The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best Of 2024: Part Two

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

In this concluding chapter of our “Best Of” 2024 series, we share wisdom from an extraordinary group of changemakers who challenged our assumptions and expanded our possibilities.   From a septuagenarian fitness icon to Spider-Man himself, from free solo climbers to modern mystics—each guest illuminated different facets of human potential. Their stories of courage, creativity, and conscious living remind us that transformation is always possible.   I’m deeply grateful to our guests for their vulnerability, to my team for their dedication, and to our sponsors for their continued support.   But most of all, I’m grateful for you, the listener. Your willingness to grow and transform alongside us makes this journey meaningful.   Thank you for sharing another remarkable year. Here’s to an extraordinary 2025. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Nordic Track: Learn more about their next-level tech and machines 👉nordictrack.com/rich-roll Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much 👉airbnb.com/host Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

So I recently revamped my home gym and I did it with some amazing products by NordicTrack. And I got to tell you, I'm really blown away by the quality of their machines. This is a company that for 50 years have been leaders in at-home fitness equipment. And my setup includes the amazing commercial X32i treadmill. And part of what makes it amazing is that it goes up to an insane 40% incline as well as a 6% decline. So imagine a workout where you put the treadmill at 40% and start marching up. It's unreal. I also have the S27i studio bike with a 20% incline and a negative 10% decline, as well as the smooth, quiet RW900 rower. So cycling between the three of these products has just been amazing for my fitness. But what really brings these machines to life is the iFit Pro membership. They have a new AI coach

that helps you set goals and create personalized workout plans. And it kind of acts like this amazing accountability partner all through texting. With iFit, I also get to follow my world-class trainer pals and past podcast guests, people like Tommy Rives and Knox Robinson. And the machines actually automatically adjust to match the trainer's intensity. And iFit learns my preferences over time. It even reads my heart rate and adjusts intensity to keep me in the right zone at the right time, completely removing any guesswork from every single workout. NordaTrack together with iFit offer a personalized fitness experience for body, heart, and mind with thousands of workouts,

including strength, yoga, Pilates, and mindfulness. So stop stalling your progress with Nordic track. And I fit just press start and let the trainers and tech do the rest. Head on over to Nordic track.com slash rich roll to experience personalized fitness. You can allow what happened in your life to completely dictate what happens today or tomorrow.

Or not. Or not. The only person that can truly take care of me is me. What is the thing that's drawing your heart? Like, what is it? Like, take a step in that direction. What is not servicing you, you gotta let it go. When you change your perceptions, the next thing that changes is your thoughts.

Then your feelings, your emotions change, your stress responses change, and then your life changes. Hey everybody, welcome to part two of our Best of 2024 series. If you missed it, in part one, we explored groundbreaking medical research, inspiring personal transformations, and strategies for mind-body wellness. And today's lineup is equally profound, featuring raw conversations about resilience, purpose, and human potential. From a 73-year-old fitness icon to your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, these conversations offer wisdom for navigating our rapidly changing world.

Let's begin with Chef Babette Davis. This is a woman who, at 73, defies every perception of aging, capturing hearts and minds across the world as a viral fitness and mindset sensation. Her philosophy of self-love and resilience made this one of 2024's most energizing conversations. The only person that can truly take care of me is me. I am responsible for me. I'm responsible for my health. Well, let's talk a little bit more about this idea of your responsibility to yourself. That's not unrelated to this idea of self-love. And you always talk about putting yourself first.

You talked about that a little bit last time, but maybe we can go a little bit deeper into that. So what do you mean when you say that? Basically, I view life as an amazing gift, a beautiful human experience. And for me, the only way that I can show how appreciative I am of this gift is to practice self-love and self-care. That includes my thoughts, the people that I surround myself with, how I nourish myself. how I nourish myself. Just how am I caring for this human body so that I can live at my purpose? And I feel right now I figured out what my purpose is. And it's sharing my journey because it's so inspiring to so many, I can't imagine that you were always this way. It feels like you were always this way. No, I wasn't. I wasn't always this way.

But I've come to realize that this human experience is full of a lot of bumps and knocks. And, you know, it's a beautiful thing to be able to get through all of that. And then still be high enough that you're willing to share you with the masses. And that's what I do every day. And that is what I'm embracing. And I love so much about the journey, I accepted the journey. And now I just decided I was going to be full of love going forward. And I understand that that is a lot stronger than hating.

And I think I mentioned that in our other interview. What does being angry get me? Just a grumpy old lady being angry. I'm full of life right now. I'm happy. All that stuff is back then. Yes, I am who I am today because I went through all of that. But man, I'm so much better than I was. My daughter said to me, I think it was yesterday, I was talking to her. Everybody goes through whatever it is they go through. And she said to me, I'm just so stressed right now. I am so stressed at this moment right now. We've got a lot going on with family and the whole nine yards. And I said, what can you do about anything that you're stressed

over right this moment? What can you do about any of that? She said, nothing. I said, so why don't you just take advantage of right now and let's just make each other laugh and just move past that. and just move past that. And I found some silly, something on YouTube that was really stupid and I sent it to her and we had the best laugh ever. It's just reminding yourself there's absolutely nothing I can do

about any of that right this moment. But I don't have to let this moment go. I can embrace this moment and give thanks for this moment and be happy in this moment because I control my thoughts. I control my heart. And all of that stuff, it's not real. It's not real, Rich. Speaking of transformation through self-love michael chernow's journey of sobriety

and personal growth reads like a hollywood screenplay through his commitment to daily habits and morning routines this celebrated restaurateur turned nutrition fitness and nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle entrepreneur delivers an absolute masterclass on personal transformation. It was a Monday, and I had been up for days. And the two guys that I was with kind of called it quits. And I remember very clearly being in my apartment, not wanting to stop what I had in my pocket and in the booze that I had. And for whatever reason, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I stopped and I looked over there and I said, I hate you. Like legit, I hate you like legit I hate you

and you should die like you should just do it you've been playing around with the idea for so long you should just you should do it and two weeks prior I had overdosed on heroin and I could not I just couldn't figure out how to stop

I wanted to stop desperately I did I really did I remember walking how to stop. I wanted to stop desperately. I did. I really did. I remember walking from that apartment that I overdosed in. I was walking west on 13th street and I was like, that's it, man. No more. Done. How have you let yourself go get to this place? And that night I was back at it. And so for those two weeks, I kind of had made a commitment in the opposite direction and said, all right, dude, well, you're not going to figure out how to end this.

In a positive way, you might as well push as hard as you can till it's over, you know, like till you're dead, basically, because you almost died, can't figure it out. You're so close. I really wanted to end it that morning, but I didn't. I blacked out,

and I came to 16 hours later. I'd slept through work for the umpteenth time. My boss, I called my boss, and I said, I'm so sorry, man. He's like, Mikey, that's it. Sorry. Like, I love you. You're a great person, but you're dying.

Everybody knows around you, you're dying. I'm not going to allow that to happen on my watch. You're done. You're fired. And man, I loved my job. I really did. I loved where I worked. And I said, Frank, please, please give me another shot, man.

Please, I will get sober. And he said, there's no chance you're bartending or running, you know, bar managing this restaurant in your condition. Just no chance. But if you show up at the restaurant at 8 o'clock in the morning for the next 30 days, I'll consider giving you your job back, but you have to get sober. And I said, whatever, whatever you want me to do. So I began that journey. And that was like, kind of like a kick in the ass that I needed. I don't know what

really was different that day than, you know, all the other times that I'd slept through work and wanted to kill myself and, you know, felt like my life was useless or hopeless. But I made a phone call to an old friend who was kind of like an older sister to me when I was running around the streets, you know, without a home. I knew that she was dating a sober guy. And I think she was sober at the time as well. dating a sober guy. And I think she was sober at the time as well. And I said, I'm done. I need help. I'm desperate. I need help. And so she introduced me to this guy, Marcus. He basically said, wake up as early as you can, get out of bed, brush your teeth, wash your face, put on your contact lenses. That for me in those days was like a massive ask

you know that was like a big ask right brush my teeth I mean I don't even know did I ever brush, I don't know wash my face, never happens never happened I never washed my face

outside of being in the shower so brush my teeth, wash my face, take a piss, and then drop down on my knees and pray. And I was like, huh? They were like, don't ask questions. Just drop down on your knees and ask God for help because you need help and you have no idea how to ask for it. So if you ask for help in the morning on your knees, the chances of you asking for help later on in the day will just be greater. We don't give a shit if you believe in God.

We don't care what you talk to or who you pray to. Just do it. And I was like, okay. So they said, get on your knees and pray, put on a pair of sneakers and go out for a walk or a run. That could be a walk around a run. That could be a walk around the block. That could be a run around the block. That could be nine miles. That could be whatever you want it to be. Just get out and move your body right away, right away. And I said,

okay. And then they said, as soon as you get back, make a bowl of oatmeal, a big, huge bowl of oatmeal, add whatever you want to it. But we're telling you to eat oatmeal because it's cheap. huge bowl of oatmeal. Add whatever you want to it, but we're telling you to eat oatmeal because it's cheap, it's relatively healthy, it's inexpensive, and we need you to start putting healthy shit into your body. Right as soon as you're done with that oatmeal, go to this meeting at 10 a.m. Get your hand up and say who you are and what you are. And who you are is Michael Chernow, and what you are is an alcoholic. And I was like, okay. And then they said, right after that meeting, come down to the Muay Thai gym

and we're gonna kick your fucking ass. And we're gonna teach you how to be, at that time, could be controversial to say today, but we're gonna teach you how to be a man. And we're gonna teach you about integrity. We're gonna teach you about honesty. We're gonna teach you how to get back up, which honestly, in my opinion,

is probably the greatest lesson I've learned to date. The only thing I think we have to do perfectly in life is get back up. And I learned that there with those guys, because they really did knock me down physically all the time, constantly. I got my ass handed to me every single day in the rings of Muay Thai. And the one thing I prided myself on was always getting back up. And then they said, right after we're done training, we're going to train here for two, two and a half hours. You're going to eat chicken and broccoli. You're going to take a nap and you're going to go to work.

You're going to eat chicken and broccoli as early as you can for dinner. And you're going to go to bed as early as you can. And that's just going to be a rinse and replete. And before you go to bed, you're going to drop down on your knees and you're just going to say thanks. And that's it. That's all you got to do. And I was like, I mean, it's, you know, I just did it. I did it. I don't know if I'd want to go through it again, but I wouldn't change any of it because I really do believe that every moment of it has made me the guy I am today. And I can honestly say looking at you today that I love my life.

I fucking love my life. I'm so blessed and grateful for my life. What do you make of that? What do you want people to understand about that and how it applies to their own lives? Very simple. You can allow your past to predict your present or future. You certainly can. All day long, you can be a fucking victim and you can allow what happened in your life to completely dictate what happens today or tomorrow or not, or not. And I've chose to not dictate what happens today or tomorrow. Or not. Or not.

And I've chose to not allow what happened in my past to dictate what I do, think, say, or how I conduct in my life today. I just don't. Anyone can change at any time. It's never too late. You're never too far gone. You might think you are. You might not believe that with every ounce of life in you that it's too late. It's too far gone. I'm too old.

I'm on skid row. There's no way. It's just, I got to throw in the towel. And it's just not true. It's just not true. hell. And it's just not true. It's just not true. While Michael found his path through discipline, author Ryan Holiday returns to explore the critical role the Stoic virtues play in personal and societal growth. Drawing from his latest book, Ryan offers fresh insights on applying ancient wisdom to contemporary ethical dilemmas. When I started this series, I guess I wasn't fully aware of how inseparable the virtues were. But each time you try to look at one specifically,

whether you're looking at courage or discipline or justice or wisdom, you go, oh, but it's so connected. You're kind of writing about the same thing. Yeah, and the same people doing the same things. And you can, how you choose to talk about each one, it's really just a choice. Are you putting in this bucket or this bucket? But you're illustrating the same thing

over and over and over again. Right, because if you're pursuing justice without wisdom or temperance, it's not gonna come out well. Or is keeping your word, doing what you say, honoring your commitments, is that the virtue of justice. Or is keeping your word, doing what you say, honoring your commitments, is that the virtue of justice? Or is that the virtue of discipline?

Is doing your best, realizing your potential as a person? Sure, this is very obviously a matter of discipline and willpower. But to not give your best is to cheat someone, right? To not realize your potential is to deprive the world of something. And so they're all very, very related. I am fully convinced that justice has to be the virtue that the others orient themselves around. Because, yeah, courage in pursuit of an evil end what's the point uh and hardly admirable and then um there is this idea of course that like because you're doing the right thing

uh the world will just greet you with red with green lights and and tailwinds and they won't right so you need the discipline to to sort of bring that into fruition. And then like wisdom is obviously the thing that helps you figure them all out. Obviously, there's all these big things that are happening in the world. But what's cool about having a podcast or, you know, you have a little company, it's possible to like for individuals to do things that previously only like countries did or previously only like massive corporations did. But now you as an individual are faced not with, hey, do you fudge the math on your taxes or not? But like, do you work with this supplier or that supplier? How do you treat your employees?

Like these sort of questions that we get to, instead of there was an impotence in us sort of going, well, how do we want those people far away who are in the positions of power influence? How do we want them to make decisions? There's also a sort of return of a lot of agency to the individual in this sort of global interconnected where like we actually get to make decisions of some consequence. It's not the same as

Nike deciding or Apple deciding where their factory is going to be, but you get to decide, are you buying from this supplier or that supplier? And that's of no small consequence, at least for the people directly affected by the thing they're making. My favorite part of the entire book is the afterword where you address this directly. I really, you know, was thirsty for and enjoyed like your own perspective of how these principles have applied in your life or how you're striving to apply them and where you've needed to apply them in order to address like failures and weaknesses. And you're very specific with respect to what you just shared, like where did the coins come from? The, you know, the Daily Stoke coins and who is manufacturing the leather bound, you know, covers to the books and all that sort of stuff are

decisions as a business owner that you have to make that have ethical considerations in terms of how they measure up with virtue and your own personal integrity. Or just like a even like more mundane one, like, I don't know about you, but I would always read about like Black Friday sales and people like lining up for, you know, like to buy like a plasma TV, like the day after Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever. And I was like, this is gross. Like, why are you doing this? Right. Is this what we want to be as a society? And then, you know, you start a business and you sell things and then someone comes to you on your team. So are we going to do like a Cyber Monday email? And suddenly you're faced with the decision that becomes very real. The CEO of insert, you know, department store was also faced with.

And you have to go, oh, okay, so I think these things are gross, but they make a lot of money. Do I want to do that? And then you have to decide. And, you know, and so like for Daily Stoke, we don't do Cyber Monday or Black Friday. I just, I was like, this isn't what I like. So we do like a food drive every year. And it's been cool. But like, how do you, I'm saying that not to pat myself on the back, but this idea of like justice, not this abstract theoretical thing, but justice as something that results from the decisions that

you make in your life in the sphere in which you happen to operate. So some of us are the CEO or the founder of Patagonia, and we make a decision that can impact tens of thousands of employees. And then some of us own a little bookstore in Texas and we go, hey, do I want to give my employees the day off to be with their family? Of course, it seems awesome, but the cost of that is this number. Are you okay with that? Like justice is that. It's wrestling with that. I don't want to hold myself up as someone who's like always making these great moral decisions, but the idea of principles being a thing that costs you money or things that challenge you or that you are allowed to do.

And in fact, may even be like an industry practice, but whether you should do them, whether it's the kind of person you wanna be is an entirely separate question. Taking philosophy from theory to practice, film director Tom Shadiac walked away from the summit of Mount Hollywood to climb a different mountain, one that's about purpose, it's about meaning, and service to

something greater than the self. Through his work with Memphis Rocks, the indoor climbing community he created in an underserved Memphis neighborhood, Tom demonstrates how embracing interconnectedness can heal societal divides. This idea that everything is separate, this idea that you all don't affect each other, that the ripple, the science of the ripple, it sends a ripple out into infinity. It just goes, right? And until we recognize that, we will continue to create these issues and put all our attentions on symptoms. The symptom, which we need to do, we need to find healthier diets, healthier outcomes, and we need to find healthier structures and organizations. But what is causing all this stuff? Like, what is it? What story? Uval Harari is now like really on the march

with his brilliant take on history, which is these are stories. The question is, is it true or how's it working out for you? How's the story working out for you? Yeah, the kind of intractable problem of over-identification with self is such a difficult one to untangle

when, you know, all the incentives of our culture kind of drive our behavior towards that. And we can listen to podcasts and read books and we can be, you know, informed that this is not the way to happiness and meaning and purpose. And yet we'll still think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But like, if I can just get around the bend and get that other thing, then like my problems will go away and I'll be happy.

And I won't have to deal with whatever I'm dealing with right now. And it's really hard to kind of disabuse yourself of that delusion. I would say keep going, see how it works out for you. You'll get that thing. You'll be flying privately and the jet will be empty. Like you'll have a mansion and there'll be no community in that mansion. And again, I have no judgment about any of this stuff. Just do that thing. And then maybe if you feel like it, one day come to Memphis Rocks and just meet some kids you might never have met before and see how that feels and climb with a kid

and maybe then, you know, take them to our juice bar. It's called Juice Almighty, by the way, after Bruce Almighty. They named it brilliantly. Zach Rogers named it. And see how that feels. And build your life around those things that feel awesome. Build your life around those things that feel awesome.

I'm here to say that like this feels awesome. And like you said, it's really hard and I wouldn't want it any other way what great thing has ever happened by just like oh this is so easy like like so easy like i mean look at the way a butterfly is born man that is some painful shit like look at the way human is born like you know there's a reason it's in like blood and muck and mess and like it's tough but it's without look man it's the way it works right like blood and muck and mess and like it's tough, but it's without – look, man, it's the way it works, right? The depth of the valley and the height of the peak are – they're hand in hand.

So if you don't have those things that – the shadow, you have no light. And so it's just in the whole freaking design. Yeah. The shadow can become the superpower when you develop the capacity to claw your way out of it. I look at shadow as something to be loved. Like, you know, we have this thing called shadow boxing. I don't want to box with my shadow. I want to, like, dance with it.

Like, I want to love it up. Like, yeah, I hear you. Like, there you are. There you are, ego again. I just – I'm going to walk on hopefully a movie set really soon. Like, there I am again. Like, I am the most important person here. And I can say to my shadow, oh, I, I, oh, you're, you're still here, aren't you? Yeah. Okay. Now you miss me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, look,

let's come on, come on, come with me. We're going to do this together, but you know, I've, I've got a little bit of a different attitude. Stay on my shoulder, but, but, uh, I still love you, but I actually think all these people are as important as I am on this movie set. Beautiful. When someone comes to you, as I'm sure they do, and say to you, I love your message, Tom. I hear these things about meaning and purpose and happiness. And I just don't know how to connect the dots. Like my life's okay, but I know that it could be better. I could live with more gratitude and more love and more community.

Like how do you counsel that person to connect more with these things that are so fundamental to feeling self-actualized? Well, the first thing that I do, and it's really hard for me, I see some podcasts and other shows do like questions from people. They'll write in questions

and then you give an answer. I can't do that. Like I just, there's too many questions I have for that person. If I ever do this podcast, the segment I want to do is called questions and antlers because antlers are something we shed. You know, I'll give you a perspective

and then maybe we'll shed it in a year because you'll have gone through something and I'll have gone through something. But I need to ask that person a lot about their life before I go ahead and shooting on them, you know, like, so that's one thing. But overall, the first thing I would want to tell a person is, first of all, the fact that you are asking me that question means I have zero worries about you. I am not concerned about you at

all. The fact that you're asking that question means that as the poet said, that where you are right now, God circled on a map just for you. You're already open. You're aware that maybe there's a fuller way for you to experience life and to use your talents. Fantastic. Take the pressure off to do that. Don't look for your purpose. I think this is a great poison, by the way. Danny Thomas said something, and I'm so inspired by him, but I don't necessarily agree with what he said, which is when he did found a St. Jude, he said, now I know why I was born. Now I know my purpose. And I'm like, oh, so you weren't born to birth the beautiful producer, Tony Thomas, your son, who's done so much good in the world on his own. You weren't here to birth Marlo and you weren't

here to inspire a young Lebanese who had no idea that there was a path for an Arab American in show business. No, it's all like it's all like greeting your staff today. Like that is no lesser purpose than me doing the next big film. So just go gentle with yourself. And then what is the thing that's drawing your heart? Like, what is it? Like, take a step in that direction. This idea of healing through connection is actually a powerful reminder that not all problems can be solved with the intellect.

True wisdom is the domain of another brain, one we too often overlook. And that brain is the heart brain. Meet Kimberly Snyder. So what science is showing now is that there's this way of creating more clarity and more focus, more energy, more vitality, hormonal balance, gut health, from actually going in and accessing your heart. And to your point, it can heighten intuition. This is something that's been talked about in ancient traditions around the world, from the Babylonians to the Greeks.

The Egyptians didn't take the heart out of the mummy and spiritual traditions. And only in the recent, let's say a hundred years or so, there's been such an emphasis on just brain, brain, brain, linear, linear, linear. So the research that is in this book that we've even done our own study shows that all the things that we want,

that clarity, the more success, the material things, the greater health actually comes from starting to sync up this power center. It's not sentimental. This is really practical what we're talking about. actually comes from starting to sync up this power center. It's not sentimental. This is really practical what we're talking about. Yeah, it's, you know, on the one hand, there are all of the ancient traditions and the traditions that are shared across

a multiplicity of faiths and practices over millennia, of course. And I wanna get into all of that, but what I didn't expect in your book is to see all these graphs, like sort of heart rhythm graphs and science and studies on the actual impact of what certain practices to bring you into

greater coherence between heart and brain can do to you physiologically, emotionally, and et cetera, all the way down the line. So I was researching my last book, which came out in 2021. And I came across this really interesting piece of research about the heart brain that I've been working in wellness now, Rich, for close to 15 years. And I didn't know this. And I was like, what is going on? How come I don't know this? Why doesn't everyone know this? And so I started going down this rabbit hole with the science.

And at the same time, I was reading this book, The Holy Science, which was, you know, Yogananda is the one who brought yoga to the West. And I've always been interested in spirituality worldwide. And in this book, he talks about these five states of the human heart that are from the ancient Vedic texts. And as I was going into the science, I was like, whoa, these heart stages line up with the science. So basically the dark heart scientifically means

the heart and brain aren't communicating. So that's where we start to feel like push pull, is really arduous. I'm so confused all the way to what's known as heart brain harmony or the clear heart where we're just moving from this deep place of flow and harmony with life. So yes, to, to, you know, comment on that, there is the spirituality, which I love is where it starts to really line up with this science. You don't have to be spiritual to really benefit from this heart-brain information and to learn how to awaken the heart-brain. There's so much science,

but there is also an intersection that's really fascinating. So what is your main thesis before we dig deeper into this idea of heart-brain communication. So the book is called The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts. So this hidden power, Rich, is I want everyone to know because it's affected my life so much that there is this power center inside of us. It's this anchor that when we start to waken, it gives us the clarity, the energy, the greater health, the deeper relationships,

the access to more intuition that we're looking for. And it's not outside, it's not needing the attachment of this relationship or all the biohacking devices or all the specific foods. Those can be great too. And I've gone down that rabbit hole and I live a really healthy life and I sleep well and I use non-toxic products. But when I started accessing this power, I would

say my energy increased about 70%. And that's because all these little ups and downs, this is where the psychological becomes the physiological. For instance, two minutes of feeling irritation puts into motion 1500 different biochemical processes that ultimately drain your energy. So while my lifestyle was really clean and, you know, well-conceived on the outside, all these little triggers, right? Our amygdala stores these emotional, like the resonance of certain things. So it'd be like, I didn't like that email or going to stress response or here's traffic or what did that person mean by this up and down all day?

So when we learn to actually create more coherence, what it feels like Rich is zooming out, not so up and down in daily life. So I want people to know there is this way to increase your energy, to reduce stress and to just increase the things that we want from inside. Blew me away. And I want everyone to have this knowledge.

How many times do we hear, be mindful, think more positively, don't get in your head, love yourself. I used to, I love Eckhart Tolle. He says, go beyond thinking. But the difference with this work is that we're going to a different place to find a solution than where the challenge is.

In this example, the challenge is the thoughts were in our heads. You said it yourself, you're in your head a lot. So we actually come down into this place and these practices, which some of them so simple, so powerful, just by putting some of your attention on your heart right now, as we're talking, research published in the American Journal of Cardiology shows that that alone starts to rewire your

nervous system. This term neuroplasticity doesn't just refer to your brain wires. It's between your heart and your brain as well. What does this mean? This means in daily life, you start getting out of your old patterns. Why this is different? Your heart sends more messages to your brain. So this changes your perceptions. The five hearts are five stages. They're also five different realities. When you change your perceptions, the next thing that changes is your thoughts. Then your feelings,

your emotions change, your stress responses change, and then your life changes. So right here, I could be in this perception of, oh God, this is so hard. I don't really want to be here. Or I could have this perception of, you know, I'm really excited about this. This changes what's happening on a physiological level. So it's so practical. And again, what blew me away was how simple some of these tools are. A lot of the tools in the book are three to 10 seconds. I use them all the time when my kids are having a tantrum or I get an email I didn't like for work. And you shift time and time again to this different heart brain. And suddenly you're not in the same triggered reactive patterns.

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master of mindfulness, Hakam Tafari, returned to the show to share his philosophy, which is sort of this blend of street culture influence with ancient wisdom, to discuss this idea of surrender. Surrender as a superpower for personal transformation. You know, one of the things that I've been really playing with and really enjoying is surrendering, that concept of surrendering. And it was something that for many years, it was tough for me to do.

And as I've gotten older, and as I've learned to soften my heart, I've really learned how to surrender. You know, as you talk about that and like, yeah, I don't know if I can do that. How much of it is you not surrendering? Oh, most of it. All of it probably, right? Yeah. And whatever part isn't about that could probably be solved through a deeper form of surrender. Because if you're truly letting go, then there's no space for that cackle. Yeah. But liberation is hard. It's a fucking beast, isn't it?

It really is. it really is it really is so when you say you're focusing on surrender what is the brass tacks of that practice you know the aspect of letting go the aspect of dismantling old habits you know for, for me, I've really worked hard in these last few years on really letting go and dismantling and just getting rid of what doesn't service me. And surrendering is that. What is not servicing you, you got to let it go. And I think I go through modes where I'm just like, I need to get rid of this. I need to get rid of that, whether it be physically or mentally or spiritually. And it's becoming part of my muscle memory now because I'm realizing that it's lightening up my load in so many ways that I could even possibly imagine. It's lightening up my load in so many ways that I could even possibly imagine.

It's lightening up my load and it's making things a lot more easier and clearer for me. The more I can let go, the more. And, you know, I said this in the last time we were here, you know, holding that backpack and just being able to let go. But it's really true. And in that surrender, I think for so many of us, and especially for men, there's a kind of, they equate surrendering with weakness. And to me, surrender is almost like a superpower. It takes a lot.

It's also an act of courage because it's forcing you to confront yourself in an honest way and make peace with the fact that you're not the all-powerful, in-control being that you would like to believe that you are, right? You have to disabuse yourself of that delusion. Yeah. And that's very threatening to the ego and it requires courage. So it's actually the antithesis of weakness.

Weakness is going about your way and never turning the gaze inward to deconstruct that illusion. Yeah. But it's a leap. It's a leap for a lot of people. If you tell somebody the solution to your problem is to let go,

that immediately gets interpreted as waving the flag of defeat. When all of our instincts and every kind of input over the course of our lives is telling us to like push, push, push. And if you're strong enough or you can summon the will, you'll be able to solve the problem that way. And that's the gift of having experienced a life crisis, be it existential or with substances or some form of addiction is that you're forced to confront that. And then you kind of find your way to the other side

and realize the power of surrender and how it's very different than what you might imagine, have imagined it to be. For sure. And one of which for me was a big one was alcohol. That was a big one. I think I'm gone on maybe two and a half, two and a half years now where I haven't touched it. And that was a big one. I think I'm going on maybe two and a half, two and a half years now where I haven't

touched it. And now is a big one for me because I would somewhat lean on it to, once I realized that I didn't need alcohol in my life anymore and just got rid of it, things started becoming a lot more clearer for me. And I know it sounds cliche and a lot of people are like, oh my God, I got rid of alcohol and I got rid of drugs. And it became more mystical and clear. But something did essentially happen for me when I gave up alcohol. And then being in establishments and being in areas where I saw my friends drinking

and seeing what they were doing when they drunk too much or how they would act and being in those environments. That in itself was a game changer for me in letting go, in surrendering. Because I had to surrender a certain type of lifestyle that I was used to for so many years and certain people that I was used to for certain years and letting that go. And then, you know, just other little things in my life

and facets where I was just like, that's not servicing me anymore. This is not servicing me anymore. This is not servicing me anymore. As Hakim maps the path of surrender, distinguished professor Sonia Lyobomirsky illuminates the science of joy. Sonia is an authority on the science of happiness. Her work challenges conventional wisdom about well-being

and reveals evidence-based strategies for lasting contentment. Here is a look. Negative emotions, as an aside, are very important. They're evolutionary signals to us. So they're important to experience as well and to process. It's only when negative emotions are really chronic or acute, right, then they become dysfunctional and unhealthy. So one component is positive emotions, but that's not enough.

The second component is having a sense that your life is good, that you're progressing towards your life goals in a sort of good way, a sufficiently fast way, that you're satisfied with your life. And I like to think about these two components as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. Draw a distinction between those two. So in your life, meaning like every day you're kind of having like I'm experiencing some happiness right now and a little bit pride right this moment and sort of they're about moments. In the micro and in the macro.

And then as opposed to I review my life in general, how do I feel? So I might be really unhappy this week because I'm working on some project that's really, you know, whatever, challenging. But I know one of them was we thought that happy people, when you compare yourself to other people, that happy people compare down and unhappy people compare up, right?

The idea is that if you're unhappy, you're like, oh, look at all those people who are richer and smarter and more attractive than me. And if you're happy, you look at like, oh, I'm richer and smarter than other people. And so we asked people, who do you compare yourself with? And that was actually really fascinating. So I'm a first year grad student, is that when we asked that to the unhappy subjects, they were like, oh, they told us all these stories. Oh, yeah, yeah. Who they compare themselves with.

And the happy subjects, students, they almost like didn't understand our question. Oh, yeah, yeah. Who they compare themselves with. And the happy subjects, students, they almost like didn't understand our question. They're like, what do you mean? And I mean, they understood, yeah, you can see someone else's better off or worse off, but they clearly did not spend much of their time dwelling on social comparison. So that was our first insight that maybe happy people just don't care that much about social comparison. And then I ended up actually five years later doing my dissertation on this. And I did find that happier people just, I mean, it's not that they don't compare, but they just don't let the comparison

sort of affect their self-esteem. Thus proving the axiom that comparison is the thief of joy. So we can talk about what that means, but it doesn't mean that you're fated, right? To be happy and unhappy. But clearly when we look around us or any of those of us who have more than one child know,

some are just happier than others. Right. And with that, what is the scope of mutability? Like how much range does the average person have in either becoming more or less happy off of that like genetic preset? I mean, it's hard to answer that question precisely. I like to think of not of a happiness set point, but a happiness set range. Is that some people set ranges sort of here, like from say two to five,

and for others it might be five to eight, or, you know, three to six. And that it's easy for us to remain in that range. So we have sort of our life's ups and downs, get us sort of, and sometimes we even go like higher, lower than the range, but then we tend to go back after the ups and downs, we get back into that range.

But I can't really tell you like how wide that range is. It's a guess. Right, but there's something that makes us sort of regress to the mean. And to our own kind of mean, right? So exactly, exactly. And we kind of know this, right? That you can imagine people you know in your life who,

let's say someone who's sort of typically kind of not a very happy person, but they experienced some successes and so they seem to be happier, but then kind of eventually they sort of go back. More often it's the other way, right? That people, humans are very resilient. So, you know, we have adversities, trauma sometimes, and people, it's the other way right that people humans are very resilient so you know we have adversities trauma sometimes and people it's a positive thing they tend to revert back to their range how important is struggle whether it's welcome or otherwise uh in terms of driving

happiness or unhappiness you know i thinking, of course, about the empty experience of receiving something when you didn't actually have to work for it. And with struggle and meeting obstacles and getting to the other side of them, of course, we build a certain level of resilience that kind of enhances our self-esteem, et cetera. So what does your research say about this aspect of the human condition?

I think there's a couple of ways to answer that question. One is there's research on the pursuit of significant goals. Happy people always are pursuing something. There's always something around the corner. And so you can think of struggle as part of that, right? Almost any kind of major life goal, whether it's to raise healthy, happy children or career goals, or even like losing weight for a lot of people, you know, it's a lot of struggle.

So that pursuit is associated with happiness. That's one way to answer that question. Another way is there's a theory in psychology called self-determination theory, which is actually one of my favorite theories. talks about really three basic sort of something that we all want, which is a sense of competence, a sense of connection or connectedness, and a sense of autonomy or control. And I would put struggle as part of that sort of sense of competence and autonomy, right? That you, when you're struggling and overcoming, right? It makes you just feel like you have agency and control

and a sense of like, right, that you're accomplishing, that you're competent, that you're efficacious. The sense of agency, I would imagine, is pretty important. I think there's a lot of people who feel like they don't have a lot of agency in their lives and it doesn't really matter what they do or don't do, that they're sort of in a situation that's static. And with that, a sense of powerlessness.

Yeah, a sense of control, so important. In fact, when we think about like people who are living in poverty or just certain circumstances, certain kinds of relationships, abusive relationships, like children for that matter, right? That they just have the sense of like helplessness, right? That they can't control the situation. And those of us who have control over our daily lives, like we really take it for granted. A couple of my students looked at some data that have already been collected on like thousands of people. And they wanted to see like what predicts happiness. If you sort of, let's say you take like lots of people and you measure everything about them,

and then you kind of throw it all in to some analyses. And then over time also. And then sort of how happy are they? And one of the big findings is that sense of control was like a huge, like, you know, one of the biggest factors. And that was not surprising. human potential, Wasfiya Nazreen, the first Bengali in Bangladeshi to scale the seven summits in K2, shares her extraordinary journey from childhood trauma to spiritual expansion through mountaineering. As a mentee of the Dalai Lama, her perspective bridges the East and the West, and her message, I think you'll agree, is quite profound.

And her message, I think you'll agree, is quite profound. There is no, or at least how Tibetan Buddhists teach it, is like, ultimately, you are your own guru. Yes, we have a teacher, guru meaning teacher, teacher-student, teacher-student oral tradition from Buddha's time. But ultimately, you'd learn from us and then find your own guru the power is within you every individual have like we all have our own specific karma you know I live in LA and often see bumper stickers that says karma is a bitch but I feel like here people only talk about karma when it comes to negative stuff. But this too is karma.

The positive, the negative, the neutral. Karma, the word means action. And all actions start like, so we have body speech and mind action. Things we do physically, things we say through our speech, and then things that arise in our mind. The most important is what arises, because the first two depends on what arrives in the mind. And all of it, from time immemorial, since our souls have existed,

is being recorded in kind of like a database like iCloud or Google+, whatever you use, like infinite. There's no unlimited capacity. But the Tibetan word for mind, for example, is not mind, it's mind continuum, because the karma is every instant. I could be talking to you right now, very pleasantly, and have very negative thoughts about, oh yeah, your t-shirt looks ugly, or I'm creating negative karma, even if I'm...

And it's moment to moment, and it's moment to moment and it's constantly being recorded. And when we die, our root mind, which remains in our heart chakra, so the brain is the cognitive mind and the soul's mind, which we call the root mind is here. And only that, let's say it's like a chip

that just like a light chip that passes away with that information. And then whichever body we go to, that's what's passed on. When I share my stories, I think one of the most important thing for me is to really make people realize that it does, we're all climbing our own mountains, regardless of whether we are an A-lister like we spoke about or whatever circumstances we're in, we're all suffering and we're all climbing our own mountains. But having a purpose, having honesty and really working at it,

there's no mountain high enough for us to climb. If I could do everything that I've done from the background that I came from, anything is possible. It truly is. It's not a cliche line. But we got to work hard for it. We really got to be prepared and train ourselves for it. But there is a way out. And we only get one chance at this game none of us know

when we're going to exit this planet the likeness of me dying on a mountain is way less than me dying in the streets of let's say Dhaka city or LA city I don't like civilization and I don't function well in but just to give that like we cut we all come here for a very short time and we must make this a very purposeful time. Don't ruin it. It's like what the Dalai Lama told me in different ways in our first meeting. What do you say to the person who says, I don't know what my purpose is or I don't know how to find purpose or I know my life could be larger or more expansive, but I don't even know where to start.

Yeah, that I think, I mean, that's how I was questioning in my mind when His Holiness gave me the purpose lecture on my first meeting. But I think we all need to go on our own journey in our own ways and really dive deep into understanding what karma is and i don't mean again karma is even though the word means action what what what is

the purpose that we came in but no one else can find it out for you we all have to find it on on our own terms in our own ways and that journey will teach you so much, like it did me. You know, I had to find my own purpose. And oftentimes, you know, we go through journeys and it never makes sense, but ultimately in the end, it all makes sense. That same spirit of adventure now brings us to world-renowned adventurer, Ross Edgley,

who returned to the podcast to share stories from his superhuman 510-kilometer nonstop swim down the Yukon River. Beyond impressive, beyond world record besting physical feats, Ross reveals how embracing uncertainty leads to profound personal growth. It's like, why do I continue to do these things? And I think when you look at the myth of Sisyphus, you are of Greek mythology, and Sisyphus was one of the most intelligent men to ever live, and he kind of outsmarted the gods,

and the gods were really annoyed about this. So what they did is they said, okay, Sisyphus, what we're going to do is we're going to doom you to basically roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. And as soon as the boulder gets up to the top of the hill, it just rolls back down. So for eternity, you're just doomed to just struggle. But it was Albert Camus, the French philosopher who said, but this is interesting, because if you imagine Sisyphus was able to outsmart the gods one more time, and he was able to do this, if you imagine him smiling. So as he's rolling the boulder up a hill and back down, he's enjoying it. He's taking control over it, this eternal struggle. And what I love here, Albert Camus said,

the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. And that really struck a chord with me. And I think kind of that thread goes through philosophy and psychology. Jordan Peterson, you know, the meaning of life is to pick up the heaviest load you can and carry it. Viktor Frankl, the meaning of life is to give life meaning. And so when you start looking at that, for me, the pursuit of a nonstop swim, it might be impossible, it might be never ending, but in many ways, it's my boulder.

The struggle alone is enough to build my time. And the carrying of it gives you meaning. And if you had to define that meaning, what would that look like? How do you put words to what that meaning is? I think it's just the relentless pursuit of sports science. So even though you're rolling the boulder, you're just collecting data the whole time. So I think it's that,

that when all is said and done, we're probably going to end up with the most comprehensive study of ultra endurance in swimming than anywhere else. And I think that'll be a pretty cool legacy to leave behind. What are we supposed to learn from you, Ross? What do we take away from these things that you've done that would be helpful in our own civilian lives? I'm still trying to figure that out myself. But I think, like I said, coming back to the idea of

purpose, I think that's the biggest thing. And actually, we were chatting to the team just earlier. And I just think it's this idea of like, everybody's got something that they could do. And when you look at the history of us humans, the anthropology of us humans, we've always been sort of going on these journeys of self-discipline for self-discovery. You know, whether it's the Japanese monks going on an Okugaki, the Amabushi monks of Japan, whether it's Aborigines going on walkabout. We've always been doing something. And I think, you know, recently I'm a huge fan of Ned Brockman.

I loved it. It wasn't what he did. It's how he did it across Australia. Russ equally across Africa. Russ Cook, the hardest geezer. Oh, my God. Again, it wasn't what they did. It's how they did it that I just love. And then Ned's going for the record at the moment for 1,000 miles.

Yeah, I think he's going to be the fastest person to run 1,000 miles on a track. That was it, yeah. But it's centrally located, so that way, you know, people can come and join him, and it can be like a participatory kind of thing. I think it's amazing. And when I hear stories about that, and I look at people like that, I'm like, yes, we're essentially doing exactly the same. There's a common theme throughout all of it that, you know, as a tribe, if we were sitting there, there'd always be one in that tribe,

dating back to caveman times, who would just say, what's over the horizon? Like, what is it? That wanderlust gene, there'll be something that that person that would go, you know what, we're going to stay here, we're going to make a family, but you, you disappear over that mountain. And I think that's it. I think looking at guys like Russ and Ned, I'm just sort of trying to do my own sort of aquatic version, but anybody listening, I just think it could be anything as long as it resonates with you, whether it's rowing, cycling, just pick a route, something. And yeah, that idea of self-discipline for self-discovery. What is the weakness that shows up that you really need to work on in your life? Not in your swimming per se.

Cheesecake. Yeah. We have your diet. We talked about that. I'm talking emotionally. I guess where this is coming from is I hear that and I believe you, and I think that's laudable and beautiful and inspirational in all the best ways. But this goes back to your relationship to all of these events and kind of what they mean, right? And I've seen too many people who use events like this to run away from certain things in their life rather than towards some greater level of self-actualization at the tippy top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? So for being really honest, like I can admit that I can use like endurance sports to hide from certain things that are uncomfortable and be celebrated for that. When I know when my head hits the pillow that, you know, maybe there's some other things in my life that could use a little bit more attention or maybe things are out of balance a little bit. And I'm just curious about like how you think about that equation.

I think one of the biggest things like to be completely honest and transparent about that, I think one of the biggest things was, it's become an amazing job, like in reality, and I love the Japanese philosophy, the ikigai. So your ikigai, your reason for being why you get up in the morning, your purpose, again, coming back to purpose, but that made up of four things, what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, but the fourth one, what you can be paid for. And I think that's what's so interesting, because I know exactly what you're saying that I think sometimes talking about philanthropy and charity and various other things, that's absolutely right. But you also need to be paid for it as well at the same time. So to be completely honest, there is a commercial aspect as well in that everything

that I've done, it does work as a business, a very, very strange business granted, but it is a business. Sure. While Ross seeks adventure through endurance, author and former firefighter, Caroline Paul, challenges conventional wisdom about aging in her latest book, Tough Broad. Her exploration of nature's role in redefining our later decades offers a fresh perspective on life in the second half. It feels like adrenaline is being replaced with this pursuit of awe. Is that accurate?

Yeah. I mean, it kind of snuck up on me. It really wasn't until I was writing this book that I realized how much I had changed from that sort of, I guess, daredevil youth. devil youth. In the past decade or so, I had noticed that I was not as into sort of, you know, when I flew, I didn't love the fact when I hit rough air or I was more about like seeing coyotes below me or coming upon a really cool beach as I was flying. And I have to say that part of me thought I was getting old. Soft. Soft, boring. And it bothered me. It did bother me.

But it wasn't until I was writing this book that I realized that it wasn't that I was getting old or soft. It was that I was getting more present in my life and I was searching for awe. It also feels like part of the discovery is realizing that it was awe all along and you were under the misapprehension that it was adrenaline. And this is something that dawns upon you as a result of this wing walking experience that you have. Yeah, I was interested. So the book covers a lot of different outdoor adventures. It can be boogie boarding or bird watching.

But it also entailed scuba diving with an 80-year-old and wing walking. So it went sort of in terms of adrenaline, I guess it ran the spectrum. So someone sent me a video of this biplane flying and this gray-haired woman was in the front seat and all of a sudden in the middle of the flight, she gets up from the cockpit and climbs up on the wing. And I realized I had to talk to this woman. She was doing this thing called wing walking, which is not a thing we do these days, I'm just going to say. But it is from the barnstorming days in the 1920s. Didn't the FAA ban it recently? Oh, yeah. But it's not low-level flight. Like, barnstorming was low-level flight

where they had wingwalkers transferring from one plane to another in midair or going from a moving car to a moving plane. So when Cynthia Hicks was 71 when she did this, and she went to a place called Mason Wingwalking, the only place in the country that teaches this. And yes, they did recently, recently ban it, but not when I was writing this book. And I wanted to talk to Cynthia because I was interested in what a one-time sort of exciting adventure would do for our sense of self and our neural situation.

Like, you know, when people go skydiving and it sort of changes their perspective on things. So I wanted to talk to her and she said, yeah, I mean, you wouldn't believe the courage you get when you climb up on that wing. And I thought, oh, well, I guess I have to go do it. So I went to Mason Wing Walking to do a wing walking class. And what I expected, well, first of all, I was not happy about it because I'm a pilot. So I don't want to get out of a perfectly good cockpit onto the wing of a flying plane. But we practiced all morning, these sort of five moves. And I asked like, but what's it like at 3000 feet when you do it? And Marilyn Mason, who was our instructor and

also 55 years old, which was, or yeah, she was about 50 something years old, which was cool. She said, oh, don't worry. Like it's your muscle memory will take over when you're up there. You don't have to worry about it being 3000 feet in the air. I was like, okay. So fear really didn't come into it that much. It was just a weird muscle memory. And you're just sort of, and so I walk along the wing the way we were taught and then tie myself into the king post,

which is this post in the middle of the wing. And yeah, there it is on the cover of the book. Like, I'm just like, you have to, you climb up onto the top. That's just terrifying. I don't know how that works. Anyway, I interrupted you. Keep going. No,'s just terrifying. I don't know how that works. Anyway, I interrupted you. Keep going.

No, that's okay. I don't know how it works either. Just suddenly I find myself there and we snap the seatbelt to the king post and the pilot starts to do loops, hammerheads, and barrel rolls. loops, hammerheads, and barrel rolls. And I got to tell you, Rich, I went from the most surly wing walker to ecstatic. And after we landed, I knew adrenaline had been part of it, but there was something else. And I didn't know what it was. And it turned out that what it was was awe. I had been jettisoned into awe. So awe is the feeling that we get in the face of something that's sort of bigger than us, mysterious. It's a feeling of wonder and fear and dread, a little dread.

And it's really been associated with religious experiences. They did a study at UCSF where they took people between the ages of 60 and 80, and their goal was to cultivate awe. So the way they defined it is the feeling you get when you look at something with childlike wonder or fresh childlike eyes, I think, was the instruction that they asked each of these volunteers to do when they went on these 15-minute walks. It was for an eight-week period. So they were to amble with fresh childlike eyes. And then they sent a control group out that goes out, walks like most of us, you know, worrying about our day, looking at our phones. And after that eight-week period, first of all,

the all-walkers began to self-report that they had less depression, less anxiety, and also other studies have shown that you have more compassion. So that's the intricateness part. The other thing they did, which really blew my mind, is that almost as an afterthought, they said to the all walkers, hey, could you take a selfie during the walk? And initially those selfies look like selfies usually do the face right in the middle. But as the walks progressed, those selfies changed and the person got smaller and the background got bigger, which suggested to the scientists that the all-walkers were becoming, without even themselves knowing, more curious about the world around them and sort of had a more healthier understanding of their place in the world, in the wider world.

They call this the small self-perspective, where you understand yourself in relation to basically the universe. Yeah, it turns out that we live in a world of anti-odd devices. So our phone, our computer, all of it is narrowing our focus, making us the center of it, and making us feel powerful and in control. And it turns out that's bad for us. Yeah. We're brought to you today by On. Being a gearhead, I'm all about testing the latest sports tech. But you know what often gets overlooked? Apparel. Apparel is crucial to performance, and that's why I was blown away by the folks at Ahn's Swiss Labs. Their cutting-edge approach from sustainability to precision testing for

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go to meals.richroll.com and use code POWER20 for $20 off your annual membership. Moving from physical courage, we now turn to emotional bravery. And we're going to do it with Kimberly Shannon Murphy, Hollywood's premier stuntwoman, who offers a powerful glimpse into her journey of surviving traumatic childhood abuse and ultimately becoming a top performer in high stakes, high risk environments. Kimberly's exploration of healing through unconventional means provides tremendous hope for survivors everywhere. provides tremendous hope for survivors everywhere. I think the attachment that we have to our parents is always going to be there.

And I think that's why it's such a struggle, right? Because you can sit outside of it and say exactly what you're saying. Like, I know why my dad couldn't show up for me because he didn't have a great childhood. And then he went to Vietnam at 18 and watched his friends get blown up in front of him. And then he got married young, all of the things, right, to bring him where he was.

And I could look at my mom and say, she was abused from, she had the same life, probably worse than I did in the sense of it was her father. And so all of these things, and I can see that for what it is and I can have compassion for them, but it doesn't take away the pain. And I don't think anything will ever fully take away the pain of what happened to me and them being part of that. So what is healing look like then? I think it looks like being able to recognize that two things can be true. I think it looks like being able to recognize that two things can be true, that my parents failed me, but they were also really damaged and really traumatized people that were raising

children and they raised traumatized children. I mean, those are two very true things and I can have compassion for them and for everybody else in my family. And I can also know that they all really fucked up and it wasn't okay. And I can have both of those things in my life and in my space. And that's okay because if I don't have both of those things, then I'm not really being honest with myself about what my journey has been. You know, if I go to a place where I'm just like, well, they were just traumatized. It's okay. It's not okay. I'm not at peace with any of it, but I can see that side and I can have compassion for that side. And I can also have compassion for me and be able to take care of my little girl inside of me and say, yeah, we know that they were traumatized,

but I'm going to protect you now. And this is what me protecting you looks like. Hmm. There's a healing perspective that's, you know, kind of more in the spiritual realm that goes something like this. Part of becoming whole is recognizing and owning that on some level, like from a multidimensional or perhaps past life perspective, that you chose this experience for the purpose of your own growth and evolution and healing. And all of these things had to happen so that you could be the person you are today to show up for your daughter, to interrupt this cycle of generational trauma and be this voice, this advocate that is healing for other people. I completely agree with that.

And so with that perspective, it softens the blow of what happened to you. And I think it does open up, it cracks the door open a little bit for perhaps more compassion than feels natural for the people that harmed you. I do believe that we choose our life. Like you're saying, if we're talking on a spiritual, that we do choose our life and that this is the life that I did choose and that my mother was a vessel for me

to come into this world. And if all of these things didn't happen, like you're saying, I wouldn't be speaking out, obviously. I'd have a very different life. And if I could go back and choose again, I'd choose exactly the same. That's beautiful, actually,

that you can say that after everything that has happened. Yeah, because I wouldn't want to be anyone but me. When somebody emails you or you get a DM on Instagram and it's a young person who says, I read your book or I heard you speak or I watched this video that you were in. This happened to me. I don't know what to do. Where should I go or who should I talk to? know what to do, you know, where should I go or who should I talk to? Like, what is the advice that you give in a general sense for how someone might begin this journey for themselves?

Well, first I'll say I haven't gotten any of those messages. The messages I get are, thank you so much for writing your book. Thank you so much for speaking out. I've never felt so seen in my life. I didn't even realize how painful this, you know, keeping it in has been, or you gave me the strength to tell my husband. I've been married for 20 years and he had no idea that I was abused by my father. I've gotten a lot of those, like maybe not that exact scenario, but similar. So no one's ever asked me like, what can I do? It's just thanking me for, you know, I've watched every single one of your interviews and you've saved my life. Just feeling seen and validated, right? So what do you say to somebody who's reticent to,

you know, unlock that chest and start looking in because it is so scary and so threatening? I literally have it tattooed on my arm. Yeah, what does that say? It says the only way out is through. So if somebody's hearing that and they're thinking, yeah, but what does that mean? It means you can't go around the trauma. You can't jump over it or under it.

You have to go through it. You have to live through it. You have to tap into those memories as hard as that is. If you don't do that, you don't have an understanding of what happened to you and you can't move through it. And I tell this story a lot. So my daughter is like this, I was telling you, magical being. So she loves plants and she's like, you know, never wants to wear shoes. And she's just so foreign to me, you know.

And I've always hated indoor plants, never understood them. I've always like, why do we bring dirt inside? I don't get it. Like, aren't we trying to bring the dirt outside? And when I met my husband, he had quite a few and I got rid of all of them. And she said to me a few years back, she said, mommy, I want a plant in my room. And I was like, absolutely not. And it just came out of my mouth. And I was like, oh my God, Kim, like, why would you, she wants a plant. She's not asking for like, you know, like a dartboard or something. And it was coming up to me doing a journey. Sorry, I keep bringing up the journey thing.

Don't apologize. And I was like, I need to like investigate, like, where is this coming from? Like, why am I having such a reaction about this? why am I having such a reaction about this? Because I have the power in this moment to make my daughter feel like what's important to her doesn't matter to me. Or I have this moment to give her what is going to make her happy, which is a plant. So, you know, so I went into my journey kind of with one of that being my intention, like if there's something around, and I always go into my journey saying anything my inner child would like to show me, I am here to see it. Like anything you need to get out, anything you want to show me. And it was pretty immediate. And when I started like feeling the medicine where I was like in my grandparents'

house and I was on the top of the stairs, which is where we played a lot. And my grandparents had this like massive cactus in the corner. And my grandfather was coming down the stairs and he like pushed me into it. And I actually remembered always having cactus in my body, but I never remembered what happened and how it got there. And my grandfather was the person who, he was very meticulous. He like used to put model airplanes together and just sit there for hours and do that. And so he was the person that if I were to tell my parents, like, hey, I fell into the cactus, they would have put me in a room with him and a tweezer. And so I stayed quiet the whole night. That's interesting. With that in my body, with the cactus in my body.

And we all know how painful that is. And it was down my whole back. Wow. And when I came out of the journey, I was like, oh my God, now I can connect. Okay, this is why you're having this reaction to having a plant in the house. It has nothing to do with you or her. And now I can heal that wound, which I did. And I think the next day,

Capri and I were at the plant store and I like bought them out like $2,000 worth of plants delivered to my house. And she's got like a whole garden in her room. Right, right. But if I was to take that away from her, I'm basically spilling my trauma onto her because I'm like, oh, your authentic self is like,

I just want to plant. And your mom's like, absolutely not because of my own stuff. Speaking of taking risks, photographer and entrepreneur Chase Jarvis returns to make the case for why we should never play it safe and why creativity and personal growth demand choosing risk over comfort. The book is called Never Play It Safe for a reason. And I'm not, just to be clear, I'm not talking about seatbelts and sunscreen. I'm not talking about physical safety, emotional safety.

All those things are really important. The kind of not playing it safe that I'm talking about is that all of the best stuff in life is on the other side of our comfort zone. And so my hope is that this is a bit of a training manual that will help us get there because that's not the experiences, the inputs that we get from our friends, our loved ones, our culture,

and the organ between our ears. It's not there telling us to take risks and that all the best stuff is on the other side of our fear, quite the opposite. So my goal was this to be a little bit of a manual and it does, it trots out, not just my own relationship with risk and fear, but having had a podcast

that's had more than a thousand guests and just having gone through a lot of creative invention and reinvention myself, I've learned a lot about that process. And so I'm trying to share it transparently. And I shared before we started recording, I might as well just spill the beans here that I worked on this book for 18 months, five months in active research and 13 months of writing. And then I threw it all in the trash eight weeks before my deadline

to write the book that you're holding. And that's so crazy. And I did it for a reason. And because that's the book that I was supposed to write. I presume that the earlier version of the book was- It's very tidy. Was one that played it safe. It made it look, it made everything look great.

To quote Brene Brown, it had a lot of gold plated grit where you tell just a little gritty story, but you get right back to the how shiny and magical everything is and how shiny and magical you are. And that's just not real. And so indeed it was the process. And that's where the title actually came from

was that process of throwing it all away. And yet it's the, now I can't even think of not having had it been that way. Yeah. So what was the impetus to write this now final version of the book? Cause I'm thinking about how it relates to this, you know, adventure that you've been on with CreativeLive.

It feels very much born out of that struggle. Not only the kind of professional challenges that it presented, but how it kind of brought you to your knees and made you look inward and really reflect on like, who am I and what am I doing? And how do I wanna be spending my time? And why was I doing this and what happened?

Yeah, well, two things. I'll try and keep the audience in mind when I doing this and what happened? Yeah, well, two things. I'll try and keep the audience in mind when I say this and my own story. So the story that you talked about with essentially CreativeLive is one of the characters in there. And that is a, if people are new to that, it's an online learning platform

that I started 15 plus years ago. And it was the first one of its type. It was the first live streaming. We built live streaming technology from the ground up. And we had many folks who are the best in the world on the platform. We raised $60 million, had tens of millions of users, made hundreds of millions in revenue. And at some point along the journey, I, having been the chairman and like charging, you know, this is where we're going, we're taking the hill and had a lot of the venture, the Silicon Valley universe, like driving the thing at some point they were going to drive it

off a cliff and I had to come back and capture it. And essentially the way I think about it is catch the ball right before it hits the ground and step into a role as the CEO running a venture-backed company. And I'm a lifelong artist and not necessarily suited for that. So I had to basically betray myself in a way in order to make that happen. And on the hindsight and on the backend of looking backwards now that company, we grew it again, made a profitable, sold it to a publicly traded company. I did some time as a, yet me as a publicly traded company executive, dangerous.

And so there's a reflection on that. But to me, that was a central character in the book. And yet I, when I looked back, all of the best things in my life were when I took these big risks. And ironically, even though that was a massive risk, as are so many other chapters that I talk about in that book, that's what made me grow. I wouldn't have changed it. And yet there were so many aspects of that were tiny betrayals because I ignored who I was to go do this thing because I thought it was going to be well-received and look good and it was the next career step. And so the book is not about having a perfect beginning,

middle and end. It's about know that we will all betray ourselves over and over again. And the goal is to just do so slightly less and return to ourselves with a little more kindness and a little more awareness and get 1% better every day. Cause what is it? The person who is a degree off, but walks a thousand miles ends up pretty far from home.

So that's that story. And I hope that it's foundation for other people to be able to see that in themselves. The theme of calculated risk continues now with free solo climbing icon Alex Honnold, who shares fresh insights on balancing extreme athleticism with the demands of fatherhood. His evolving relationship with risk, I think, offers wisdom for anyone and everyone navigating life's challenges. Is there a support group you

attend for people whose amygdala doesn't fire? That's funny. No. I mean, the short answer, no. The longer answer, I mean, it's a whole aside, but the scene in Free Solo just kind of shows us like, oh, his amygdala doesn't work, he's different, whatever. But the real version of that was that, and that whole scene in Free Solo was because this science journalist

wanted to write a long form like article. Anyway, so this is a long ass article in Nautilus magazine. You can look it up. But the takeaway was that with enough exposure to certain, you know, enough exposure to certain stimulus, you desensitize yourself to it. And so it's kind of like, it's not that my amygdala doesn't fire. It's that my amygdala doesn't fire is that my amygdala wasn't firing for that level of stimulus. You know, it's like, I'm looking at pictures in a totally safe space, which to me, I was like, obviously I shouldn't be scary. But, but typically that will light somebody's fear response, but that's because they don't spend their whole life getting scared

for their life. You know, it's like, and so I was kind of like, well, yeah, I've spent my whole life getting completely gripped, like scared out of my mind all the time. It was like, obviously what I'm doing in this FMRI machine is not gonna be scary. And so, I don't know, I think people see the little short version in the film. They're like, oh, no amygdala? Like he's a freak.

There's something wrong with your brain or some kind of like spectrumy aspect about your personality. But actually I think that really though, that's people sort of projecting their own thing because people always like to see someone doing something outlandish or different. And they're like, well, that must be because they're just fundamentally different.

And then I think it excuses them from having to think of the fact that they could do that too if they worked hard at it for a really long time. You know, cause like, I don't really have. Oh, he can do it cause his brain is different. Yeah, exactly. And I'm kind of like, no, I can do it

because I've spent 29 years spending five days a week training at that thing, consistently trying things that are hard for me and like pushing, like literally pushing hard my whole life. You're like, I don't think you can discredit that with like, oh, it's brain's different. You're like, no, come on. Right, the analogy would be like, if you put,

you know, like somebody who's been addicted to heroin for two decades, like their hormones aren't gonna fire like a normal person because they're so used to like supercharging them with drugs or whatever, right? So they basically train themselves to need, you know, an extreme amount of whatever in order to like feel something in the same way that you're putting yourself in risky situations and so your relationship with fear

has like, has changed as a result of those experiences. So you're not lighting up your brain in the same way. But I would argue that I have a healthier relationship with fear as a result. Because if you're in the FIMRI machine and the battery of tests they were using, you'd look at this selection of images that everybody looks at.

It's like a standardized test. And the images are just black and white cue cards that just like pop up in front of you. And you're laying there totally safe inside this machine surrounded by scientists, you know, it's all chill. Like, why would that be scary? But for the average human, you know, by seeing certain images, it just triggers, like your brain just lights up certain ways. But I would argue that's kind of silly because you shouldn't trigger a fear response unless you're actually in danger. And I think that, you know, with many years of climbing in dangerous places,

I've sort of conditioned myself to only light up to fear when I'm actually in danger. Actually, I say that, but that's not even true because I get scared all the time when I probably shouldn't, you know, because climbing is just scary. Climbing is scary. Like you only have a rope on

and you're climbing and it's all safe. There are still times where you're like, oh, this is kind of scary. Oh, it's insane. And even in watching this documentary, I mean, you guys are like, there's, you know, you're a hundred, there's a hundred scary. Oh, it's insane. And even in watching this documentary, I mean, you guys are like, there's 100 feet of rope, right? So you're looking at like 200 feet if you fall.

Like there's crazy gaps there. So it's not safe at all. Well, sometimes it is. And sometimes though, even when you are safe, it's still just scary. You can be like a couple of feet above your last piece of gear. So you're only looking at a few foot fall.

It's totally fine. It's safe. The rope will catch you. And you're still like, oh, I don't want to fall. Like this is a scary position. So even with a lot of experience, like climbing is fundamentally scary because I often think like in a different life, you know, like if I hadn't found climbing, like if I hadn't gone to a climbing gym, like would I have just led a totally normal life as an engineer in a cubicle, just whatever? Or would, would you just get totally into some other path

and like go hard and like push hard? I don't know. But I think I'm really lucky that I found something that I love as much as climbing that I've been willing to try the hard. It's a gift, it's a curse too. I think it's a gift. I mean, honestly, I think that's another,

one of my random thoughts about parenting is like the real goal of parenting is help your child find the one thing that they're like into that much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you can't, that's not something you can impose upon them or force. All you can do is expose them to tons of stuff

and encourage them and figure out what they gravitate towards and then kind of rush in to support that. Yeah, encourage them to embrace whatever passion they have. You know, like, cause that's the kind of the thing if someone's into something a little niche or a little weird and you're like, that's weird, you shouldn't be into that, then you can squash it. But you never know. I mean, like the human experience is so broad, you know like, that's weird. You shouldn't be into that. Then you can squash it, but you never know.

I mean, like the human experience is so broad. You know, if somebody's into something like go for it. Right. I mean, who would have thought that you could have built a career off of like this thing that you're into. And you could have easily been in a situation where you were just dissuaded

or somebody just said, this is insane. And you kind of like took that in instead of dismissing it. Yeah, I mean, credit to my parents, they were always just like, you can do anything, you can be good at whatever you want. You know, like that kind of thing. That's a gift also. Yeah, I mean, and I don't know if they said that

explicitly so much, but it was sort of always the understated, yeah, it's like, you know, whatever you wanna do, you can do it well. Yeah. And they're like, cool. So, well, maybe that's a good place to kind of wrap this up. Like that's a good message to put out

and an uplifting message to put out to the world. Like if somebody is in that place, like it is a gift to like know at a young age, like this is what I love and this is what I'm gonna do. And like, there's just not gonna be anything else except this. Most people don't have that. Like they're bouncing around like,

yeah, I kind of like what I do, but I haven't found that. To be fair, that makes it sound like I always knew that climbing was my calling, but realistically, you know, I thought I was going to college. I went to college. I didn't love it. Then I thought I was just going to climb for a little bit. Then I thought I'd probably have to become a mountain guide or become, you know, do some outdoor, I don't know, like be a camp counselor or something, you know, because there's no money in climbing and you couldn't be a professional climber. And then eventually I started to make some money through climbing. It was kind of like, well, I may as well do this as

long as I can to see what I can do for myself. Cause I love climbing. And so now, you know, 20 years later, it looks like it was an obvious path, but it was definitely not an obvious path. You know, the whole time you're like, is this a thing? Like, can I be a climber? You know? And I think that's where having the real passion for it, I think has helped to sustain that for so long. Yeah. I mean, I think it's good to hear that because it is easy to form the wrong idea. I don't want people to be daunted by like,

because nobody knows that they're on the right path while they're doing it. It's only in retrospect that you look back and you're like, oh, obviously. Yeah. But I mean, did you ever think like, I'm gonna be a podcaster? No, it's absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. But like, I mean, did you ever think like, I'm gonna be a podcast? No, it's like absolutely ridiculous.

Like, yeah, you can't, you don't get to see when you were graduating law school. And I think that's a big impediment to people kind of taking that first step because as human beings, our brains, like we wanna know, like, well, if I decide I wanna do this, like, where is it gonna lead me? Where is it gonna go?

And it's like, you don't get to have that. But that's what I think was the gift for me with climbing is that I love taking each step as a climber. You know, like, I don't know where the path is going. I don't know anything about the path, but every day I'm like, I love going climbing. I love going climbing. And so- The destination doesn't matter.

Yeah, and then years later, you're just like, you know, I've been walking down this path of climbing forever and it's great. And you're gonna keep walking it. Hopefully, I'll do my best. I'm going to miss passive climbing forever. Yeah. And it's great. And you're going to keep walking it. Hopefully. Yeah. Do my best. While Alex masters physical risks, Tom Holland navigates personal challenges. The Spider-Man star came to the podcast studio to open up about his journey towards sobriety and his subsequent foray into the non-alcoholic beverage industry.

sobriety and his subsequent foray into the non-alcoholic beverage industry. Tom's candid reflections on fame and staying grounded offer a really refreshing perspective on what it means to maintain groundedness and authenticity in the spotlight. Yeah, I think it's like, you know, when surfers talk about when they crash or get hit by a big wave, the worst thing you can do is like tense up. You just have to kind of roll with the punches and like let it happen. I always find that if I go out in public and I try and resist the request for photos, I end up having a worse day. So if I just sort of go, you know, it's part of the job.

Lucky to be doing it. Happy to take the pictures. I always have a better day. And I think that for me is just an example of like rolling with the punches rather than trying to fight back. It's like swimming upstream. Like you're never going to be able to convince everyone to be nice about it and to say please or whatever it is you're looking for.

But yeah, it's just part of the job, I guess. Yeah, that's what they're paying you for to have to like deal with all that bullshit right and to kind of be in a place of surrender and peace with it rather than like confrontational Alec Baldwin vibe

but after you know decades of that you know maybe it just gets under your skin I mean how could it not yeah and I think as well like I mean I don't know where Alec is from, but I know being a Londoner in London, if anyone speaks to you on the street as a Londoner, the first thought in your mind is like, why are you talking to me?

If someone asks you the time, it's like, why do you want to know the time? London is so antisocial when it comes to like stranger to stranger. So I think as a true Londoner growing up and then becoming famous, it took me a really long time to adjust to being approached on the street. I've got used to it now. It's like part of my life now. But when people used to ask me for photos really early on, especially after Spider-Man 1 had come out, I still couldn't quite understand why people wanted to take pictures with me. I used to find it really odd. And my reaction was like, no, I don't want to take a picture with you. But now I have like, I've ironed that crease out a little bit.

Well, the interesting kind of ripple to that is that you didn't have, you know, a normal childhood or a maturation period where you could kind of figure out who you are and what's important in advance of all of that. Like, this has been your experience, you know, since you were a young kid. So, you've had to learn how to deal with this before your brain was fully formed, you know what I mean? Still ain't fully formed, I'll tell you that much for free. Yeah. You and me both, my friend. I was really lucky that, like, my life changed slowly. Like, my friend. I was really lucky that like my life changed slowly. Like I started when I was really young and then I had about 10 years before the Spider-Man thing happened. The Spider-Man of it all was the, that was the big turning point of where like everything changed.

And I was lucky that I had those formative years to sort of grow up, make mistakes, learn about set life, learn about the world of movie making. And then Spider-Man happened. But it definitely was a steep learning curve for sure. But you seem like, first of all, you seem like a happy person. You strike me as somebody who's really grounded, who understands what's important, who doesn't get caught up in a lot of the nonsense. Maybe part of that is keeping at arm's length with, you know, Hollywood, quote unquote Hollywood, and, you know, living in the UK and having this strong family unit and surrounding yourself with friends. But it seems to have kept you sane.

Do you still live in a house with like all your buddies? I do. Yeah, I do. And that is changing. My brother and my best friend are in a transitional period of moving out. We're sort of at that stage in our 20s now where we're like, we should all live by ourselves. It might be time. Yeah, but it's been great.

My best friend Harrison, who I live with, I really admire. He set up this fantastic rum company called Hammer that he's been promoting and working on and stuff. And seeing him kind of build that from the ground up in the house has been such a pleasure because he's so driven and he's up every morning. He's out selling it. He's doing all this great stuff. And he's been a real, you know, inspiration for me for what we'll talk about later with Biro. So yeah, so I love living with them. And they're really great guys to live with. They're very tidy. They keep the house nice. Because I'm away a lot,

it's nice to have people in the house. It's like a reverse entourage narrative, right? Yes. You guys are like healthy, eating well. We all go to the gym together. Supporting each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would make for a very different HBO series. It gym together. Supporting each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would make for a very different HBO series.

It'd be a very boring TV show. Yeah, yeah. Like, wow, they're so productive. Uh-huh. But yeah, I like living with Harry and Harrison is great because they are so productive. And the thing with acting that I've always found quite difficult is that it's either 100% or nothing.

So like if you're on set, you're working flat out, you're exhausted. And if you're not working, you really don't have anything to do. I think sometimes with acting, being very authentic is something that comes natural to people. And I've always been a very genuine person. When I went to my first audition, I was by far the worst dancer in the room. But I was the last kid there. They would like cull kids. So we would be there for five hours and every hour they'd say like, if you're between numbers five and 25, you can go home, everyone else gets to stay. And I was the last kid there. I did no singing, no dancing, just acting stuff with the director. So maybe he just thought that I was very honest

and was quite open and emotionally ready. The dancing and that sort of stuff came later. And I think I've always been very driven. And if you put the work in front of me, I'm really good at getting it done. I'm not very good at putting the work in front of me myself. I need someone to help me do that. Whereas my brother Harry or Harrison, with what he's done with Hammer,

like the way he's built his little company and driven it from the ground up and he gets up and does it every day is amazing. I couldn't do that. You're a team player. I'm like, tell me what you need me to do and I'll do it. But don't ask me to like come up with the strategy to do it. Transitioning now from individual journeys to a collective future,

please meet renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari, who came on the podcast to explore AI's profound impact on society through his unique historical perspective, along with crucial and grounded guidance to help all of us navigate a future that is looking more and more uncertain. So the key question is ultimately political and ethical. If they have consciousness, if they can feel pain and pleasure and love and hate, this means that they are ethical and political subjects. They have rights, that you should not inflict pain on an AI the same way you

should not inflict pain on a human being, that what they like, what they love might be as important as what human beings desire. So they should also vote in elections and they could be the majority because you can have a country, a hundred million humans and 500 million AIs. So do they choose the government in this situation? Now, in the United States, interestingly enough, there is actually an open legal path for AIs to gain rights. It's one of the only countries in the world where this is the case. Because in the United States, corporations are recognized as legal persons with rights. Until today, this was a kind of legal fiction.

Like according to US law, Google is a person. It's not just a corporate, it's a person. And as a person, it also has freedom of speech. This is the Supreme Court ruling for 2010 of Citizen United. person. It's not just a corporate, it's a person. And as a person, it also has freedom of speech. This is the Supreme Court ruling for 2010 of Citizen United. Now, until today, this was just legal fiction because every decision made by Google was actually made by some human being, an executive, a lawyer, an accountant. Google could not make a decision independent of the humans. But now you have AIs. So imagine the situation when you incorporate an AI. Now this AI is a corporation.

And as a corporation, US law recognizes it as a person with certain rights like freedom of speech. Now it can earn money. It can go online, for instance, and offer its services to people and earn money. Then it can open a bank account and invest its money in the stock exchange. And if it's very smart and very intelligent, it could become the richest person in the U.S. It's an AI. And according to US law, one of the rights of this person is to make political contributions, donations.

This was the main reason behind Citizen United in 2010. So this AI now makes billions of dollars of contributions to politicians in exchange for expanding AI rights. And the legal path in the US.S. is completely open. You don't need any new law to make this happen. That's like a plot of a movie. Yeah, when we were in L.A. Yeah, I mean, wow.

That's so wild to contemplate. What are the differences in the ways in which the advent of this powerful technology is impacting democratic systems and authoritarian systems. So both systems have a lot to gain and have a lot to lose. Again, the AI, it's the most powerful technology ever created. It's not a tool, it's an agent. So you have millions and billions of new agents, are very intelligent, very capable, that can be used to create the best healthcare system in the world, but also the most lethal army in the world, or the worst secret police in the world.

If you think about authoritarian regimes, so throughout history, they always wanted to monitor their citizens around the clock. But this was technically impossible. Even in the Soviet Union, you know, you have 200 million Soviet citizens. You can't follow them all the time because the KGB didn't have 200 million agents. And even if the KGB somehow got 200 million agents, that's not enough. somehow got 200 million agents, that's not enough. Because, you know, in the Soviet Union, it's still basically paper bureaucracy, the secret police. If a secret agent followed you around 24 hours a day, at the end of the day, they write a paper report about you and send it to KGB headquarters in Moscow. So imagine every day KGB headquarters is flooded with 200 million paper reports.

Now, to be useful for anything, somebody needs to read and analyze them. They can't do it. They don't have the analysts. Therefore, even in the Soviet Union, some level of privacy was still the default for most people, for technical reasons. Now, for the first time in history, it is technically possible to annihilate privacy. A totalitarian regime today doesn't need millions of human agents if he wants to follow everybody around. You have the smartphones and cameras and drones and microphones everywhere. And you don't need millions of human analysts to analyze this ocean of information. You have AI. And this is already beginning to happen. This is not a future prediction. In many places around the world, you begin to see the formation of this totalitarian

surveillance regime. It's happening in my country, in Israel. Israel is building this kind of surveillance regime in the occupied Palestinian territories to follow everybody around all the time. And also in our region, in Iran, since the Islamic revolution in 1979, they had the hijab laws, which says that every woman, when she goes out, walking or even driving in her private car, she must wear the hijab, the headscarf. And until today, the regime had difficulty enforcing the hijab laws because they didn't have, you know, millions of police officers that you can place on every street, a police officer. If a woman drives without a headscarf,

immediately she's arrested and fined or whatever. In the last few years, they switched to relying on an AI system. Iran is now crisscrossed by surveillance cameras with facial recognition software, which recognizes automatically if in the car that just passed by the camera, the facial recognition software can identify that this is a woman, not a man, and she's not wearing the hijab and identify her identity, find her phone number. And within half a second,

they send her an SMS message saying, you broke the hijab law, your car is impounded. Your car is confiscated. Stop the car by the side of the world. This is daily occurrence today in Tehran and Isfahan and other parts of Iran. And this is based on AI. And it's not like there is a report

that goes to the court and some human judge goes over the data and decides what to do. The AI like immediately decides, okay, the car is confiscated. And this can happen in more and more places around the world, like even in the US. From technological evolution to spiritual awakening, modern mystic Julie Pyatt came on the podcast

to share her alchemical journey from physical trauma to spiritual awakening. And in this episode, shared stories from her recent pilgrimage to return her parents' ashes in Alaska. Our other siblings were not able to make it. So it was Vicki and me and then then Tyler came with, and my brother Stuart. And we traveled up to Alaska. We rented the Alaska Heritage Center. It's a native heritage center, which my dad helped build. And when my dad took me there, he had taken me to this Athabascan ceremonial house that is one of the most beautiful. It's got a totem pole in the front that's not carved, but there's a portal hole,

like an oval hole that you crawl through. And then you're inside their community gathering space. There's a fire pit. There's different totem poles on all four directions. pit. There's different totem poles on all four directions. And we were able to rent a cabin at my dad's special place. And my sister ran the obituary. We were like eight years late. My mom passed away in December, but was not in touch with very many people. And I was like, Vicki, no one's coming. No one's around anymore. But what happened is we gathered about 30 super special people,

really, really dear, dear relationships of my parents, of my sister, of mine, of my brothers. And we had a memorial there for them. And I had Shreemu cheese boards along with smoked salmon, which was donated by one of the guests there. And we then walked through the cultural center and we crawled through this portal in the Athabascan house and we sang for my parents. And it was perfect, like incredibly, incredibly beautiful. Stuart and Kelly Moneymaker, who was Stuart's wife for eight years when they were in their 20s. She was up there and she's

been doing incredible work with the natives. She's doing documentaries and really working with the cultures up there and bringing awareness to climate change and how it's affecting their tribes and clans. I learned when I was up there, I was invited to a shaman meeting that Kelly arranged with four women that were from different Alaska tribe lineages. And it was to introduce Damanhur to them and Shreemu to them.

lineages and it was to introduce Dom and her to them and Shreemu to them. And what I learned is that in Alaska, there are 32 microclimates and there are 200 dialects. So they didn't like me using the name clan or even tribe because they said that that's a colonialized term that's been placed on them. But I had told this beautiful woman, her English name is Jackie, that I wanted to wait until I had my ritual name from Dominar, which was Blue Whale, Balanotra Edzura, before I came to meet her. And when I told her that that was my ritual name, she said to me, in my language, my name means the one who summons the whale. You told me. Yeah. So it was just, it was incredible. And if four times during the meeting, I completely lost my orientation, which usually that doesn't happen to me, but it was a very beautiful meeting of energies of the

way of life. They also live in dream time. They live a very spiritual connected life to nature. And I'm looking forward to all the relationships that that is opening up to me and to Kelly and Shreemu and Jackie and Maida also, and some of the others, Amelia. So I'm inviting, some of them are coming to Dominar with me, which is really great. But anyway, to have been able to be in the Native Heritage Center and honor my parents in that way was one of the most extraordinary experiences. And my sister made an

amazing slideshow of my parents' life. And she had reminded me that I interviewed my mom on my podcast for The Life of Me many years ago, maybe 2017. And so Vicki said, it would be great if we played like a piece of the podcast and everyone could hear mom's voice. And so we just randomly chose a section of the podcast and it was the section of the podcast where mom is talking about the song Moon River and about how Moon River had become the song of our family. And she tells the story of Stuart opening for Jewel, the recording artist, and him coming out on stage. And I think it was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas. And he says, I'd like to dedicate the song to my parents. And he sang Moon River to them that night.

So we listened to the whole song because the Stuart song was recorded on the episode. So the song then played. And then when we went to the ceremonial hut and first Stuart and Kelly played, then Tyler and Stuart played, then Tyler and I sang 500 miles. And then at the end, Tyler played and sang Moon River. And so it seemed as if we had planned the whole sequence of events, but we hadn't planned anything. And it's just the way that it all landed.

But we hadn't planned anything. And it's just the way that it all landed. In addition, I had this desire. I was going to take some of my parents' ashes and I was going to charter a helicopter and go up on a glacier and release their ashes on this glacier. I've done it before. If you travel to Alaska,

it's really a shame to not go up in a helicopter or a plane because you can't understand where you are unless you go up. And so I had this booked, I had paid for it and Tyler was gonna come with me. And Tyler went to dinner

with one of my brother's friends and he shared with him that there had been three fatal helicopter crashes in July in Alaska in this particular helicopter that I was to go up in. So I pivoted and chartered a boat and we went out on Prince William Sound, which is in this fishing village, which has a lot of nostalgia for my childhood. has a lot of nostalgia for my childhood. And so we drove our car through the longest tunnel in the United States and arrived at this fishing village. And much to my wonder and awe,

this abandoned building called the Buckner Building where I explored as a child was still there, abandoned. I took one of the best pictures of my life then. And then we went out on the boat. The captain was this beautiful girl from Laguna. The sound was glass. We saw eagles, a bear, sea lions, sea otter, and multiple glaciers.

And we arrived at this waterfall. The waterfall must be called Angel Waterfall. It looks like an angel. And to the left of it was this great elder face in the rocks. And it really looked like Easter Island. And my mom is from Chile. So it looked like it was their spot. And so my brother and I deposited their ashes in honor of the five children in all that they gave to us. And it was beautiful, like pristine, beautiful, amazing. We close with psychotherapist Esther Perel, whose groundbreaking work on modern relationships challenges our assumptions about love and connection. Through her uniquely focused lens, Esther reveals how our increasingly atomized

world impacts intimacy and desire and what we can all do about it. I would start actually with highlighting what I think is a very important change that occurred around the realm of relationships, period. For most of history, relationships are organized, and when I say for most of history, it's in comparison to here. person to hear. For most of history and still today in many parts of the world and as I say in my audience and probably a lot of you sitting right here, relationships are organized around loyalty and community, around duty and obligation. There's a lot of structure, there's hierarchy that describes to you what are the roles, the expectations, the gender roles. And there's a lot of certainty and very little freedom and very little personal expression. And relationships are tight knots from which you don't extricate yourself very easily.

And we move to a model where structure is replaced by network and the relationships become loose threads that you can fluidly go in and out of. And we have unprecedented choices and options. And now at the heart of relationship is the individual. And this individual is in search of community. Previously, they were in search of personal freedom. And at the heart of this individual

are their feelings. And the dominant feeling is the feeling of authenticity. And authenticity is being true to myself. And in the name of being true to myself, today, we forego relationships.

To not betray me, I will leave you. And we have never been more free, and we have never been more alone, and we have never had more uncertainty and more self-doubt. So that's the ground of modern love. Does that make you reflect on past paradigms of relationships with a sort of rose-colored glasses? Like, was it better? I mean, obviously we're talking about, to drill down on it, it's like, okay, in the past, relationships were about class structure. They were about power and security, arranged marriages, et cetera. They were political and the furthest thing from kind of freely chosen or about romance and love, right? Well, romance and love existed. Passion has always existed, but it took place outside. But that wasn't the reason to get married. No. But no, I don't at all. I think I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the situation of my grandmother. So that is, it's very simple. No, I where we end up sometimes evaluating ourselves as products, where we have to deal with comparison as the thief of joy.

and we re-partake in a frenzy of romantic consumerism where we sometimes are afraid to commit to the good for fear of missing out on the perfect. And we want to find a soulmate on an app. This is modern love. And this soulmate, by the way, which has always meant God until now, is now a person. And with this person,

I want to experience wholeness and belonging and meaning and ecstasy and transcendence, all stuff that we used to look for in the realm of the divine. And all of this is changing the definition of modern intimacy. Modern intimacy is no longer about I come to you with my dowry and my herd. Modern intimacy is I come to me with my interior life and I'm going to communicate with you. It's a communicative experience and I'm going to open up and share with you my fears, my vulnerabilities, my aspirations, and you are going to reflect back and validate me and momentarily help me transcend my existential aloneness. So modern intimacy is into me see.

Yeah, it's a lot. The degree of difficulty is insanely high and the level of pressure that is shouldered by not only the seeker, but the sought is equally insane. And this is all set against a backdrop in which our culture is increasingly secular. We don't have our religious

traditions to look for the divine anymore. So we look for it in other individuals and, you know, particularly or acutely... Individuals and psychedelics. Yes, that's a newer thing. There's something acutely American also about the individual, like sort of reigning supreme, right? It's all about me, what I need, what my needs are, and my individual happiness. And there's a lot that gets then projected on the sort of romantic candidate to fulfill a number of categories to be kind of worthy of playing that role.

Want a list? Yeah, let's hear it. So I want all the things that we have always wanted in traditional relationships, companionship, economic support, family life, social status. But I want you to also be my best friend, my trusted confidant, my intellectual equal, my efficient co-parent, my fitness buddy, my professional coach, and my personal development guru. And on top of all of that, I want you to be my passionate lover to boot. Right. For the long haul, by the way. And that long haul keeps on getting longer. It's amazing that any relationship survives this, you know, list of requirements. But many of them are crumbling under the weights of the expectations.

I mean, this is an overburdened system with an under-resourced reality since the traditional support systems are not in place. And this is one of the challenges of modern love. And there you have it, folks. Thus concludes our Best of 2024 series. Highs, lows, wisdom, challenges, triumphs. It's all in there. I hope you found it helpful.

I hope you found it inspiring and instructive. Once again, I'm genuinely grateful for each and every guest who took the time to share their insights. And of course, I'm most grateful to all of you, the listeners, the viewers, without whom this show simply would not be possible. I am in your debt and, as always, at your service.

That's it. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. And I will catch you on the flip side in 2025. Peace. Pants. Thank you.