Best of 2025 (Part One): Conversations That Shaped Us | The Rich Roll Podcast

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Why do you believe you're alive? and for what would you give your life?

Your time and energy is the single most valuable resource you have in your life.

There's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined.

Hey, everybody.

Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to express a heartfelt happy holidays from me and from my entire team here at the RRP and Voicing Change Media.

2025 has been a delirious year for many reasons.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very difficult year for me personally.

But having the support of all of you has made it a lot easier.

So thank you for that.

And now it's over, which is something to celebrate, because you can't embrace the birth of something new until you completely let go of the old.

So celebrate we will with the first of two best of the year compilation episodes, which is our annual tradition here.

For the last 13 years I really have done my very best to host deep and meaningful long form conversations and I do it in service to your personal development, to your relationship with change and transformation.

There's no different too many fantastic guests to feature here.

But what follows is our best attempt to synthesize the greatest the year had to offer into the most compelling and practical guide that we could.

So I want you to think about these next two episodes as a refresher course for the devoted RRP fans out there, a reminder to revisit episodes that maybe you skipped or perhaps really resonated with you, or as an abbreviated anthology on what we do here for those that are brand new.

As always, these episodes are our way of expressing gratitude for you, the audience, as well as, of course, to our amazing guests who helped make the year what it was.

And it's really in that spirit that we present this first episode to you now, starting with a clip from my friend Mel Robbins, who went absolutely stratospheric this year.

What have you learned or discovered about this?

You know kind of self-obsession that we have and this deep-rooted desire uh, you know, to kind of be in control or to get the world to kind of um, conform to our idea of what it should be.

Well, i have two things to say about this.

One you're never going to get rid of this fundamental need for control.

It's part of the hard wiring and understanding that everybody has.

It will also make you understand why the way that you've been dealing with relationships and the world at large is backfiring, and so there's a huge difference between seeking control and actual power.

And here's the headline that I've discovered by saying let them and let me now, for two years straight.

It's this.

If you feel overwhelmed or tired or stressed out or lonely, or you are not achieving the things that you want to achieve or you're not as happy as you want to be, the problem isn't you.

The problem is the power that you're giving to other people, to their thoughts, to their emotions, to their expectations, to their moods.

And you don't have to live like that.

Your time and energy is the single most valuable resource you have in your life.

How you spend your time, what you pour your energy into, it is what your life is.

And what I discovered by saying let them and let me, and understanding the difference between control and true power, is that I was controlling the wrong thing.

I had life reversed.

See, I thought I'd be happy if you liked me, Rich.

I thought that if I navigated my life based on my kids' moods, or my husband's moods or my parents' expectations, that was the way that I would feel more in control.

But here's the joke that we all need to stop like to accept and like kind of laugh at ourselves and then change how we live our lives.

There's one thing you'll never be able to control, and that's another person.

And yet we've organized our entire lives around ensuring that other people are happy, or that they think a certain thing, or they're in a good mood, or that you've met their expectations.

And here's what I've learned.

When you actually stop giving your power to other people's opinions and to their moods and to their expectations of you, and you take the power back and you say well, let me focus on what I think about myself.

Let me focus on what my values are and what my intention is, and let me act in a way that is aligned with that, as best as I can.

And let me actually learn how to respond to my own emotions like a fucking adult, instead of vent texting at everybody or pouting in the corner or gossiping or bitching or taking it out on other people.

Let me be the mature adult here and let me work on this.

When you actually put your time and energy there, a funny thing happens.

All the other stuff takes care of itself.

Oh my God, Rich.

When you're proud of yourself, you actually don't think much about what other people think.

When you are kind of focused every day on just doing little things that make you proud of yourself or that are aligned with the things that you care about.

You're not worried about what other people's expectations are.

If you screw up and hurt somebody's feelings, it's not like World War III is broken out.

You literally just know your intentions, so you can take responsibility for the impact it had and apologize.

Move on.

Like it doesn't become this noose around your neck.

And you don't feel this sense that you're responsible for everybody in your life.

Like even last night.

Yesterday we had a really long day and my daughter and I worked together and we were having dinner and I kind of snapped at her.

And then we got into this little thing and we were all sitting in a booth and somebody said on this side of the booth just let her be upset with you.

What a beautiful thing.

Just let my adult daughter have a moment where she's annoyed with me.

Why do I have to fix this?

I don't.

She is allowed to have feelings.

She's allowed to be disappointed.

She's allowed to be pissed off at me.

And if I give her the space to have those feelings, then I'm actually recognizing the power that she has to process her own experience in life.

And it immediately starts to disappear.

It's unbelievable how we have taken on the responsibility of the world, and in doing so we've not only burdened ourselves and robbed ourselves of time and energy, but we've also robbed other people in our lives our children, our partners, our parents from the experience of actually facing life and feeling what they need to feel and understanding that wow, like nobody needs to step in and rescue somebody stand by their side and support them.

But you know, I also can see that I would rush in and try to solve everything for my kids, which only made their anxiety worse when they were little.

Because every time I stepped in and I wouldn't let them struggle or I wouldn't let them have the uncomfortable feeling.

When I step in and just try to take it away, I'm actually communicating.

I don't actually believe you can handle this, which makes it worse.

Next up is my friend, the Harvard happiness expert and social scientist, Arthur Brooks.

It's one thing for you and I to talk about meaning, purpose and happiness, as people who are in our kind of era of crystallized intelligence.

And we're looking backwards at our life and trying to make sense of things.

But as somebody who's now kind of directing your focus on younger people, like-

What's different about how you talk about these issues with respect to that generation versus ours?

So the first book that I wrote about this was From Strength to Strength.

That's how you and I met.

That was the first book that, the first time I came on the show, we talked about that.

That made a big assumption, which is you're not perfect in terms of meaning of life, but you have a good concept of it.

That's not an assumption I can make.

What you find is that the inflection point in generalized anxiety and clinical depression for people in their teens and 20s exactly follows the answer to the question.

I feel like my life is meaningless.

And it tracks with data showing that when people stop looking for the meaning of their life.

Also, of course, it's contemporaneous with the onset with the sort of the critical mass of people living online.

So that's all these things are going together.

So when I'm talking about people in crisis in the second half of their life or, you know, burning out or having a midlife crisis, super strivers not knowing what they're going to do,

That's a different problem because that's predicated on the idea that you have an underlying sense of life's meaning that you can tap into and live in a different way.

I can't make that assumption with people in their 20s today.

So I have to go back to first principles.

That's why what I'm writing about right now is the meaning of your life and how to find it.

You know what are the big things that you actually need to do to understand about your brain, the practices you need to actually start adopting so that you will open yourself up to questions of meaning and come to some sort of understanding about it.

I think that there's a paralysis that ensues with young people when you throw words around like purpose and meaning.

It's sort of like, I'm supposed to know my purpose.

And so I either feel bad about myself or guilty or less than, or I'm just sort of confused.

I don't know what that even means at that stage of life.

Yeah, for sure.

And so that's why it is so big that for the longest time I would just talk about it in those terms, and it is quite paralyzing.

So I'm writing a book about it right now that talks about actually, what are the steps to go and find it, which starts off with confronting the fact that there is a problem understanding neurophysiologically what the problem is.

Talking about the things you need to stop doing in your life and then the practices that you need to actually admit the sources of purpose and meaning in your life.

And it's not straightforward because you know, back in the Pleistocene they didn't have these problems.

And even our grandfathers didn't have this problem because just daily life made it organic.

But some of it is still pretty straightforward.

When I only have 10 minutes with young people, I'll talk about taking a little test, a little two-question exam of whether or not you have a crisis in your life.

And if you do, what to go in search of.

So two questions, for example, I'll ask my students or my adult kids for that matter.

Why do you believe you're alive?

For what would you give your life?

Because you find that people who have the greatest tangible sense understanding of meaning of life, They have a sense of understanding about the why of their life and for what they give their life.

It's like being alive and not being alive.

This is one of the reasons that people who've been in combat roles in the military have such a strong sense of life's meaning and Because they've had to confront that without ever even asking those questions.

For what would you give your life?

Well, the Marines.

But it's self-selecting in some regard, right?

Because those are the kind of people that would go into the military.

They already have a conviction around that.

Maybe.

Although you know, being the father of two Marines, I can tell you that a lot of them, they go into the Marines because they want adventure and they come out having found meaning.

Because they've addressed these particular questions.

So when I talk to my students, they're on average 28 years old.

They're MBA students at Harvard.

I say one of your projects is going to be to be thinking very, very deeply about your theory, about why you're alive, which means how were you created and for what purpose?

That means writing a mission statement.

And what would you die happily for right now?

Happily.

That's a rough question for anybody, but for a young person you know that's a very confronting question.

They find it super exciting to take it on.

They find it super exciting because they don't have to do it right now.

It's like, this is the project.

And they're finally like, oh, I don't have to go find the meaning of my life.

I have to try to understand the answers to those questions, which is a lot more tangible than what they've been dealing with.

Why am I alive?

And so what do I read?

I'll read this and read this and read this and talk to this person and start going and start a contemplative practice.

And you can start doing stuff to try to get the information that will give you some illumination around, at least an understanding of those questions.

And that's that's progress.

That's that feels.

It feels less diffuse, it feels less unanswerable.

Still still a steep mountain to climb.

Meaning is brutal man, meaning is brutal.

I mean, it's like again, this is the same thing.

It's like we we can conceive of our death, but we can't conceive of our non-existence.

There's that your prefrontal cortex is not ideally designed to to confront questions that have understanding but no answers.

This is what the contemplative traditions they'll say you know to the junior monk.

Okay, for the next 40 years, chop wood and carry water while you think about these koans.

Yeah.

You know, because it's not, because it's not straightforward.

This is Rhonda Patrick, health researcher.

So, like when we're Building up lactate as a result of vigorous exercise, it's passing through the blood brain barrier, it's going into our brains and it's doing all sorts of beneficial things, like something called neurogenesis, right.

So talk a little bit more in depth about the importance of lactate or the relationship between it and the healthy brain that we all are trying to kind of foster.

Yeah, I would love to.

It's one of the reasons why I really try to engage in a lot of vigorous intensity exercise.

I've got neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family.

So for me, I'm very brain focused when it comes to exercise.

It's one of the main reasons I do exercise.

I feel better, but I also know that I'm delaying the aging of my brain and helping prevent neurodegenerative disorders.

So lactate?

It depends on how.

There's a lot of factors at play in terms of how much lactate you're going to make, right?

So how intense you're going in terms of your exercise, your mitochondrial function a lot of individual variability here at play.

But generally speaking, when you start to go into that vigorous intensity zone, you can start our steady state.

Lactate levels are like less than one millimolar.

And when you start to go into 80 85, 90 max heart rate, you can get anywhere between 7 to 14 millimolar of lactate in your blood.

And this can be measured.

You can go out and get tests.

I've measured it before for myself.

The lactate levels don't last long in your blood system.

And that is because it is being transported and going and taken up by other tissues.

So really, as far as I've measured repeatedly, it's about a 20-minute, about 20-25 minutes, and then it goes back to your baseline.

So there have been a variety of studies that have shown.

By the way, Dr George Brooks from UC Berkeley was the first to really propose at the time this lactate shuttle theory, as he called it.

And it's not really a theory anymore.

It's been proven time and time again.

But he was really the first to to propose that lactate was being transported into circulation.

It was being taken up by a variety of other tissues, notably the brain, and that it was having beneficial effects in these other organs in the brain.

So there is a transporter.

Lactate goes through this it's called an MCT transporter and it gets into the brain.

And there's been a variety of human studies showing that actually during physical activity, lactate is fueling the brain.

Because your brain is working hard.

Your heart is working hard during exercise, your lungs are working hard.

Your brain is also working hard, right?

I mean, you know this as an endurance athlete, your brain is also working hard during exercise.

And lactate's fueling that, fueling the brain activity that's been shown.

And some of that also has to do with the fact that lactate it's increasing brain-derived neurotropic factors.

So you mentioned that, BDNF for short.

And that is doing a lot of things.

It is helping grow new neurons, particularly in part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory.

It's also part of the brain that atrophies with Alzheimer's disease.

So there have been a variety of studies that have shown even older adults that are engaging in moderate intensity activity for about a year can increase the size of their hippocampus by like 2, which is amazing because typically older adults lose their hippocampus atrophies with time.

So not only were they fighting and staving off the atrophying, but they were also increasing it.

So that was pretty, I think, one of the big eye-opening studies.

And this was over 10 years ago.

This was like a 2012 study that was published showing this.

So the brain-derived neurotrophic factor is growing.

New neurons can increase the size of the hippocampus.

But also, it's really important for something called neuroplasticity.

And that is it's kind of like you can think about keeping our brains more pliable and malleable and adaptable.

So really, neuroplasticity allows our brains to adapt to a changing environment.

And this is important for aging, but it's also important for mental health.

So people with major depressive disorder, for example, they have dysfunction and neuroplasticity.

And that kind of makes sense, right?

If you can't adapt to a changing environment, it's very stressful.

It can cause anxiety.

It can be depressing.

So there have been a variety of different researchers that are trying to target neuroplasticity as a treatment for depression.

So neuroplasticity not only plays a role in brain aging, but it also plays a role in mental health.

And I think that's important to point out because, I mean, I think almost everyone by now knows that exercise is one of the best things you can do for mental health right.

I mean, it's like, it's just, you can't deny it, right?

I mean, you go out even, just even doing like a 10 minute high intensity workout, you feel better.

You know you feel better.

How important is the plasticity piece in the mental health conversation?

And you know what is the significance of of that plasticity increase as a result of vigorous exercise.

Yeah, it's a good thing that you point out.

I think there are a lot of things that are changing with exercise.

I mean, endorphins that make you feel good, you know, endocannabinoids that make you feel good.

I mean, there's serotonin gets increased, right?

So there's a lot of different I would say short-term effects that are potentially responsible for the beneficial, like elevation in mood that you experience after exercise.

With neuroplasticity, I would argue there's more of a long-term effect, right?

Your brain is now able to adapt better to a changing environment, and that's going to have more of a long-term consequence.

So neuroplasticity is another really important thing that brain-derived neurotrophic factor regulates.

And again, coming back to the lactate, which is what we were talking about, you know, lactate is also... When I say it's a signaling molecule, it is communicating and activating a lot of different things in the brain.

So norepinephrine is another one that's been shown to increase.

And norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for focus, attention, but also mood.

You know.

So people are often treated with norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors for anxiety and also depression.

So lactate plays a role in increasing that as well.

But again, we're just getting down into the nitty-gritty of one aspect of exercise.

And, as you pointed out, there's a whole plethora of changes that occur with exercise that are beneficial, not limited to lactate.

I just I think the lactate story is so important because it really is a proven mechanism, both human and animal studies.

It's something that's measurable.

And again it's something also that we've known is it links the more high-intensity exercise, the more vigorous exercise, with a lot of these beneficial effects on the brain.

Mm-hmm.

We continue our best of series with psychology professor Lori Santos.

This is something that culture gets wrong.

We talked about culture getting manifesting wrong.

I think that's number one thing we get wrong on TikTok.

But number two thing we get wrong about happiness on TikTok is this.

If you look anywhere on TikTok, it's all about self-care, treat yourself, self, self, self.

Like you look at the studies of happy people and happy people are not focused on themselves.

Happy people are very other oriented.

They're doing nice stuff for other people, right?

Controlled for income.

Happier people tend to donate more money to charity than not so happy people, right?

It's just these like subtle correlations between doing nice stuff for others and feeling better.

But then you have all these experiments where you kind of force participants to do nice stuff for other people.

One of my favorite is by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues, where they walk up to folks on the street, hand them 20 bucks and say either hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice, to treat yourself right.

Or, hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice for somebody else.

You could donate it to a homeless shelter.

You could buy a friend, you know, something nice like, but has to go to someone else.

When they call people at the end of the day or even at the end of the week, they find that people are happier when they treated someone else rather than when they treated themselves.

Right.

In giving that money to the other person.

If you qualify it, it then becomes a burden for them as opposed to an enriching experience where you felt like oh, I did something nice for somebody.

Yeah.

And this is a spot where, even in my own life if I'm not careful with it like there's just like a terrible opportunity cost because, like all the money you spend on yourself to feel better you know, buying yourself a massage, or buying yourself that new gadget or buying you're treating yourself to a nice glass of wine, worse well, it's just the same money that you could have spent on someone else.

I often joke that that every time my brain is like i'm gonna get a manicure, i'm gonna do something nice for myself.

I'm like wait, can i give my sister-in-law a manicure?

Can i like buy that in that massage for like, someone in my workplace?

Like It genuinely is one of these things that even violates my intuitions.

Even saying it now,

I'm like, dude, I would like the massage better than my sister-in-law, you know, whatever.

But you're cultivating abundance and abundance mindset, right?

Instead of lack, like you have to hoard it because you're afraid it'll run out or you'll run out.

And the benefits is like when you do nice things for other people, like what you get back in the social connection is huge, right.

My producer and co-writer for my podcast, Ryan Dilley, tells this story of He was walking into a coffee shop and someone was walking out with this cookie they were very excited about and then dropped it on the threshold of the doors they were walking out.

It seemed sad.

And he ran into the coffee shop and brought this person a cookie and gave them the cookie.

And the person was really happy.

And he's like, months later, I'm still telling that story.

I don't ever tell this story.

At the time I walked into the coffee shop and just got myself the cookie.

Now it's millions of people in your show are hearing it, right?

Yeah.

These moments of good deeds that we do for others, they percolate.

They percolate in our own memory.

They percolate in our social conversations.

Even just hearing Brian's story, probably all your people have this little boost in happiness that we get.

And so we forget that our actions and our things we do to feel happy at the moment.

Some of them live on better than others.

And the things we do for other people live on in special ways.

Is there any science to establish...

I want to call it a placebo effect, but it's not quite that.

What I'm getting at is the intention behind it.

Like does it matter if you give of yourself from a place of you know openheartedness and generosity, or you're doing it selfishly, because Laurie Santos said if I do this, it makes me happy?

And I know just based on my anecdotal personal experience that it actually doesn't matter because Like, if I just, even if I don't want to do the thing, like I know that it will make me happier.

And so to be selfless from a selfish perspective, it still ends up creating a shift.

Yeah.

And I think that's true for all the like.

We get the benefit from the behavior in a lot of the cases.

I think that again, with all these things, there's a little bit of nuance.

Laura Aknen has this work that if you feel forced to do nice things for others like you don't have any choice, you don't have any agency in it.

That can be not good.

This is one of the reasons we see things like caregiver burnout and so on.

Like you have no choice, you have to be doing these nice things.

That's not great.

But if you come at it from like, all right, I don't really feel like doing this behavior.

I'll try it.

It kind of works.

And that's, look, that's true in all these domains.

I respect so many people that get the wonderful emotional hit that have the craving for working out.

I never have that.

It's always a slog for me.

I've hoped that doing it more and more, I'll get into it.

Never is.

But every time I do it, when I'm done, I'm like, oh, that was great.

Why did I hate doing that?

What's my problem, right?

And I think the same thing can be true for doing nice things for others.

For me, that's also true for like talking to people.

I know that talking to strangers from all my studies.

Again I can like tell you the journal article name, right?

That it makes you happier.

But I'm just like, don't really feel like talking to people.

But then inevitably when I do it, I'm like, okay, I should really do it.

I wind up feeling better.

Even on the plane over here today I was sitting next to someone who kind of plopped down and this individual, sort of disabled and like, had a tough time getting in and was sort of seemingly sort of frustrated and And I had this moment of like.

All I want to do is look at my phone and check my email.

That's all my craving and motivation is telling me to do.

But I know happiness wise, I should like try to brighten this person's day.

And so I did it and we had a little chat and then I felt a little bit brighter, you know the first 10 minutes into the flight and feel like I made you know his version of that flight a little bit better than if I was just kind of on my own.

We'll be back in a flash, but first a quick break.

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Okay, let's get back to the show with a clip from Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer.

I think that we just make things very complicated for ourselves, and then you get older and it all becomes easier again.

All the things you worried about seem so silly.

I wrote this thing a while ago.

You're two years old and you fall and you scrape your leg and you screaming bloody murders.

If the world's gonna end, you're seven years old.

Johnny or janey doesn't send you a valentine and, oh my god, the world's gonna end.

You're, you know 13, you have a pimple on.

Oh my god, i'm never gonna look good.

You're 18, you know, and it just goes on.

At some point you look back on all of it.

How stupid it all was um, And the culture allows it in some sense almost promotes it.

I'm not sure why.

But at the end of it, there's always somebody who's profiting.

Meanwhile, yeah, you look back on it and say how silly.

But at the same time, the fact that you like didn't get that Valentine when you were in seventh grade or whatever you know, create some neural pathway in your brain that you know, 30 years later, you're still acting out on as a result, because it's some form of trauma that remained unhealed.

Yeah.

You know, but to recognize that other people's responses to us are a function of their needs.

They say nothing about us.

Every compliment you give me is not really about me.

It's more about you.

Yeah.

Every insult.

My need for you to like me.

Yeah.

Every insult and so on.

And if we were brought up to understand those things?

Even a seven-year-old can understand them.

If they're spoken in kiddies, then Johnny doesn't give you the Valentine.

So Johnny didn't give you a Valentine.

It doesn't have to, you know, you go from that.

You didn't get the Valentine.

Therefore, nobody likes you.

Therefore, your life is going to be a failure.

It's silly, right?

I mean, how do we communicate these things to the children?

Somebody says, how many Valentines did you get, Mary?

And you got more than Susie.

So therefore, you're a better person.

Where as soon as you say, yeah, but I've got the valentines from the most important people.

It's all crazy.

It's crazy.

It's all crazy.

You know, and I talked to you about how that pancreas story, you know, that I still can't.

This was a story where I'm not going to eat the pancreas, but I feel I have to eat it because now I'm a married woman at this very young age.

And I still can't figure out why I thought that.

You know, that there's so many things that are communicated to us.

You know, if you're sophisticated, these are all the things that you'll do.

And we go back and people, I don't know, it's become my new mantra, who says so?

You know, yeah.

And when you recognize the three levels that I talked about, you know where level one and three look the same, but they're very different.

Level one, two, three thinking.

Maybe explain that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, the easiest example, I keep using the New York.

It's a wonderful magazine.

And this example doesn't shine, but so be it.

Level one, we have people who don't read The New Yorker.

Level two, people who read The New Yorker.

Level three, people who don't read The New Yorker anymore.

Level one and three look the same, but they're very different people.

You could have them read it again, but that makes the story too complicated.

You have a young kid is uninhibited.

The rest of the world is inhibited.

And then you get to a certain point where you say, who gives a damn?

And you become disinhibited.

But when they accuse the older person of being like a child, they're not.

They're very different.

The child doesn't know the rule.

The older person knows the rule and thinks it's silly.

And I remember again, this is so silly, but if I had spilled something on my shirt, I'd be walking around like this, so nobody would see it without realizing how ridiculous this itself looks.

As if every moment...

This is going to describe who we are for a lifetime that people won't realize.

Yes, you can have dirt on yourself.

One minute doesn't mean that's the way you wear your clothes.

You're wearing two different shoes.

Doesn't mean you don't know that there'll be a different response to wearing the same shoe.

Everybody worrying so about what other people think, and everybody knows they themselves don't know.

And the joke is thinking that other people do know.

And so you're always guessing at what's the right thing to do.

And I'm here to inform people nobody knows.

And nobody can know because everything is changing.

Everything looks different from different perspectives.

And it's okay not to know because there are other things you do know.

Next up is world champion mountain biker Kate Courtney.

So what do you say to the person who's looking for something to go all in on but doesn't quite know what that is?

It's a really good question.

I think it's about listening to that curiosity and excitement.

And I think you just follow it.

You just follow the little breadcrumbs of that feeling and be willing to take a little risk when you need to, to find out what you're capable of.

It can't be manufactured and it can't be faked right like, but you also can't just wait to be struck with it, like i think those things are revealed through doing things and, to your point, like being willing to explore your curiosities, and i think The modern world has a way of like eroding our relationship with our own curiosity because we're told we need to do these things, or this is what success looks like, or the path that you should be on.

And curiosities are an indulgence or something that we kind of like repress or quash rather than kind of move towards.

It feels like there's a lot of focus on what we get out of things right now, which is important.

I mean I would not be sitting here if things hadn't, if the pendulum of luck hadn't kind of swung in the right direction at certain races in my career, right.

So I'm not saying that accomplishments and what you get out of things doesn't matter at all.

Like I live in reality.

But I find that a better compass is what you can give to things.

And I'll tell you a little story.

And this now I've related everything back to the Olympics, which you know.

I guess these pivotal moments, they really make an impact and you learn from them.

But I always thought, like from when I was a little kid, that if I went to the Olympics I'd go get the Olympic tattoo.

Right.

That's like the sexy focus thing.

So I go, I don't have this great experience.

I obviously do not get the tattoo.

You don't want to look at it and be reminded of.

Yeah.

And then I don't make the Paris team, which we didn't really get to.

But yeah, I was ranked, you know, 10th in the world and actually had a really good season.

But the other two Americans were top three at the first two World Cups and they just absolutely crushed it and they earned those spots.

And so I'm like sitting at home.

Mm hmm.

And during this period I went and visited my brother and we ended up going and we got matching tattoos.

And I'll tell you what we got there.

It's very small.

You don't know where it is, but it's on my ribs.

And I ended up getting the words, give him hell tattooed on my ribs.

And there's a good story as to why.

So my grandpa growing up, every time I did anything in my life, he would tell me, give him hell.

And that was his like mantra to us was just like, give everything you've got in what you do.

And he sent me videos before a bunch of hard races where he said that message.

And it really impacted me, because it's about being willing to meet yourself in every moment and give what you've got.

And I think you know Early on maybe the Olympics, maybe pursuing racing was about getting the flashy tattoo and having the accomplishment and being able to say like here look what I did.

And here's what I got for it.

But I think for me now, the question I ask is like, what can I give?

And how far am I willing to go to exhaust that potential and to give everything I have while I still have the opportunity to give it?

It's service.

It's like, what am I giving?

Not what am I extracting from this?

Yeah.

And I think, when you're looking for what will fill your cup and what will be a worthy pursuit over a long period of time, I think it's a lot about what?

What thing are you doing where you're giving everything and in that moment, you're enjoying it, right?

Like the deep engagement with the activity, whether it's like giving back to the community, whether it's giving everything in an interval on your bike, like where that act is so illuminating that at the end you have gotten something.

Yeah.

It's a byproduct.

It's also, you know, kind of this weird thing again where you might trip yourself up because it's like give them hell, like give it everything you've got.

Like that pushes all the buttons of the, like you know I'm gonna overtrain and I'm gonna, like you know, live in a cabin and be like, if I'm gonna give them hell, then here's what I need in order to do that.

But it's an.

You're coming at this like more mature, more expansive, like to give it all you've got like requires that holistic approach where you are making room for going on bike rides with all of these women and girls, that you're trying to get into the sport and you're working with these like you're doing.

Your life is much bigger now, right.

Like giving it all you've got means serving all of these different things, all of these value buckets that allow you to sustain your athletic career but give your life meaning.

This is psychologist and researcher Ethan Cross.

Where my head is going at this moment is thinking.

I'm trying to put myself in that state of distress.

And I know myself well enough to know that when I'm in the midst of a negative emotional experience, it's more difficult to grasp for the solution.

There's something that As uncomfortable as it is, you're resistant to changing it.

It is doing something for you.

On some unconscious level, you're choosing it in an adaptive way.

I suppose that makes me resistant to reach out for help or to find a way out of it.

I'm more likely to indulge it.

Well, and if you find that that approach is serving you well—

I mean, it's not.

Well then, I think, if that's not serving you well, having the foresight to recognize actually this intuition, I have to lean into this emotion even further.

It is not going to help me.

Rehearsing that ahead of time and we can go over how to do that, because actually the penultimate chapter of my book is all about how you go from knowing to doing.

How, when you find yourself in the midst of the storm, can you be reminded that your default tendencies may not be adaptive?

Let's plug in some of these shifters.

We'll talk about how you could do that.

But I think recognizing that sometimes our instincts don't serve us well.

I mean, worry is a great example of this.

So worry, this was the topic of my first book.

A lot of people worry. because they think it's going to help them.

There's something that feels really secure about worrying, right?

Because I look, this is a really important thing.

So let me try to figure out every possible angle on this.

Like your brain is an unbelievable supercomputer.

Your ability to come up with an infinite number of what if worst case scenarios.

This is remarkable.

At a certain point, like, It's useful until it ceases to be useful.

Typically, I think, the ceases to be useful happens like three minutes into the worry bout, rather than three days or three weeks or three months.

So recognizing that this temptation you have to lean into this is not serving you well, and giving yourself the permission to do a little experiment,

Just give yourself like the next time you find yourself really wanting to indulge in the sadness or the anxiety, let's try something else and see how that works out, and try some of those shifters.

That is something I would invite you and everyone else listening to do.

And again, myself too.

I've sometimes had to... I love approaching problems right when they happen.

I'm not dispositionally avoidant.

When something happens, I like to deal with it, nip it in the bud, move on.

Very tactical.

I have learned that sometimes...

That does not work well.

In particular in an interpersonal context.

Sometimes, if I'm in an argument with someone else, they need some time to recalibrate before we can productively deal with the situation at hand.

I have to force myself.

All right, Ethan, you're going to distract for a while.

And I lean into work hard for like several hours or several days even.

And that really serves me well.

And I'll tell you what.

Now that I've benefited from that, it has broken the previous automatic response pattern that was not serving me well.

Yeah.

What's interesting about that predisposition to problem solve, like I would imagine your inner monologue is like this is a positive quality.

Like when I see a problem, I solve it right away.

But If you're curious about why that is, perhaps you may find a deep discomfort with uncertainty.

It's like, what's driving that behavior, right?

And that uncertainty is so uncomfortable that it has to be eradicated.

And the best way to eradicate it is to just solve the problem, right?

As opposed to, what does it feel like to sit in that uncertainty instead?

Or you could sit in the uncertainty.

That's one thing you can do.

You can also productively distract from the uncertainty and let time temper the emotional response linked with whatever is driving the uncertainty and see what that does for you.

Or you can talk to someone else.

You got to be careful who you talk to to help you reframe the uncertainty.

Or you can lean on your culture for support.

And if you believe in a higher power or are spiritual, activate some of those resources.

There are lots of things you can do. to deal with that experience.

And one of those things, or two or three, may be far more productive than the default, which is to just try to kind of hammer it away with the worries.

We continue with longevity scientist, Walter Longo.

What's interesting about your work is that, And maybe what's somewhat unusual about you as somebody who is a research scientist, is that you are thinking about how you balance your discoveries around efficaciousness with sustainability and adherence in the general population.

It's one thing to look under a microscope, have a discovery and extrapolate from that into some sort of principle.

But how can that be translated into something that the average person can take and use, sustain that will benefit them over time?

Yes, and I think that we wanna take it all the way to disease cures, not just treatment cures, right?

So now, for example, with diabetes, we now have three or four trials, all of them showing a 50 to 70 regression of the disease.

And then- On the FMD.

On the FMD, just once a month without changing their diet.

And that's a very important thing, right?

So we don't change your diet, we don't change your lifestyle.

And we're saying so.

You know, for thousands of years people have been talking about food as medicine, right?

But it really never happened, right?

So that's what we're trying to do, is say, can we standardize this, you know vegan-based medicine, and then use it to, in some cases, even cure diseases?

And so diabetes, I think, is definitely one of the ones where we're very confident, and So University of Leiden, or the University of Heidelberg, did the first trial a couple of years ago and showed impressive, impressive effects on A1C, but also on reduction of drug use.

And then Leiden repeated and got the same results.

And so I think yes, this is feasible ways to bring people back to a functional state, from a disease state to a functional state.

And I think that a lot of that has to do with molecular mechanisms that are much more sophisticated than people may imagine.

So, for example, we just published in collaboration with Laura Perrin at Children's Hospital, we published on the use of the FMD in rats with kidney damage and then in people with kidney disease.

But in people, of course, we don't get to see what happens.

But in rats, we get to see what happens.

And it's really remarkable.

So we damaged the kidney, and you see a complete disruption of the gene expression.

So our genes are turned down and off in the different cells of the kidney.

And then we start the fasting-mimicking diet, and you see that.

So there is a very precise architecture, let's say, right?

Three-dimensional.

And then it's completely destroyed by this toxin that we give the rats, right?

Then we start the fasting-mimicking diet cycles and you see everything going back to where it was right.

Almost like a magic intervention.

So it's not really the fasting-mimicking diet that is doing anything, right?

It is the rat that always—and people are the same—that always have programs that are able to be triggered by fasting to— turn on regenerative and developmental-like programs.

So the same genes that are used when the kidneys are first generated in a baby.

Like pluripotent stem cell generation?

Is that what you're talking about?

Yes, yes.

So the cells are being reprogrammed into some of these reprogramming factors, Yamanaka factors, also known as Yamanaka factors, are turned on.

And you see that every organ is turning on different ones, right?

So in some cases, you see OCT4 being turned on.

In some cases, you see MYC.

So different organs use different ones, but they all have the same thing in common.

They turn on these many genes that are involved in organ generation.

And then that's how they can go from this very disrupted state back to the previous healthy states.

So they know exactly, you know what to turn on to get back to fix the problem.

So yeah, so then that's the power of these fasting-making diets.

So turning on the ability of the body to fix itself.

And so now, you know, diabetes, we're seeing it.

We're seeing now with kidney disease.

We are now seeing it with, I mean, at least this is in humans and animals.

But for some other, like gut, we are clearly seeing it in animal studies and now there are a number of trials that will test it in clinical trials.

We've got a lot more to come, but first, a quick break.

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Okay, let's get back to the show with a clip from personal development expert and bestselling author, Mark Manson.

We're in like this guru sphere, right?

Particularly in the self-help world, where there are outsized personalities out there who are commandeering very large audiences and a significant mindshare amongst a vast population of people who are probably genuinely looking for good advice and guidance at some period in their life in which they need it.

But back to what YouTube and the internet rewards.

It rewards hot takes contrarianism, heterodox thinking certainty conviction charisma, all of these things, none of which necessarily are related to truth, veracity and good advice, right.

So you, as somebody who I know thinks about how do I provide good advice and do it with integrity.

You're out there not competing, but you're in a world in which those other people are out there, for better or worse, who are motivated not by values necessarily, but more and more by metrics like growth.

And with growth, that means platforming people who might be not the best people to platform under the rubric of like, just asking questions and all of that kind of thing.

Like, you know, let me tell you what they don't want you to know.

And, you know, everything you've ever been told is a lie.

And, you know, this is like what works, right?

And I don't know if it's a willful blindness or a lack of self-awareness, or maybe just I don't give a fuck.

Like it doesn't matter as long as I'm growing and more and more people are paying attention to me.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. because I think it's good for the world.

Actually, let me start with a caveat, and then I'll go into my mixed feelings.

So the caveat of all this is I want to say that, as this is simultaneously having the guru sphere, as you put it, I really like that word is exploding right.

Self-help is bigger than it's ever been.

It's become mainstream, essentially.

There is an unprecedented wealth of genuinely good mental health and physical health information that's become available in the last 10, 15 years.

That was never available in all of human history.

There's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined.

So that's mixed in with all this stuff.

And it's often very, very frustrating as a consumer to parse the good from the bad.

Even people who, by and large, have ridiculous positions and beliefs about most things will occasionally share a really good piece of information.

So it's like there's a mental struggle of sifting through all the information out there.

So I want to put that on the table first.

And then that relates to my mixed feelings in the following way, which is Ultimately, I feel like it's a good thing to let two opposing narratives into the public sphere and let them kind of combat each other.

And because a lot of times the conventional narrative does end up being full.

I mean how much nutritional information over the past 20 years you know that was conventional turned up to be absolutely terrible and horrible for people you know a decade later, right?

So it's like the conventional wisdom does get overturned frequently.

And so you do want that.

You do want it to be free and available for people to attack and combat and offer alternative theories.

And yeah, even if occasionally they're harebrained, you know, sure, whatever.

That, I think, is fine.

And I do think it does cause a lot of stress and strife among the population and among consumers.

It makes our lives a little bit more complicated, as it puts more responsibility on us to figure out what we're consuming and whether it's good or not.

What I do worry about is, to your point, the over-indexing of crazy town, let's call it.

I've kind of come to just as somebody who's observed online media online my entire adult life and tried to like really kind of track it and understand why certain audiences behave certain ways, i've kind of come to the conclusion that perhaps the most chronically online population in the world are the crazy town conspiracy theory people.

They're more engaged, they're more vocal.

Um, if they like you, they'll watch everything, they'll like everything, they'll comment on everything, and so i think, as creators, i think there are a lot of people in our industry who they'll dip their toe in that pool, in the crazy town pool, and they'll get that flood of engagement.

And that feels good.

It's like, especially I mean when you've been say, grinding through 20 episodes and you're at this plateau and like nothing's really popping off or performing well.

And you're like, man, what am I, what are we doing wrong?

Like, what can I be doing better?

And all of a sudden one just like shoots off like a rocket.

You're like, man, I should do more of that.

Next up is the iconic Maria Shriver.

What am I here to do?

And how do you drown all of that out?

I don't think you need to get hit by a two by four.

I don't think you need necessarily to hit rock bottom, whether it's in AA, NA you name it or whether it is to get divorced or get fired from a job.

There's all kinds of heartbreak.

I think going on all the time.

But I think the key is stopping in this society.

Stopping and allowing yourself to sit in silence and have that conversation with yourself and report on what's going on within.

So I think that that's possible for everybody.

I wouldn't advocate that.

You know, hitting rock bottom, I would advocate, you know, ending up on a floor looking at your marriage and going.

Now what?

You know? but sometimes that's what it takes.

But I think we're seeing breakdowns in small ways all over the place today.

And therefore that's why I'm hoping that, whether it's writing or your friend, you were saying that he's democratizing poetry and telling everybody that they can write.

And people feel a huge release when they write.

Even if they don't think of themselves as writers.

Some people write with their opposite hand, their non-dominant hand, and see what comes out there.

I'm just a big believer that that can help you find your way forward when you feel in crisis, when you feel stuck, when you don't know the way forward.

Yeah, It feels indulgent, but it's actually, you know, positive self-care to do that.

Does it feel indulgent to write?

Well, I think, to stop and pause and carve out quiet time for yourself, especially if you're somebody who does feel like you're always behind in terms of like living up to other people's expectations of you.

That's exactly the time to do it.

I know.

It's like the time to do it is when you feel the least compelled to do it, right?

Like it feels like that is a luxury that I cannot afford.

But you need that pattern interrupt.

Otherwise, you're going to continue to just reap what you've always sown, right?

But it can be... You can start with five minutes.

You can start with 10 minutes.

You can start with 15.

I'm not saying you have to be Thoreau and go to Walden Pond or you have to go off onto a silent retreat, or go on to a retreat or do what Jesus did and go away for 40 days.

But if you look at history, if you look at people who've actually been able to gather their thoughts before social media, they went away and kind of took time to be in silence to gather their thoughts.

Things I've read about Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos.

They still go away and find time to like.

What am I thinking?

Where am I going?

What is my purpose?

How do I wanna change up what I'm doing?

That's a conversation that everybody needs to have with themselves.

So if you're having it in the bathroom, in your closet, I've talked to some women who have, you know, two kids and they say they get up 20 minutes early and they go in the bathroom, lock the door and just try to figure out.

What do I think?

Where am I going?

What do I want to do?

So I think if you start, I have a poem there, start where you are.

And start with what you have, which might be five minutes, might be 10 minutes.

Just that kind of thing can lead, that can begin to design your path.

I think when you talk about things like purpose or meaning, like what is my purpose, that's intimidating for a lot of people, or perhaps even violent, like oh, I should feel bad about myself because I don't know what my purpose is.

And these poems that you've written are really just demonstrating what it means to look inward and try to make sense of the complicated emotions that we all have.

Those bigger, grander ideas kind of emerge from that as a practice.

Yes.

I mean, I think purpose is different for everybody.

And I find so many people come up to me, young people, especially, you know, friends of my kids.

And like, I'm looking for my purpose.

It's like your purpose isn't hiding behind a tree, right?

It's not.

But just kind of doing something you love.

Your purpose is you're here, right?

I'm a big believer in that.

And we all and it changes as we move forward in life.

But these poems are really about an excavation of one's childhood, of one's feelings, of one's longing, of one's love.

And my purpose has changed.

My purpose now is to share this, to share the kind of art of poetry, the democratization of poetry, reflecting it's different than it was when I was in my 20s and that that can evolve.

All my work has kind of brought me to this place in a funny way where I never thought I would be.

I think young people often feel like I need a purpose.

Oh my God, oh my God.

And I think, just to take some of the, it's okay, you know, you're okay, you're doing great, you're enough.

This is writer and artist Craig Maude.

Going out to Silicon Valley was sort of I'd say probably one of the most pivotal moments of my adult life.

So I moved to old Palo Alto and my two roommates were these Stanford D school guys.

And these guys were just the freaking huggiest guys in the world.

And every day I'm just being smothered by these hugs.

And they were so positive.

They were vegetarians.

Uh, there was no drugs, uh, alcohol.

They didn't drink.

And I went from this place of everyone's getting blasted blacking out.

You know, alcohol is part and parcel of everything.

Every meal is like just meat.

You know, Japan loves meat, right?

It's just like beef everywhere.

Uh, to moving into this house where these guys are just hugging me constantly.

There's no meat, there's no alcohol.

And they come from clearly a place of abundance, these two guys.

You just felt behind them were generations of love that had manifested these two human beings.

And so that was all just part of this.

How do I give myself again?

Not having a mentor, not having an archetype, not having someone older to lead the way, how do I give myself a greater sense of self-worth?

And in doing that, the alcohol fell away pretty naturally.

And I'd say it was about 31 when I was finally able to really kind of say goodbye for good.

Put it completely in the rear view.

Yeah, those guys that your housemates seem, on some level, to exhibit something that you talk about in the book which, for me, like one of the biggest, most impactful things that I took away from reading your book, is this idea I'd never heard of before called yo-you.

Is that how you say it?

Is that how you pronounce it?

Yo-you.

I want to hear more about this because I think this is a really cool and profound idea.

Yeah.

So yo-you in Japanese is... In English, it could kind of be empathy, but it's deeper than empathy.

And in Japanese, the way I've come to understand it is it's having the space in your heart to accept someone else, to have space in your heart for someone else, an abundance of space in your heart and your life to be able to accept hardship, to be able to respond to hardship.

And that's, I think, what I felt fundamentally when I moved there is that having these systems on a greater level, supporting people, imbued everyone I saw on the street, everyone I was passing with a little bit of yo-yo.

And more people have more yo-yo and less yo-yo than others, but there is this sense of space in the heart.

In the West.

Abundance is something we're seeking, and when we get it, we reward ourselves by trying to get more of it and hoarding it.

It's sort of an energetic thing.

Your relationship with this energy is such that, should you be lucky enough to have it, it's best uh, it's best deployed, you know, outward in service of other people.

And when you have a lot, like, then you have more to give and it's your responsibility to give that.

Right.

And in doing that, you engender empathy.

It allows you to forgive more easily.

Like it.

It it opens up space to your point um, for these other emotions that we tend to like kind of clamp down on, or you know, we hoard those too, like i'm not going to forgive you until this or that.

We're very conditional about these things.

Yeah, and i think, being around people with yo-yo and realizing I grew up in a place with no yo-yo, where everyone was economically kind of pushed against the wall and in terms of what are our opportunities?

Well, there aren't any, and so like, when you're in a situation like that where you can fall, when you see how far you can fall I think this is like another thing about the American condition that's a little bit scary is when you see how far you can fall and you can fall to hell beyond hell in America.

There just aren't those safety nets to catch you.

When you see how far you can fall, it's really hard to feel a sense of abundance that you can give to other people.

And so in Japan, because of, like all these structures and these social structures, and like you can only fall oh, I can see how far I can fall.

It's not that far.

It's not that scary for me to help this other person out.

I think just being around that and feeling that, and then being on these big solo walks that I've been doing now for six, seven years.

It was in that and I write about this in the book you know I was able to I'm able to laugh about who my father was.

I was able to find this crazy sense of forgiveness for this guy that I didn't know was possible.

I didn't know I was capable of.

And you know, feeling that experiencing that is again is again.

We're getting back to this self-worth ratcheting.

And, I think, having a sense of you, you feeling that you're being able to deploy it in a way that's positive, that elevates people.

Uh, again, that just helps you feel like you're, you have more value as a human too.

It's like, it's, it's mutually beneficial.

We continue with actor and podcaster Ethan Suplee.

With all the rubber banding, and then now, in this you know stable situation that you're in right now, I mean we could talk all day about like what worked and what didn't.

I'm less interested in the details of that.

It's all very personal, personalized, individualized.

But from those experiences of Succeeding and failing and rubber banding and relapsing and back and forth, and you know, now it's cycling now.

It's a gym.

I mean you have compiled like an encyclopedia of principles around Transformation and change.

Yeah so, if you had to write a book and it had, like You know, ten chapters, like you know, each one being one of these principles like what rises to the top in your mind as the most important factors for somebody who is contemplating making a change, and Having a plan for the day and then preparing for the plan to go out the window once you meet reality, and having another plan and having as many plans as you can consider and then having a plan for when all of the plans fail and kind of, you know, getting through the day is the most important thing.

Realizing that the weight isn't the issue at all, that the weight is a byproduct or a symptom of the issue, that it will Look.

If you need to lose 10 pounds that you put on during COVID, or you twisted your ankle and were laid up for a few months or something like that, then none of this applies to you.

But if you've been overweight your whole life, there's likely not going to be an intervention.

That you apply that then when you're done.

You don't have to keep applying to some degree.

My big fear now, like I'm a fan of the GLP-1s for the morbidly obese.

I'm also glad that I achieved this prior to their advent.

But my fear with them is that people are going to use them like fad diets.

That what we'll see long term is a version of what I did in those years was Find something that takes weight off really quick You're losing muscle mass and fat and by the way any diet any extreme diet you're losing muscle mass and fat Doesn't matter if it's keto and you're eating a bunch of meat if you're losing a pound a day some portion of that is lean tissue and But you get on them for three months, you lose 30 pounds, you get off them, you gain the 30 pounds back.

You've 40% of what you lost is muscle and 100% of what you gain back is fat.

And so we could see, over a long period of time people's weight stay static, if not rise a little bit, but their body fat percentage skyrocket.

And that worries me, because there is no consideration to anything but that the weight is the problem, not a byproduct or a symptom of the problem.

Also, you're missing the whole piece around developing discipline and a connection with your body and your mind.

Like you, have extraordinary discipline and you've done the inside work to untangle those knots and understand.

You know why you tick the way that you tick.

And if you just inject yourself with something like I, they're appropriate for people who are some.

I mean, it's like obesity is driving all these chronic lifestyle ailments.

Like you have to, if the house is on fire, you gotta deal with that first.

So I'm not against this in any way.

Um, But in terms of what you had to learn about yourself and the way your mind and your body works by going through this process has placed you in this sort of sensei position.

You know what I mean?

You've done the work.

And so what you have to say about this matters versus somebody who took a different route to it.

It's such a tricky thing because I've I'm trying to be as open and honest as possible, but there is a team out there that is these are lifesaving drugs.

And if you say anything bad about them, you're killing people.

And then there's another team that is these are going to, these are going to result in killing people.

You can't say anything good about them.

There's such a lack of nuance.

You know there.

I don't know if it's as big today, but there was a whole thing about like keto and sugar is killing it and carbohydrates are killing everyone.

We just cycle through this.

You know, by the season, right nuance is lost.

Next up, we're going to talk consciousness with author annika harris.

What i've come to believe is that we don't yet understand consciousness at all, and This is a legitimate question to ask period.

One thing I don't like about panpsychism is it implies that there's some fully formed set of beliefs for us to subscribe to.

And there is not yet a theory.

There are many suggestions, but we really don't know.

And so I think part of the reason why scientists have also been receptive to this is because I'm simply asking the question.

I'm simply making the case that we've gotten to the point where we can say this is a legitimate and important scientific question to be asking.

Is consciousness more fundamental than the scientists have previously assumed?

As far as your description of consciousness being fundamental and what that means about matter, I wouldn't say that matter emerges out of consciousness.

And one thing I should also say is that in my thinking and in my 11-hour docuseries you can kind of follow my thinking around this, where the evolution of my thinking changes.

And so by the end of the documentary, I get to the place where what I realize is The hard problem of consciousness, which is the thing I'm trying to address.

You bump into that.

Wherever you try to place consciousness, no matter how far.

Now, if you put it in electrons, if you put it and panpsychism does a little bit of this.

The only way to actually address the hard problem is to put consciousness at the very, at the most fundamental level.

If that's the case and that's a big if I don't know, but if this is something that I like to entertain now and to think about and to think about how, all of these different theories about quantum gravity and all the rest I talked to Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli about their views.

I like to now think of this all through the lens of

If consciousness is fundamental, you know, how do we interpret this phenomenon or that phenomenon?

And so if consciousness is fundamental matter, what we perceive to be matter is just other conscious experiences arising in the universe.

And so the mathematics, the physics, that's all a description of conscious experience.

And so what everything actually is at bottom is is felt experiences arising and passing away in the universe, and again, they can be very, very simple and incomplete, also because we can only perceive, you know, very small fraction of what's actually happening.

All we can actually agree on is that uh, consciousness is real and that we are experiencing consciousness and, as you know, sam sort of always repeats in his daily meditations like consciousness is all we have right, like you know, And the idea that something you're over there and I'm here and you know this is happening and tomorrow, like these are all, on some level, like kind of flawed interpretations of a reality that we are not.

You know, we don't have the perceptual ability to accurately interpret.

Yeah.

Whatever description we have of the reason why we're having the conscious experiences we have.

I mean, if we were brains in a vat, we would expect this to be exactly the same, right?

And so the only thing we can have direct experience of is our conscious experience.

And we know those are real and those exist in the universe.

What they mean about the external reality, we really don't know, and so in some sense, it really is the only thing we know.

And the truth is, everything we know, or think we know, has to happen within consciousness as well, because you know you can make ridiculous statements and you just, you know put at the end of it, but i was unconscious and it actually makes no sense.

You know, i decided to have eggs for breakfast this morning, but i was unconscious when i made that decision.

Those things we absorb, information and knowledge and process it always as a conscious experience.

It is so incredibly difficult to try to process what you just said in any meaningful way.

You know what I mean?

Like I've spent years I guess like the way in really is meditation and you know a real like sort of confrontation with the illusion of self and the kind of emergence of thought and you know perceptual stimuli that allows you to first connect with a deeper reality that is beyond our ability to kind of perceive in our normal everyday lives.

Yeah, i mean, i i'm not even sure i would call it a deeper reality, i would call it a clearer way of seeing even our own conscious experience, and so We certainly walk around with a lot of illusions and we know the brain is creating illusions like this all the time for us.

Change blindness just in terms of our visual field.

But yes, the illusion of being a self in the way that we typically feel ourselves to be.

When you're able –

There are different ways of kind of seeing through this illusion.

Some of them are just intellectual.

You can understand how the brain works and realize there's no self in there to find.

But you can do it introspectively as well through meditation or through psychedelics.

Often you have this experience and we now understand also how this is related to the state of the brain.

You know, when the default mode network quiets down, it's in that state that we tend to be able to drop that illusion of self, and The experience of it is of seeing things more clearly.

It feels like a simpler, more basic understanding of the reality.

Next up is activist Robin Greenfield.

Here in the United States we have 5 of the world's population, but we consume 25 of the world's resources.

That, by definition, is extreme.

The world can't handle the way that we exist.

And so the reason that I am so extreme is that I am a product of an extreme society.

And to do anything other than go to the extreme would not allow me to even simply exist in a harmonious way.

I have to go to this extreme just to even try to get to a place of a truly harmonious way of being.

And then also my objective is to simply exist in a way that results in the questioning of the status quo and the societal norms that are unquestioned and even believed to be unquestionable.

Like the concept of ownership, which is at the heart of what I'm focused on right now.

There's cultures that don't even have a word for ownership.

There's not even a concept of owning.

I don't even know if I would call it a culture.

We're so fragmented.

But in our society, it's like unquestionable ownership.

We can own the land, we can own the possessions, we can own the money.

You know, and a lot of people accept that we can even own people.

And so to go to this level of non-ownership, it is extreme, but it is only extreme because I would say we are so we've, you know, we've become so disconnected and and i'm so enthralled by testing the levels of society that are very challenging to test.

And i have, you know, I just I'm doing it because I love it.

I wanna be doing it.

Yeah, I mean, you're poking the bear.

It's sort of like you're taking a stab at what we consider inalienable truths.

Everything in life is about perspective, right?

And it's so true.

And when you talk about normalcy, like things that we don't question and we just accept as fact, there are plenty out there that we just sort of blindly kind of assume use as a basis upon which to build the foundation of our lives, and Ownership is certainly one of those.

Like what is ownership like?

We assume it's a real thing.

It's not a real thing It's not real.

It is a story.

It is a social a social contract, right?

That we simply do not challenge, but doesn't actually exist.

And for you to kind of challenge that is deeply confronting and is going to inevitably put you on like a crash course, you know, crash collision course with like authority and like all kinds of institutional structures, right?

And that's what you're signing up for.

Should the law enforcement in Griffith Park decide that you need to be locked up for a night or two?

I'm sure you're aware that that may well be in the near future, right?

You're okay with that.

Like in the same way that like Gandhi is like okay, just nonviolent communication, but also nonviolence in general, like acceptance.

And for you as this activist, it's all part of the story that you're telling.

Yes.

And I actually.

So I've never been to jail, even though there's plenty of people who would rather me not be able to share my message, because it stands against a lot of what corporations would like and what our government would like.

I have been pretty effective at poking the bear with a smile on my face where they haven't You know.

So there's a lot of people online.

Then they just think you're insane, right?

There's a lot of people who think I've gone mad.

Yeah.

So I've done it.

But then you're like, look, I did TED Talks.

That helps.

You know, I mean you have a gaggle of people around you right who are kind of running interference for you, like these sort of acolytes and the people that are following you that are kind of showing up in Griffith Park like Ant and the like.

Yeah.

I mean none of them are there enough to.

If the rangers come, they're going to be able to do anything.

If the rangers come and they want to take me away, they can.

They will.

I don't have anybody supporting me in that regard, really.

And one of the reasons why is because... Well, I just want to first acknowledge one thing.

The activism that I'm doing is... it's in a realm where I've been very safe up to this point.

And I've certainly taken a lot of risks.

There's no question about that.

And I've certainly given up a lot of comforts.

But the reality is I live a very comfortable life even with the fact that I own nothing and have no money.

And there's certain areas in which I think right now is an area of civil disobedience.

Where I'm I'm, there's a good chance I will be in jail in the years ahead because I'm just so deeply wanting to test the things that are likely to bring me there.

And I have to say that if I was to spend some time in jail right now, I mean it's absolutely perfect.

All your needs are met.

Yeah, to practice non-ownership.

I'll have a bed, I'll have food.

I will be able to practice just simple existence.

This is nutrition scientist Matthew Nagra.

And this is a study out of Canada where they looked at unprocessed red meat consumption and the risk of cancer.

But they did something interesting where they separated people into those who eat little fruits and veggies, moderate fruits and veggies and then high fruits and veggies.

And they found that, in those with a lower intake of fruits and veggies, unprocessed red meat was associated with cancer risk.

But in those with the highest intake, it was not significantly associated with higher risk.

So Lane takes that to say that, while at even a regular intake of unprocessed red meat, if you're eating fruits and veggies and have a good diet quality, it's not problematic.

But my criticism of that study, or rather that conclusion from that study, is that if we look at the amount of red meat that they were consuming, the high consumers were having, we'll say, a little above 500 grams a week.

That's less than a serving a day.

So 100 grams is a typical serving.

That's about a deck of cards size per day.

And so these people were consuming less than that.

And that's sort of the threshold for where we typically see risk.

So I would argue that the men in that study weren't even consuming enough.

And the women in that study were consuming even half as much, so even less.

So that's problem one.

The second problem is they lumped all the cancers together, or they did another analysis where they lumped 15 cancers together.

The issue with that is if, let's say, unprocessed red meat increases colorectal cancer risk but doesn't impact these other cancers or most of these other cancers, well then, if you're looking at overall cancer risk, you're not going to see much.

Even if you get an uptick in one cancer, it's going to be sort of washed out by the other ones.

So I don't think it's fair to consume that there's no risk there.

And then the third problem is it's just cancer.

What about cardiovascular disease or other outcomes?

We can't conclude that it's safe for all of these other issues.

So that is sort of what I made a post on, and this is back a few years ago now.

It's funny, I'm surprised he even commented.

I didn't have much of a following or anything at the time, but somebody tagged him and was like hey, Lane talks about this.

What do you think?

Or they were maybe a bit concerned about the conclusions they'd heard from him.

And he just commented saying that I'm biased and cherry picking, and there's other data that supports his position.

And so I just replied, well, can you share that data?

Because I haven't seen other data like that.

And in fact he often talks about that study because of its uniqueness and the way that they did the analysis.

So it doesn't make sense that there would be other data that supports it.

Lane is somebody who's also going to say you're going to want to begin taking more protein than this RDA.

Yeah, and I think we agree.

And that's the other thing I really want to be clear of.

I think a lot of the information he puts out is good, right?

I'm not to be super critical of him in general.

I just think around the animal protein versus plant protein debate and the red meat stuff.

I think there's maybe a bit of bias there or something.

But yeah, I would very much agree with him on going a bit higher than the RDA.

Most people believe that red meat is... perfectly fine and appropriate as a part of a healthy diet.

This could be a semester course here, but perhaps that's true.

I'm interested in your perspective, but my sense is that We're just eating altogether way too much of it.

And when you consider the fact that cardiovascular disease is the number one reason why most people are going to die and the relationship between CVD and saturated fat and cholesterol and LDL red meat intake is only going to drive you in the direction of that, rather than in the reverse.

Yeah, and I think a really important variable here is dose, right?

You mentioned eating too much of it.

Like do I think that someone and I'll say this as a vegan, even when it comes to health do I think you can include red meat, especially lean red meats once, twice a week, something like that?

Yeah, I don't think it'll have a meaningful impact.

The problem is where you're averaging a serving a day.

Like that's where really the problems start to creep up.

And even with lean meats.

We see, and there's a trial by Bergeron in 2019 where they actually compared red meat, lean red meat, white meat and plant protein.

And they match saturated fat.

They matched fiber intake and still the plant protein lowered ApoB relative to the animal proteins.

And so there's still a benefit.

What do you make of that?

Like what would drive that differential?

I think a part of it is going to be the dietary cholesterol.

So that's one thing that wasn't matched because it's inherent to the meat.

And I know there's a lot of debate around dietary cholesterol and the impact that it has.

And there's some nuance there.

So if you take somebody who eats no dietary cholesterol, you take a vegan and you start feeding them cholesterol through eggs or other foods, their LDL is going to shoot up more.

Whereas if you take somebody who's already eating about 400 milligrams of cholesterol a day and you add more, it doesn't do anything.

There's a plateau effect.

I see.

There's also genetic differences person to person, but that wouldn't show up in a trial like that, because everyone was doing every diet.

So it could be that little bit of a bump in ApoB could be due to the dietary cholesterol.

Or, you know, potentially due to some of the phytochemicals in the plant foods maybe having a little bit of an impact, or something as well.

The exact mechanisms.

I mean, I don't know that we'll tease out exactly what proportion each one contributes to, but those could all be factors.

We continue with the iconic supermodel, Elle MacPherson.

I wanted the experiences.

And so I, just you know, I did that Aussie thing, which was like step outside of your comfort zones and give it a go.

And And.

So if opportunities came my way and they resonated with me, even if they didn't make logical sense, I would take steps towards it, and then the doors would open.

And one thing led to another.

And before I knew it, I'd sort of built a brand and had a platform and then started producing things and then started licensing and then finally owning a business with Welco.

Yeah.

I mean there's lots of stuff in there set aside, like the television and the film stuff.

I also didn't realize like how many like sort of projects you did, you know in the kind of realm of hollywood, but was the first kind of entrepreneurial venture when you decided to like do your own calendar.

Yeah, that was the first instance.

That that was like realizing well, sports illustrator is putting these things out, like i can do this myself and control it.

Yeah, and i realized at the time that i was in more photographs in the calendar than a lot of the other girls.

And so it was sort of heavily based on me anyway.

And I just sort of thought, well, I'm not really being paid for this.

Perhaps I can do it myself.

But it was a fun project as well.

Like I wanted to be able to choose the photographer and choose the location and apply what I'd learned with Sports Illustrated to my own project.

And It was brilliant.

I remember I think it cost like maybe 60 grand and I pulled it all together and I found a producer, a printer and a distributor and just did it.

It was like a kid that doesn't know any better when they're going down the mountain and they're skiing.

They have no fear.

Well, I had no fear at that time.

I didn't think, well, what if it fails or what if I can't get it out or what if no one buys it?

I just thought, okay, I'll give this a go.

Were you like the first person to try something like that at that time?

Maybe.

I don't know if Christy Brinkley had done her own things.

I mean, she was sort of the generation just before me.

And she was already sort of stepping out of the kind of regular model mode.

And she had her health and beauty books.

She was doing other things.

And so she may have done a calendar.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And then you had the lingerie company, right?

That was like a licensing deal though, right?

Yeah.

But that was also you kind of seizing control and saying like I can do something outside of the you know kind of strictures of this modeling world and create kind of financial independence in a different way.

I mean, now today with the influencer economy, like that just seems like an obvious thing.

But back then it wasn't, right? was brilliant at making underwear.

They came to me and said, will you be the face of our brand?

I was looking for a project.

I didn't know what because I had already kind of seen licensing in action as a child.

I remember playing tennis.

And do you remember John Newcomb?

He was an Australian tennis player.

And I remember getting a little tennis skirt and it had his logo on it which was his like wink face and his big mustache.

And I was like, man, here's a tennis player and he's making clothes.

Like I think that's so genius that he's able to do two things.

And so that sort of was in the back of my mind.

And I had this concept that I had a platform through Sports Illustrated.

How could I use that platform into creating a business that didn't require me going to the studio every day, like showing up as a model?

How could I kind of find some sort of something and at that time I thought it might have been swimsuits that I could put my name on and have the swimsuits be the stars, so the sale of the swimsuits be my income, rather than me just showing up at the studio so making money while you sleep, really?

And this New Zealand company had come to me and said will you be the face of our brand?

And I just said, Why don't we do a licensing agreement where I'll help you design, because I love lingerie?

I was living in Paris at the time.

I can't find anything that fits.

I have a particular type of thing that I want to do for myself.

And if it sells, great, we all make money.

If it doesn't sell, we don't, you know, it's a wash.

And so that was my first truly entrepreneurial, I think, decision.

Next up is filmmaker and telepathy tapes podcaster Kai Dickens.

Rupert Sheldrake, he's a biologist from Cambridge University.

I mean, that's a very prestigious school.

He's an incredibly smart man.

And I loved his story about how he fell into this.

He didn't believe in telepathy or that psi abilities could be real.

He was in the tea room at Cambridge.

And there was, you know, I think he was a young graduate student or something at this point.

I don't exactly remember, but I know he was early in his career.

And there was a scientist at the school, Sir Rudolf Peters.

So he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to the scientific field within England.

So this is a very prestigious professor.

And Rupert was in the tea room with Sir Rudolf Peters who said I have just come across a blind boy who was able to read an eye chart when his mother was looking at it.

And that's fascinating.

Well, how is that possible?

And it sounds very similar to what we're talking about right now in this interview.

So, Rudolf Peters thought, well, this is fascinating.

It seems like either this boy is seeing through his mother's eyes or somehow has a telepathic link.

So they ended up doing like a telepathy test, I think.

Where they put them, you know, in rooms, far apart, and they did, like you know, a telepathy experiment between the two and the.

It was statistically relevant.

It was pretty remarkable.

And that changed Rupert's life.

It changed his perspective and it changed the questions he was asking.

So he has written a ton of books on animal telepathy, in particular the sense of being stared at, testing whether or not dogs know when their owners are coming home.

Yeah, explain that one.

This is my favorite study.

Yeah, it's quite wonderful because I think a lot of us who are animal lovers have had that feeling right that your animal knows what's going on.

And so he tested, they would page, I think this is before the time of cell phones, they would page an animal owner when it was time to head home.

And they would have them take different routes, different cars taxis, whatever it be, so that the dog wasn't used to the sound of the engine or the rumble of this particular gravel on the road.

And they would make sure that person was coming home at different times.

So when they did this experiment, they were trying to account for all these variables.

And a statistically relevant amount of cases, the dog would come and wait by the door.

The second, that their owner's mental state was headed home when they were going home.

And of course there's a few moments where a car got a flat tire or someone got called back into work.

And when that happened, they had the cameras up.

The dog would go back and lie down and go back to, you know, whatever it was, sleeping.

And then, if the owner turned their mind toward coming home again, the dog would come back up and wait.

And so that was a really enjoyable study.

And it was statistically relevant in dogs and even in some cats, which I thought was great.

So he's been studying this for a long time.

And One thing that he postulated that really helped get my mind around this is that the mind has a mental field.

And this is not uncommon in science, right?

We know that the Earth has a gravitational field.

You can't see it.

You know it's there.

You know it's powerful.

You know the magnet has a magnetic field.

Electromagnetic field.

Yeah.

We don't see the magnetic field, but we know it's there.

We know it's powerful.

And so why wouldn't the I mean, it's not an uncommon idea to think that our brain might have a mental field that extends outside of us that might help us understand when we're being stared at or overlap with someone when it comes to, you know, telepathy or precognition or that type of thing.

Yeah.

We do have that intuition when somebody is behind us looking at us, don't we?

Yeah.

It's pretty undeniable.

We're dismissive of it, but I think we can all relate to that.

I just know I have two big dogs.

Our yard is fenced.

Our dogs are out.

They just kind of like roam around out in the yard.

And when I'm driving home, I have an electric car.

It doesn't make any noise at all.

And if I have the windows down, as I get you know, close to our driveway well before anybody can see anything.

The dogs are like right at the right at the gate and they're barking like every time, like they know when I'm coming.

And I'm like, They have this incredible sense of smell.

Maybe they can smell something about it.

I don't know what it is, but like I've had my version of that experience.

Yeah.

And like for me I'd be like I wouldn't trust that that's telepathy or something, unless you were to try it.

I never thought that much about it.

But like, well, no, it could be.

But I'm saying like if you test it in different cars right, you test it coming home a different way, you test it putting on like I don't know, trying to get like your smell off your body.

Like try everything you can.

And if it's still working, then there's something going on.

Like, I think that's so important that like, no one should take this off at face value.

I mean, that's ridiculous to take it at face value.

We're not going to advance anything.

We're not going to become smarter as a human race.

We're not going to become more educated or more thoughtful about anything.

If we just take any of this at face value, like you have to ask the questions, you have to do the science, you have to research it, you have to peer review it, you have to analyze it,

And I think I mean that's been my whole hope with the Telepathy Tapes podcast is just to try to get research funded for these scientists where so often it's hard to get a grant to study ESP or telepathy or clairvoyance because it has been historically seen as woo-woo.

And rounding out our list is Dr. Judith Joseph, an expert on high-functioning depression.

The high-functioning person generally in my experience, has a pretty powerful motor like they have this drive.

You know they're trying to make their imprint on the world for better or worse right uh, and trauma may be the kind of cause of why they are that way, or at least in a related way, but the fuel for that drive is Essentially fear of one form or another, and that fear is is linked obviously, to the trauma or some other root cause or source, But it is a fear response, right?

This fear could be If I don't do it, like everything's gonna fall apart, or my identity is so wrapped up in what I do And if I don't show up for it, then who am I?

I'm scared of you know who, how other people will perceive me in treating people who suffer from this, and I suspect you have to identify the locus of that fear and try to deconstruct it.

Yeah, I do.

And you're absolutely right.

That fear is what we would call anxiety, right?

Fear of the not being loved, fear of the running out of money, you know, from me personally.

I have done this deep dive into my own past because I came to this country with very little from the Caribbean.

And I didn't even realize how this chasing accolades not just having one lab, but three labs, having all these roles was tied to this fear of running out of resources.

Right.

On a conscious level, I knew, okay, there's no way I'm going to run out.

The money's in the bank.

I'm good.

But the inner restlessness came from this unprocessed fear of running out.

And many people.

They may not have come from the similar background that I have, but they, The generations before them, that could have been passed down.

Let's say, if your grandparents came from a war-torn country where they were oppressed, and they came here.

And they lived in ways that you're not supposed to take risks.

You're supposed to hoard.

Don't waste food.

Some of your behaviors are out of this scarcity trauma that was never processed.

And that's why it is important to sit still and to trace yourself back to that moment.

It could have been in Europe. in your past, in your family history.

It could have been in your personal history, but it's important to sit down and reflect on it.

It's validating.

If you take your foot off the gas, it's all going to collapse, right?

Like it's all going to go away, whether that's an imposter syndrome thing or a scarcity mindset or trauma.

Unless I'm there doing it all the time, it's all going to break down, which is, which is, a fear response.

It's also there's a layer of narcissism on top of that.

It's as if like, I'm so powerful.

I'm so afraid of being not in control, but I'm also all powerful and I will be able to solve it.

And beneath that is a discomfort with uncertainty, because this scarcity mindset is really a discomfort with not knowing what's going to happen.

And so what can I control?

Well, I can control my output and my work and that will solve it.

But of course the world is uncertain and no amount of work or effort is going to allow you to transcend that.

I love that you said narcissism, because one of my professors in training at Columbia once told us to look out for people who have the.

They're like the, the flip coin.

One side is narcissism and the other side is masochism and narcissists.

You know what we think of narcissists?

We think of people who are full of themselves, who lack empathy, who are, you know, prideful and boastful, but we don't think about the masochistic narcissist who bends over backwards, is constantly working, is delaying pleasure because they believe that they're the only ones who can do it right.

Only they could do it right.

And I think many people with high function depression have these narcissistic, masochistic tendencies.

And it's not because they're a bad person.

It's just because they didn't process that pain.

And what they end up doing is finding their self-worth in that role.

So it looks very narcissistic.

I'm the only one who could do it.

But it is masochistic because they're bending over backwards.

But it's self-validating also.

And then you look at the world through that lens like, see, when I did it, it worked.

And when you didn't, it didn't work.

It's constantly being reinforced that way.

But they're not happy.

They're leaving joy on the table.

They are miserable.

Yeah, we did it.

I really hope you enjoyed this reflection in the rear view and found this episode uplifting and inspiring.

The full list of guests featured and links to the full episodes can be found in the show notes on the episode page at richrollcom and thank you.

Thank you for the love and love, the support.

Part two, with a bunch more awesome excerpted combos, will be up later this week, so stay tuned for that, and i can't wait to grow and learn alongside you in the new year ahead.

All right, everybody.

That's it for today.

Power away.

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Sharing your show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome as well and extremely helpful, so thank you in advance for that.

In addition, i'd like to thank all of our amazing sponsors, without whom this show just would not be possible or, at least you know, not.

Free to check out all their amazing product offerings and listener discounts, head to richrollcom sponsors.

And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richrollcom.

Today's show is produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, along with associate producer Desmond Lowe.

The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake.

Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor.

And, of course, our theme music, as always, was created all the way back in 2012 by my step-sons Tyler and Trapper Pyatt, along with their cousin Harry Mathis.

Appreciate the love, love the support, and I'll see you back here soon.

Peace, plants.

[Rich Roll: Best of 2025 - Wisdom on Purpose, Power, and Human Potential]-[Best of 2025 (Part One): Conversations That Shaped Us]

📋 Summary

Navigating Life: Insights from the Best of the Rich Roll Podcast

Reclaiming Power and Letting Go

The Brutal Reality of Meaning

The Biology of Well-being and Altruism

Challenging the Status Quo

The Path to Self-Worth

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Rich Roll: Best of 2025 - Wisdom on Purpose, Power, and Human Potential]-[Best of 2025 (Part One): Conversations That Shaped Us]

📋 Summary

Navigating Life: Insights from the Best of the Rich Roll Podcast

Reclaiming Power and Letting Go

The Brutal Reality of Meaning

The Biology of Well-being and Altruism

Challenging the Status Quo

The Path to Self-Worth

Conclusion

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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