper than my five senses or my two hands could ever create?

Because I am a generative center. And if I can think it, it's occurring somewhere in the multiverse. If I can imagine it, it's occurring somewhere out there. And there's a lot of people that believe that's true from indigenous peoples all the way through. If you've imagine it, it's occurring somewhere out there. And there's a lot of people that believe that's true from indigenous peoples all the way through. If you've dreamed it, it's happening somewhere right now in the multiverse. How would I possibly get there?

How would I get to this place where I switch from victim perpetrator on a daily basis to true creator? And of all places that maybe shoved a huge sign post in my face on this, it was the Course in Miracles. There's this extraordinary description in there of how humans have become addicted to human relationship in the effort to complete ourselves. We see something different than ourselves.

We feel incomplete and we figure, oh, that's the other half. If we put that together, then I'll be whole. And we become codependent in those relationships that's defined in that space of special relationship the beauty that is the opposite of that that is this promise that kind of sits there is that at some point in the near future two human beings could come together that have completed themselves no longer looking outside of themselves to realize that they are a complete technology, they are a complete being,

they have all that was ever intended at the highest technological level of nature's whole expression right within themselves. And it says that when those two people saw each other, for the first time, they would truly be seen. Because in the split state of the egoic mind that's protecting ourselves from this addictive abandonment disorder,

we can only see a mirror of ourselves. So as much as I love you, as much as I can talk to you about all of your incredible attributes, every time I look at you, I'm only either seeing the best of me or the worst of me. And that is the result of this schism, this split psychology of the egoic mind,

which is too afraid to see you ultimately for the incredible nature that you really are. And so we protect ourselves behind these egoic shields so that we cannot be seen and we cannot see. When we stop with the addiction to the outside world through our relationships, through our things, and we become whole for a split second, if two would see each other,

the amount of love and awe and just magnanimous sense of just amazement and wonderment that would come out of that moment would send ripple effects to the whole energies of the planet and through the species and we will make our paradigm leap. And so it just takes two people to finally see each other to be that next technology of humanity is what we're told in that incredible course so is that possible that we will let go down that egoic shield long enough and heal our deep abandonment disorder to become whole enough for a moment that this observer effect that we talked about earlier that if we really see the universe for all its beauty it will switch switch completely. Every atom will change. We only have to do that to one other human, only see one other human completely.

And that observer effect will change everything, I believe. Next up is Senator Cory Booker, a truly remarkable person who has dedicated not only his career, but his life to fighting for social justice, fighting for civil rights, and also environmental protection. My conversation with Corey centered on a topic that is near and dear to both our hearts, food policy reform. Here's a look into our fractured food system and what we can do to fix it. We are a country in a health crisis that we're not speaking about. We are the wealthiest country in the world, but we have some of the highest rates of diet-related diseases that are mushrooming in cost. In just a handful of years, or like five, our spending on diabetes

has gone up 25%. Half our population now is diabetic or pre-diabetic, but it's not just diabetes. It's Alzheimer's, heart disease, strokes. And so one out of every $3 in our government right now is being spent on healthcare, close to one out of five of our dollars in our economy. And I ran for president where the debate people wanted to have

was how do you provide healthcare? But it's almost like saying it's like well how do you mop up the floor when the water is for us has never turned off we talk about why we need so much health care yes so 80 of that spending is for diet related diseases and i'm all for freedom i want i want this country eat what you want but we have designed a system in which the things that we tell you not to eat are being subsidized. And the things we tell you to eat, we don't subsidize at all. So when my kids walk into a bodega in Newark,

they can get a Twinkie-like product cheaper than an apple because we as a society have said, we're gonna subsidize everything in that Twinkie-like product and not the apple. In fact, fruits and vegetables get about 7% of our ag subsidies, while the commodity crops that go to the corn syrup and the things that, again, are not making us healthy or to feed animals get the most of our subsidies. And everybody along the chain is getting hurt. Farmers are getting hurt right now.

Their suicide rates, I think, are two or three times higher than the average American. The independent family farmer is being eviscerated. People are losing their farms in utter numbers. Again, it's a massive corporate consolidation.

Small amounts of company are controlling our food system, and they're benefiting from ag policies designed in the 1950s by people who thought, let's just make calories readily available and that can stay on shelves forever.

When we know a lot better about nutrition now, this food system that we have is being done in a way that is all about those commodity crops, which now are being doused with chemicals that we don't fully know what does to our bodies. But you and I both have glyphosates in our blood, other endocrine disruptors, because we've created this roundup-ready crops and seeds, which are hurting our ecology. Streams, rivers, full of these chemicals, runoff of – we're losing quality of our soil.

So, farmers are losing. The ecology is losing. Climate change is one of our biggest contributors to the problem. All these climate activists seem to always forget that our food system is one of the major contributors to that. Farmers could be leading us out of that with us incentivizing them to do farming practices, cover crops and other things that preserve soil, nutrient-rich soil, biodiverse soil, as opposed to the dirt that's created when you douse it in glyphosate. So it's a climate change issue. It's an ecology issue. It's about our farmers, but it's also about our food workers. People who work in our food system, first of all,

overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants from our farms that are picking most of the food we eat, even to our slaughterhouses, which are more corporate concentrated than during the time of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. So you go all the way to the end users. As a guy that you know, Ron Finley says in South Central, he says, South Central, we got drive-bys and drive-throughs, and the drive-throughs are killing more people than the drive-bys. The number one killer of African-Americans is diet-related diseases. So this food system is so broken, it's hurting us in every single way

from the farmers who are producing our food, who now get 14 cents on the dollar of every consumer dollar spent because of, again, massive corporate concentration all the way down to very, very sick population. And so I think we as a society, no matter whether you're right or left, I told you about the cattlemen

who are getting hurt by this system all the way to the people in communities like mine, we need to begin to expand consciousness about that this is not a fait accompli, that this system is by design producing the results that we're seeing, where pharmaceutical companies are making incredible profits,

where literally I was shocked when I saw this that a major health organization says, well, obesity in children is such a bad thing. We are advising them to have their stomachs stapled. So we have created a system where people are profiting off of it, but the rest of us all are losing. And we can redesign it so farmers thrive and consumers thrive in health.

Because we know, as you've said many times on your show, food is medicine. I can show you study after study that for taxpayers, if you're fiscally conservative, what a return on investment if you make fresh fruits and vegetables accessible for people with diabetes or hypertension or the like. And so I want to be a disruptor now. I want to find ways to take the next farm bill, which is coming, and see what ways we can make improvements on it to begin to show people there's a better way. Specifically to the food systems issue,

like how do you kind of encourage people to get more involved? Like, are there certain things that you could advise or recommend people to look into or how to use their voice specifically? Well, every dollar you spend in your life is a vote. And I'm trying to think more about everything from where my clothing comes from to where my food comes from. And if you have the flexibility to make choices, you can endorse a lot of good practices that are starting. And so what I try to remind myself is that this is that word you said

earlier. It is a practice that trying every day to get up, to live your values is something that's not hard, but it demands of us that whether we stumble, we fall, we just get up every day and try our best to live our light. And a life of that, it's not a straight line. It takes stumbles. You get hit. You get knocked down. But getting up every day and trying to practice kindness, decency, and love, I think that that's the highest calling of life. Whether you are an elected leader, whether you are a coach, whatever you have, that to me are the people, people who live that kind of life. Those are the people that help light my path, like Kevin Batts, that encourage me in my way. have, like Kevin Batts, that encourage me in my way. Kind of a pinch me moment, the very talented and very handsome actor, writer, and director Zach Braff joined me to teach us about how to

understand, how to accept, and how to process difficult emotions through art. Here's an excerpt from our conversation back in episode 744. Well, the first impetus for writing about tragedy and trauma was I lost my, my sister had an aneurysm in 2016. And she actually survived, although in not a fully conscious state in some some tiny percentage of herself was alive uh for two more years um and my mom and brother in particular were by her bedside almost every day uh because they were lived up north and i would go visit her and she was not um only a fraction of herself was there um Then she eventually passed. And soon after my father, who was 84, but I can't help but think that it kind of expedited his demise. He died of cancer after. I went into the COVID, still grieving all of these things.

And then my best friend was living in my guest house. He and his wife and their newborn baby were searching LA for a home. They found a home. They went back to New York to collect their things. And literally like the first day of lockdown, they came back from New York and he had contracted COVID. collect their things. And literally like the first day of lockdown, they came back from New York and he had contracted COVID. And this was at the very beginning.

Right. Early, early. Nobody knew what the hell, you know, it was the mayhem of the beginning of, I think March was 2020. Right. He's 41 years old, very healthy, a Broadway star, trying to get his life going as a TV and film actor.

And he was very sick and they put him on a ventilator and he never came off of it. So not only was I on the front lines of losing someone who was close to me to COVID, but his wife and baby were living on my property in the guest house, you know, trying to digest this horrible thing. And it was so traumatic because we didn't know if she had COVID or we didn't know, it was so- I mean, that was back when we're all like sort of spraying our groceries in the front lawn and all that kind of craziness.

Exactly, exactly. And so she'd be- There was a lot of fear. She'd be sobbing in a pile on the ground and we were like, can we hug her? Is it safe to hug her? She might have been exposed to it. So it was really, really horrific.

And it was in that head space during the lockdown that I sat down to write this film about grief and about loss, but also about how one stands back up after such things. I've really just been battling, I battled depression and anxiety my whole life. And I had OCD pretty bad as a child. And I think I found writing and performing as a way of, um,

of dealing with that, particularly humor. Um, um, making people laugh was a high for me. I didn't play sports at all. I had no, I had no connection to sports. I didn't know how to make friends. So I became, because I was a funny kid, I became a class clown and that's how I made friends. And then when I was around 13 years old, my, in the East Coast in Jersey and sleepaway camp was very popular. And a lot of the kids would go to a traditional sleepaway camp that was about sports. And I didn't shine and I felt alienated. And I was like, what's wrong with me? I love performing. And my parents found this theater camp for me that was called Stage Door Manor and I went there and it was like epiphanous it was utopia it was a it was a place where

everyone was a performer and everyone was like me and I didn't know that there were other kids that many kids out there like me so just from an early age the way I would manage anxiety and depression was creating art, whether it was as a performer or as a writer. I have a very early memory of being in fifth grade and the teacher said, we had to write an essay and who's going to get up in front of the class and read their essay. And I did. And I had written other kids in the class into the essay and made a very funny essay, but the protagonists were kids in the class. And I got up there and they were belly laughing as I read it. And I remember clocking the teacher in the back of the classroom, holding her stomach and laughing.

And I thought this is probably the highest high I've had in my life so far. So is there any chance this is a career? When's career day? So that's a long-winded way of saying um that's why i became a writer and a filmmaker was a way of um was a way of trying to find shared um community with these feelings that i have and to answer your other question about uh is is it cathartic it's most cathartic when i finally watch it with an audience and I see their reaction.

When they laugh at the right moment, when they swipe a tear at the right moment, when they're pin drop silent at the right moment, that's when I feel like, oh, I'm not alone in these emotions. Yeah, it's an antidote to loneliness. Yeah, these emotions that I'm feeling are collective. Absolutely, absolutely.

That's the best, that's better said than I could have said it. It's an antidoteote to loneliness i think it was the way i was processing all of these things but i didn't want to write specifically the story of of my life i didn't want to write about covid i didn't want to write about my sister's aneurysm right but all of that was you know it's like as a writer i'm'm sure, you know, and other writers can relate. You, you have all of this, this is what's gurgling inside of you. And when you sit down and stare at the blank cursor to see what's going to come out or a songwriter, I imagine would be the same. This is what came out. This story is, it was sort of my interpretation of all these feelings I had,

including, um, recovery and, including recovery and things I'm wrestling with my own relationship to alcohol. And all of that stuff became a part of it. But it's by no means directly my story. Writing is sitting alone at a blinking cursor, telling yourself you suck. Um, it's hard. That's why I would tell people I, I won't, I won't be as, um, try and scare anyone away from it. Um, but know that it's, that I'm this deep into it and I battle procrastination. I battle

working. So I would say develop very early on. I mean, you've had some of these amazing people on your podcast. What's the name of the guy who wrote War of Art? Steven Pressfield. Yeah, Steven Pressfield and the like. You know, you have to develop a system very early on, something I never did, that is fail safe for you working and producing content.

And that is in 2023, that is very much turning off your wifi and getting your phone out of the room. There are so many distractions. And then I believe with Mr. Pressfield, it's about putting your butt in the chair and not being afraid to not know what it is today, but getting in the chair and showing up.

But it's like running with an elephant on your back if you're trying to do it with your phone in your hand. Renowned futurist, thought leader, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Who am I talking about? I'm talking about Kevin Kelly, who came on the podcast and just dropped wisdom gold on so many subjects. We talked about careers, relationships, parenting, finances, innovation. Basically, excellent advice for living, which also happens to be the title of his latest book.

Here's a look into that conversation. It's really clear right now that the major engine of wealth, and I would also suggest personal happiness, is being able to think different. That's the engine. And when we're all connected 24 hours a day around the world with our little devices, the true value is being able to think a little differently. That's the source of innovation. That's how you make great things. That's how you make great art. And anything that can help you think differently, including AI, which we'll talk about later, I'm sure, but travel and other experiences, reading different books than other people read. I mean, there's lots of ways to do that,

but you want to really cultivate that ability to think differently in a world where everybody's connected together all the time. And so I would argue, yes. Zig while everybody's zagging, you know, and try and do something different. And, you know, travel is a tremendously efficient and productive and inexpensive way to do that. And taking time off, goofing off is another great way to do that. Sabbatical, Sabbath is another great way. So there's, that's the assignment really for most

people is, is to have different ideas, to approach things differently. You're going to need help doing that. And my kids sort of have heard it many times, but very, you know, every couple of years, I sit them down. I have three kids and I say, I have a magic wand and I'm going to give you a billion dollars, but only if you tell me what I'm going to give you a billion dollars. But only if you tell me what you're going to do with it, right? What are you going to do with a billion dollars? And they'll go through the kind of lists. Maybe they're imagining, they're young adults and stuff.

You know, I would maybe buy a house or something, and I would go on a trip somewhere, and I would have this. And I said, okay, you haven't spent any of your money yet. Because in six months, that will, entirely, interest will pay back and you're back with a billion dollars. Now what are you going to do? Oh, well, maybe I'm making something up. Maybe I'll start a little shop selling knitwear or I want to do a little daycare center, or whatever it is. And it's like, okay, you don't need a billion dollars for that. So this idea, I mean, most people's dreams are not a matter of, they're not gated by money. They're gated by other things.

And it's very clear in my own experiences that that dream of wanting to work to have the fortune to do what it is, that's a really convoluted and unnecessary way around getting what you want your dreams to do. So I've concluded, this is not in my advice book, but this is a piece of advice I have now, which is my advice is if you can all help it, do not earn a billion dollars. Okay. Please do me a favor. I'll try to avoid that. Exactly. You'll be much happier. Do not earn a billion dollars. Well, the real calculus is, is the money that you're earning creating freedom for you, or is it creating a more calcified prison for yourself? Exactly. Right.

Because it can do either of those things. I'm sure there are billionaires who've been able to figure out how to, you know, create freedom out of that for themselves. Maybe not, I don't know. I don't even know that I know any billionaires, but you do. But, you know, if your wealth can provide that, then okay. Yeah. But if it's just creating misery for yourself,

then what's the point right and so that level of getting what you need comes way before a billion dollars this is what i'm saying it's like you know and so at that point of a billion dollars it is a burden it is something that really weighs on the people who have it it's kind of like fame it's my advice which is you really don't want to be famous either if you just read any biography about a famous really famous person it's another type of imprisonment and uh most of the people who are really really famous really regret that that is because they have to deal with it all the time and it's a it's a real um what's the word it can uh hinders it hinders them in many ways and so it's not freedom at at all. And it's the same thing. So

you really want to focus on, this is my favorite piece of advice from the book, which is don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only. And that only is where you'll be much more satisfied, happy. You'll probably have enough. And that is the route. The Billions is another person's success. That should not be your success. It's someone else's movie if you're trying to make a billion dollars. You want to be the star in your own movie. Sure're trying to make a billion dollars you want to go

you want to be the star on your own movie sure but explain that a little bit more because the idea of being the only is an intimidating prospect right like how do you become the only the only at what and I think becoming the only at anything even if it's the most obscure thing on the planet, does require, again, back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, kind of being contrarian or cutting against the grain and doing things a little bit differently.

And I don't know that everyone is sort of cut out for that. Yeah. So, first of all, it is a high bar. It is a very, very high bar. first of all, it is a high bar. It is a very, very high bar. And the second thing, in my experience in both my own life and looking at other people, it will take most of your life to arrive there.

There might be the really weird, freakish person who's born and has a clear idea of what they're really great at that nobody else can do, and they go for it. But most of us, it's a long and meandering winding road with lots of detours and right turns and setbacks and turnarounds and everything else to to arrive there and you actually don't ever arrive you're always on that journey of trying

to figure out what what it is about yourself that is special and unique um but but it doesn't um and okay so so so there is there is a paralysis i've seen in young people it's like i don't know what i'm passionate about i don't know and so i can't really start i can't keep my 100 until i know what that is and um i become convinced that the proper way to start is to master something. And in that mastery, that becomes a platform that you begin to kind of move towards discovering what it is. Passion is a product of action. Exactly. It's not the other way around. Exactly. And so waiting around until you're

struck with what you're passionate about as a precursor to action is the way most people think about it. And that just leads to paralysis and like a protracted period of confusion. Exactly. So you almost, and it doesn't matter where you start because that's not where you're going to be ending. And that's true. Again, if you look at any remarkable person that you admire, they didn't start there. They arrived at there. And the more kind of distinctive, unique, special, and only they are, the more likely they started way away from where they actually discovered what they were good at.

And so don't be concerned about where you're starting. As long as you're moving forward in that way of really deliberately trying to get better, you'll arrive in the right direction. Fostering your own best work is one thing, but how do you foster the best work in others? Well, there's no one better to answer that question than Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, a leader and also a leadership authority who shaped Pixar's supremely innovative company culture. Here are some philosophies he's leveraged to build effective teams

and why he believes failure is a path to growth. Your original motivation into rethinking management and leadership and on some level, the impetus of the book was trying to figure out why great companies, when they reach a certain level of scale, suddenly no longer are great, right? For me, it's a fascinating thing

because I see it just happen in company after company is what is actually going on? What are people thinking? One of the difficulties that companies have is that because of underlying changes that take place, in particular, it's true with computer-related companies, but now it's happening everywhere, is there are fundamental changes that are taking place,

not only in the technology, but in its applications, and now because of the use of more computers and cell phones and the whole web system of transferring information, but also societal changes, environmental changes, a lot of things are happening pretty rapidly. environmental changes, a lot of things are happening pretty rapidly. And people have difficulty conceiving of what it means to change their business plan, let alone other things they need to do in their lives. But it's very hard for them to conceive of it. And Steve was unusual in that his focus was on what is the right thing to do. When they were working on the iPhone, but when it was secret. So we went up to the secret lab to see it.

And what he said was, we're reaching the point where there isn't really any, was we're reaching the point where there isn't really any, you know, a lot more growth in the laptop computers, including the portable computers. So we're going to need to have a different business model going forward. Now that in itself is very unusual. Right. So that's one thing that I found interesting, just that sort of sets me apart from other people.

The underlying thing Steve did understand was that you have to find out what the truth is and adapt to it. If something wasn't right, he would switch. You commit to something with passion. And when you're wrong, you change. And that's hard for people to hold onto their head. Because you think if I'm committed,

then I'm committed, I'm not going to listen to things that's going to change my course because I'm committed to the course. But if I'm not committed, then I change course too easily. So what does it mean to both be committed and at the same time say, um i've just realized i'm wrong we're going to change that's very hard and i'd say the best leaders and the best filmmakers that's what they do we're going to get on this path okay it's not working we're going to change

yeah so how do you how do you uh do both at same time? And it is possible, but that's when the, I think that's when the best stuff happens. Yeah. Well, the way that it's possible is through these many kind of systems and philosophies that you end up implementing at Pixar that creates this unbelievable run of extraordinary movies over the tenure of your leadership there. The overarching idea here is how do we get the most compelling, innovative, creative work out of this group of people? And what is the environment that we need to cultivate in order to facilitate that. And the opportunity to fail and fail fast can be part of the environment to make something new and better and different. Actually, we don't use the term failure very much inside of Pixar.

Now, if we actually have something that fails, we say that it fails. We're not trying to avoid it. But the word's too loaded. Because, you know, starting a school, if you fail in a class, then that's a bad thing because it means you weren't smart enough

or you didn't work hard enough. But also, when you get out and bridges fail, relationships fail. So there's a real and palpable aura of danger around failure. While we also would say that we've learned a lot from our failures, because we have, we all recognize that, is that meaning of failure is actually sort of overridden by the danger part of failure. If we recognize that and say, well, okay, there are a lot of times when we should be using a somewhat different terminology,

which is that we're trying to make something work. Let's try this. Well, that didn't work. Let's try this. We don't need to overload it. So I try to be Although that didn't work, let's try this. We don't need to overload it. So I try to be very careful about the words and how they're used. It's like, I think it should be used for things which are, where you really do have a major problem. And the other one is people get stuck for different reasons. We all do this. You're trying to work on something,

bang your head on the wall. And I remember this, you know, from like just doing homework or in school, right? Yeah. Sometimes you're trying to do it. You got to do it. You got to schedule. I'm sorry, my brain is fried. I'm stuck.

Well, for me, the big step is, is that when you see that there's a problem, you have to ask why. And it isn't one of those things that you can force on them. You say, you need to do this. You need to fix it this way, which is a natural thing for people to do. I don't think it's the right thing to do, though.

It's like, okay, this isn't going the way I would hope it's going. Why isn't it going this way? What's getting in their way? And what can I do to solve way? What's getting in their way? And what can I do to solve the thing that's getting in their way? Because they may not see it. And if they don't see it, and I'm not paying attention, then we all miss it. And then it sits there and it festers and it affects people. But we can ask and figure out what actually happened. Why did it happen, and what can we do about it.

I think we can all agree that our media landscape is rapidly changing. It's shifting. It's always evolving. And in a world inundated with so much new technology, the growth of artificial intelligence and the power of social media, where is our shared humanity? Well, Emmy-nominated writer, comedian, and cultural critic Baratunde Thurston joined me to talk about all of this, the impact of technology and social media on society, and the current perils of our democratic system. current perils of our democratic system. You know, where are we in the world of media right now?

How do you make sense of it? With great difficulty. It's, we're in a tectonic shift, like the tectonic word, and everything's changing really, really rapidly. You know, I'm 45 years old. I was born in 77, Washington, D.C. My mom was a computer programmer for the federal government. And so I had a computer in my household for longer than most people my age, regardless of the economic and racial situation I came out of, which made it even more rare. And so it's always been an enabler. It's been fun. And it's been this

connective tool. And so we've got the internet. Cool. Everybody gets a voice. And they're like, oh, we got the internet, man. Everybody gets a voice. And things that used to be hard for organizing and amplifying are easy. And that can be great for trans kids. It's also great for like white supremacist organizers too. And there's no like morality in that. and there's no like morality in that. So with the speed of, like what I see with media now is a bunch of stuff. I think of its role as being this mirror that reflects us back to us and helps tell us who we are and who we're capable of. And that's where my frustration is greatest because I think we're getting a very narrow reflection

of ourselves back to ourselves. And what these tools are capable of is beautiful, but what we're getting a very narrow reflection of ourselves back to ourselves. And what these tools are capable of is beautiful, but what we're actually using them for is a vast subset of that beauty. And so we get like ad-driven monetization of stuff. We get a hyper focus on conflict and discord versus collaboration and creativity. We get subservience and following versus kind of ownership and setting your own course. And we are what we eat. And I think we become what we see and we become what people tell us we already are. So there's a lot of responsibility in the media game and technology is just adding fuel to an already raging fire in terms of like possibility, confusion,

and sometimes chaos. The acceleration of change is so massive, but truth is always truth. And there's always wisdom that transcends whatever is happening. We may not be able to relate to the specific experience of what it's like to grow up with, you know, technology X, but there are still, you know, some, there's an architecture of, you know, how to be in the world.

There's something underneath that superficial reality, right? Whether it's virtual or physically tangible, our humanity has some consistency, right? We have an emotional experience. We have desires and needs. We have fears. We have a sense of belonging or its opposite, a sense of purpose or its absence. And so we have to figure out a way

to tap into that deeper frequency. If you're trying, I mean, I remember telling businesses when I would advise them on social media strategy, don't ask me what your Vine strategy should be. Vine will one day not be here. What's your story, right? And then you figure out how you're going to express it

in the medium of the moment. We all need to kind of get below the surface. It's increasingly important because the surface is ever-changing. And I don't have a simple answer for that, but I just acknowledge it as a major contributing challenge to the sense of rupture and disruption that we're all facing. That part is unprecedented. Yeah. The big thing here is, you know, we already feel like we're in a post-truth world, but we ain't seen nothing yet. But the undercurrent of humanity is that truth,

you know, this notion that truth is important, right? Like we agree on that, right? I mean, you and I do. What's true and not true, like understanding the difference between that is important. But I feel like we're creeping towards a situation where there's gonna be a lot of people who would rebut that and say,

actually, truth is not important. What's important is winning or audience capture or just making sure that your narrative is the one that's on top. And when you have the deep fake technology, it's like the ability to obscure truth or tell whatever story that you wanna tell in the most convincing way,

completely untethered from anything real or true, you know, it becomes, you know, pretty apocalyptic. We don't just need a sort of a competitive system. We don't just need a system in which truth competes with untruth. We need a system in which truth competes with untruth. We need a system in which the incentives for truth compete with the incentives for untruth. And where we are now, that is not really the case. You can be outlandish and dishonest and generate the markings of reward through attention, through likes, through money for being untruthful.

And the punishments aren't quite aligned with that either. So the downside could be turned up and the upside could be turned down. Meanwhile, for those of us who love and value truth, we've also got to build a system that rewards it and offers demerits for undermining it. We've got to be able to show transparently that truth has value. And I don't want to just sit here and say, yeah, the truth is always better.

Like clearly, historically speaking, it doesn't always win because untruths have been able to attach themselves to things that people value. And ultimately, we value belonging, perhaps as an example, more than we value truth. We value self-preservation more than we value truth. Genocides are built on lies, all of them. They somehow compelled millions of people to participate actively or passively in them because they saw something in it for them. Self-preservation, belonging, lack of ostracization to uphold a lie. So lies had a lot of co-conspirators. And we've got to make sure we rally when it's so much easier to create and spread a lie.

We need the truth to have some allies and some rewards built in. I haven't thought about that at all. This is a real time like, oh snap, what does that even mean for us? But I think if we ignore or try to pretend that the truth is just obviously better, we're in for a world of hurt

because it isn't obvious a lot of times. We have accomplished magic, literal magic from the perspective of most humans who've ever lived. Rockets and all the technological advances and the world's creation. So we're capable of so much more than hiding from the truth. And I just think we need to hear that more. We need someone to believe in us and not just demand that we accede to them. This year, one of the greatest basketball players of all time graced the show. NBA legend and author of 61, Chris Paul. Chris imparted valuable life lessons on the importance of prioritizing

consistency, falling in love with the work, mentorship, and more. Here's a slice from episode 762. I think one of the biggest things is community, right? If you look at any business plan, anything that tries to grow, it's all about community, right? About sharing with others and finding that connectivity that we may be from different backgrounds. I mean, at the end of the day, that's the premise of my book. My book is about my grandfather, but there's other people who have had mentors or family members that they were connected to like that. And so the importance of community and sharing your experiences with other people and not necessarily forcing it on people, because even like with a plant based lifestyle or anything, a lot of times people don't want things forced on them. But sometimes you got to nudge it. You know, you got to keep at least giving them the information and it may take them a while to actually try it. and it may take them a while to actually try it.

And when I think about change, right, I just think about stacking days. Stacking days. My son is small, right? He's small, just like I was. And I've talked to him about the training and how hard it is and this, that, and the third. But he's finally starting to see a little bit of change, right, in his game or whatever, in his ability. And all I keep telling him is just keep stacking days. Just keep stacking days. As long as you keep stacking days, I promise you, I promise you, you will see

the change. But my coach used to always say, everything that you want is on the other side of hard. He had another, I think I said in the book, he said, reps removed out. Reps removed out. My biggest frustration with my son used to be we would go outside at the house and he would shoot a shot and he'd be mad. He'd be like, dang. I'd be like, what you mad for? You don't get up enough reps.

Those are the only things you can control anyway, your effort and the consistency of your effort. There's a quote in the book that I love, which is hard work is my preferred language and I try to speak it fluently. Like that's fucking great. Yeah. You know, just stack it up.

That's all you can do and walk away. What is your relationship to failure also? Like missing that shot. Is it a big deal or are you just moving on? Another rep, another rep, another rep. I was in the gym last night. I was telling you with the kid, Mercy, Mercy Miller last night, we had to end this drill. We had to end with this drill

that I do where you shoot a three in this corner and then you run to the other end of the court, shoot a three in this corner, run to this corner, come to this corner, right? So that's four shots. Then you go to this wing, five. That wing, six. This wing, seven. This wing, eight. Top of the key, nine. This top, ten. Yeah.

Non-stop. So sprint, sprint, sprint. Ten shots. Got to make seven out of ten, and we're done with the workout for the day. I went, knocked it out, whatnot. Now Mercy got to go. Ten for ten? I went eight. Eight. I went eight knocked it out, whatnot. Now Mercy got to go. 10 for 10?

I went eight. Eight, all right. I went eight out of 10. Mercy's turn to go. First time, I think he might have got five out of 10. Went again, didn't get it. Went again, didn't get it. Went again, didn't get it. Kept getting the six out of 10, and he would have to,

because you had to just make seven, seven out of 10. He'd get to the last one, missed it. He might have did this drill 10 times, 10 times. And my son was there too. And I told Chris, I said, listen, Mercy can work out with me any day, because he didn't complain. He didn't do nothing.

This kid is about to be a senior in high school. He didn't complain.. This kid is about to be a senior in high school. He didn't complain he just Kept breathing. I kept talking to him like don't worry about it. Just keep keep going keep going and sure enough After 10 11 tries he got it he got it and I I appreciated that from him and I told him at the end of our workout because he was like man Appreciate you letting me come work. I said, no, thank you. Because you make it fun for me.

And that's the fun part about having 12 kids in NBA, having all of these young kids coming up and training with them and working out with them. Because that's the exciting part for me is to know that when I'm done playing, I'll still be watching and be like, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's the exciting part for me is to know that when I'm done playing, I'll still be watching and be like, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool, man. And I'm sure, you know, within the NBA, because you're, you know, more of an elder statesman now, you have all these young players who are, you know, looking up to you for that kind of guidance. And for you to recognize like that, that brings you joy, you know, to kind of get back in that way. I think it is cool. So any parting words for the aspiring athlete out there,

somebody who's trying to tap into a little bit more mastery into their life? Yeah, I mean, you hear all these sayings all the time where they say, you're only gonna get out of it what you put into it. But I would say, fall in love with the work, right? Like I always say about the NBA, I've had guys, I've had teammates, and it's fine. Some guys be like, I don't watch basketball when I go home because I play too much. I don't know.

I'd be like, listen, you think if somebody work on Wall Street, when they go on vacation, they not checking, um, the stock exchange, you know, but to each his own. Right. So if you fall in love with the work aspect of it, then the success and the accolades that come with it, but you got to fall in love with the work. Don't just fall in love with the showers of people telling you how good and great you are. If you fall in love with the work aspect of it, then everything else, I promise, will fall into place. Thanks for going on that ride with me. It really has been such an incredible year on the podcast. I really hope you enjoyed this look in the rear view. Links to all the full episodes and the social media accounts for all the guests excerpted today can, of course, be found in

the show notes, as well as on the episode page at richroll.com. Part two with a bunch more awesome excerpted conversations will be up later in the week. Until then, stay tuned. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voice of Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at

meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel

Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love. Love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.