The Best Of 2024: Part One

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Visit on.com slash richroll. That's on.com slash richroll. I basically don't trust anything in reality. Trying to live every day as if it's my first. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better and I can prove it.

Rather than being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right. The magic you're looking for is in the work you're trying to avoid. The old models of therapy are wrong. We have intuition for a reason and listen to it. We fool the satiety mechanisms of the brains of humans by putting chemicals in our feet. Quick fixes don't work. They just cannot.

Hey everybody, happy holidays. I gotta say it's been an incredible year here at the RRP. And as is our tradition, the time has once again arrived for our annual celebratory Best of Series. It's a bit of a gratitude check. 2024 really has been a treasure trove of wisdom. And when I think back, I realized we've hosted just such an incredible array of guests.

conversations that have spanned everything from mindfulness and productivity to fitness and nutrition, of course, brain health, and how to balance careers with personal well-being. So from groundbreaking medical research to inspiring personal stories, I think it's fair to say that we've canvassed a pretty rich spectrum of human knowledge, expertise, and experience, buttressed with just so much actionable advice for life-changing growth.

And so, for our loyal listeners and viewers, consider these two End of Year episodes as sort of a greatest hits album, a chance to revisit your favorite lessons. And for those newer to the show, maybe consider it like a highlight reel or a crash course. And hopefully, these two episodes will entice you to discover episodes you might have missed or skipped over. And for that matter, to explore what I think is a pretty robust and evergreen back catalog.

Either way, I'm thrilled to share these moments with you. And we're going to start with Suleika Jawad. Suleika is an Emmy Award-winning writer and New York Times bestselling author. If you saw the Oscar-nominated documentary, American Symphony, which profiles Suleika and her celebrated musician, husband, John Batiste, you already know that Suleika is also a cancer survivor.

And this experience is one that she shared with me in one of the year's most moving episodes of the show, a glimpse of which I'm honored to now share with you. So when I got the date for my first bone marrow transplant, my doctor told me point blank that I had about a 35% chance of surviving at

And I had about a month and a half before I was going to undergo that transplant. And so that sense of finitude came crashing down on me. And I realized that there were lots of things that I wanted to do that I might not be able to do. But writing had always been this great love of mine. And I decided I was going to take the contents of this journal

and turn them into essays. And so I started a WordPress blog from my hospital room. I watched YouTube videos on how to build it. It was pretty basic stuff. And I'm sure that in that first week, my readership consisted of solely my parents and my grandmother. But I took it really seriously. I would write every single day

And it felt really good to have a job to do other than just being a patient. And it was that sense of agency that I've been craving for a long time.

And about two or three weeks into writing that blog, it started to get passed around and shared. And I got an email from an editor at the New York Times and later a phone call in which she asked me if I might be interested in writing an essay for the paper.

And I thanked her and said I wasn't interested in writing an essay. And then I took a deep breath and I told her that what I really wanted to do was to write a weekly column from the trenches of treatment because so often illness narratives were written from the perspective and vantage point of someone who survived. And it was a very different experience to write from that place of not knowing that place of deep uncertainty.

I am in a different kind of liminal space now. I'm in a different kind of in between place. I will be in treatment indefinitely for however long or short that might be.

And when I got that news from my doctor, he said to me, you have to live every day as if it's your last, which is the kind of thing that you say to someone when they're in that sort of limbo. And, you know, I tried

hard to figure out what that meant for me, but more specifically, why it instilled an intense sense of panic in me. And I realized

you know, when you're trying to live every day as if it's your last, you're thinking about how you can ring as much out of life, how you can like seize the day. And it like puts you in this space of urgency and taking. And I've come to believe that as well intentioned is that advice might be its terrible advice. Because if we were all to live every day as if it were our last, we'd be

robbing banks. I don't know, cheating on our spouses. Staring at trees or eating ungodly amounts of ice cream. Instead, as I navigate this new level of uncertainty, which of course, we all have, none of us know.

you know, what the future is going to look like. And life is a finite condition for all of us. I've shifted to a place of trying to live every day as if it's my first, which is to say, waking up with a sense of curiosity and wonder that a newborn baby might

and rather than seeking out these huge important life moments, seeking out moments of play and tiny little joys and moments of nourishment. And that has made it such that I feel like I'm

I'm moving through this uncertainty in a way that doesn't put me in panic, but places me in a state of wonder and awe and generosity. We are so steeped in binary thinking, but the truth is most of us aren't either happy or sad or healthy or well.

border between those binaries is porous and much of us are forced to live in synthesis to exist in that messy middle. You know, I think we often think of healing as ridding ourselves of the pain that plagues us, whatever that pain might be.

And I have tried to do that in every number of ways from numbing it to compartmentalizing it to dodging it to stowing it as far down as I can. But the only way that I've

been able to endure these various things that have happened is by engaging with that pain and looking it directly in the eye and, you know, observing it the way you might through the lens of a kaleidoscope where you shift the prism and the light falls in a different way.

What role does technology play in extending human life? Tech entrepreneur turned longevity experiment. Brian Johnson joined the podcast in episode 810 to answer this question and more, offering what I think is a fascinating primer on his controversial $2 million per year protocol to defy aging.

It's really simple. I basically don't trust anything in reality. Not authority, not my mind, not my perception, nothing. I just trust data and numbers. And the only thing I believe in is I don't want to die.

Outside of that, I'll go play around and say this and that. But if I really try to say, what can I distill my existence down to? I enjoy being alive right now. And I don't want to be dead in five minutes. I don't want to be dead in 10 minutes. I don't want to be dead tonight. Now, what's going to happen 100 years now? I don't know. But that's what I've really tried to do because otherwise,

Life is just so messy. It's so hard to understand what's really going on. It's hard to understand what to do. It's hard to understand how to resolve conflict. It's just, it's just messy and it's chaotic. And so I tried to distill this down into in this moment in time in 2023, and this goes back to like what I was trying to do for the species. If you ask this singular question, you can do you, you can do one thing with your existence and you try to up level the human race or make a contribution to the human race. What do you do?

And that's what I just spent 10 years trying to figure out. If you look at the precedence where the first time a message was sent with a telegraph, the pony express was dead. Nobody wanted to run melanoma with horses. It was so much better. The first time you could navigate with GPS, a paper map on your lap is dead. It's just inevitable. We don't do these things because it's more efficient. When you can wash your clothing in a washing machine versus down at the river,

So you look at these hundreds of examples of where technology becomes sufficiently good at doing a given task. It's more efficient or cost-effective or whatever the case may be. We humans adopt it extremely fast. I'm arguing with my health and wellness that my team and I have built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself.

It is able to look at all the data in my body. It's looking at scientific evidence. It creates an algorithm. So it creates superior cognitive ability, superior metabolic ability, superior physical ability. All above, I am a superior human because it's algorithm. So I have two options. Do I say I'm going to do things that I did and go prove my pantry? Am I going to make decisions on the menu? No, I'm going to choose the algorithm just like I use GPS, like a washing machine, and I use autopilot and airplane.

And so it's inevitable that when these things cross the technological threshold and they allow each of us to achieve our goals, we adopt them instantaneously. Up until that point, we kick and scream, we talk about lost job, we talk about the fear. It's a process every single time it happens, but we ruthlessly adopt them. And so that's just what's gonna happen. It's absolutely inevitable. In the early 13 colonies of America, there was a big debate on whether

they should be ruled by the monarch of England or whether they should adopt democracy. And Thomas Paine wrote this pamphlet, and he argued that the colonies should adopt democracy because they would be better at ruling their own interests than having the monarch. And he talked about all the shortcomings of the monarch.

And we now look back and we think, okay, democracy is actually one of the biggest advancements in the history of the human race where you had this new way of governing away from monarchs. At the time, it was not clear. And this is an example of history of like, what is really cloudy in that moment? How do people see clarity? His pamphlet was the best-selling of the early American colony days and democracy prevailed. And in that moment, democracy ended up being a more powerful system

of managing human thriving. One individual as a monarch was inferior to this democratic system. I did the same thing with my body. My mind is a monarch. In the same way you just spoke about your mind, your mind is acting contrary to your best interest. My mind is a drunken sailor. Exactly. It is. It's an absolute disaster. And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

did the same with my body, I said, who should really be in charge? The monarch, or should we have a democratic rule? And then we started with blueprint. We started measuring every organ of my body. And we said, OK, heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, cardiovascular function. What do you need to be your best self? And I let them speak. And I saw I shifted the power from my monarch mind that the disaster to my body to be in charge. And that's what the algorithm works with. The algorithm works directly with my body.

What I'm arguing here for the human race is I'm suggesting we have always treated our mind as the ultimate authority on all things. It decides on any circumstance what it wants, when it wants, how it thinks, what it's going to prioritize. It has ultimate authority like the monarch. I'm arguing in this next phase of the human race that that is an antiquated model of management of human life.

There are more powerful and more capable systems of intelligence that are emergent, specifically what I've done with blueprint, empowering my body and artificial intelligence to manage itself.

Now, do I still have free will? I feel like I do. Do I still have my same agency? I feel like I do. Am I happier? I feel like I am. But it's this paired with the challenging of death is the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.

In one of our most viral moments of 2024, we welcome to the podcast, Dr. Ellen Langer, the Sparky and pioneering grandom of the Harvard Psychology Department, who's affectionately known as the mother of mindfulness.

Dr. Langer's out-of-the-box thinking and groundbreaking work on the mind-body connection has reshaped our understanding of health and aging for decades. And over the course of our conversation, she unpacked the many fascinating ways our thoughts influence physical well-being, offering pretty valuable insights that had listeners buzzing for weeks. So here is Dr. Ellen Langer.

You said, we don't enjoy our lives enough because we are not actually there. We are mindless, not mindful. Virtually all the world's ills boil down to mindlessness. Most of us live mindlessly most of the time. Yeah, no, I mean, big because it's even bigger than that when I give talks about it where I have a slide that says virtually.

all of our ills, personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect result of our mindlessness. Now, when I give a talk on that, I say, and just among us and the other million or so people, I've said this to, I mean all.

So, yeah, I think that if we could only wake up, life would be very, very different for virtually all of us. Well, let's tease that out a little bit. Like, what would be a good example? So, when I lecture on this, I often give this example one thing that everybody thinks they know. How much is one plus one?

Well, you know the answer. The answer is two. OK, so it is sometimes two, but not always. If you add one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. In the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal to as or more often as it does. Now imagine right after we finish talking, someone comes over to you and says, rich, how much is one plus one?

you're no longer going to mindlessly say to. What you're going to do is pay some attention to the context, and then you're going to answer more mindful and say it could be, and then you can say it could be one, it could be two. Right, and what does plus even mean? Right, right.

I think this is really important, especially, but not exclusively with respect to health. Medical science, like all science, can only give us probabilities. An experiment says, if it's reliable, that if you do it again the exact same way, which you can never do exactly the same thing, you're likely to get these findings. Those probabilities are presented in medical journals, textbooks, what have you, as absolutes.

When you know something absolutely, you don't pay any more attention to it. And people need to know that everything they're told is a probability, is a best guess. I mean, I can't imagine, but there are still doctors who will say something like you have six months to live. There is no way they could know that. And when their prognosis becomes self-fulfilling, then I get upset.

Yeah. Even the diagnosis of cancer, that you have cancer. You could have something that people have cold cancer, but is different from it in, you know, in these ways. And those, you know, we just don't know. So, you know, and if I got sick, I'd certainly go to the medical world, but I wouldn't just hand myself over to them.

and any doom and gloom hypothesis, I don't think I would be quite as willing as many people seem to be to accepting the truth of it. Most people get themselves crazed with, oh, should I do this or should I do that? The decision is based on a prediction, right? Should I do this is because I'm predicting that this will be great.

Or this, which will be great, which will be greater, I don't know, and so on. When you can't predict, it doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then life actually becomes easy. So my bottom line, rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right.

randomly choose. Now, you can randomly choose if you want an um-enjoy or a snickers. Nobody's gonna care, right? But it's the exact, this is the hard part to swallow, it's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not. Getting married or not. Taking the job or not. Doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small, you can't know.

That's a very confronting idea. Yeah, well, I mean, you can only live one life. If there were some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids and live a life as somebody who's one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids, maybe I can make a comparison. But you don't have that available to you. So I say to my students, so let's say, should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale? So they made a decision to go to Harvard. So let's say,

It's terrible. They screw up royally. And they say, oh, I wish I had gone to Yale. There's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse, better, the same. And that's why regret is so mindless. Because the choice you didn't take, you're presuming, would have been better. And there's no evidence for that.

Globally renowned productivity expert and digital minimalist, Cal Newport dropped by the studio earlier this year to discuss this idea of slow productivity. Cal is an authority on how to thrive in an age of constant distraction. And here's a taste of that message. I mean, I think the plight of the modern knowledge worker is we don't have a good definition of productivity.

So we think we do, right? I mean, it's someone like, yeah, I know what it means to be productive or not productive, but we don't actually have a great definition and knowledge work of what that means because knowledge work is not well set up for the classical definitions of what it means to be productive, right? So in a factory, I can measure model T's produced per labor hour input, and it's a number, right? And then if you change something about how you build the model T's and that number goes up, you say this way is better, this is more productive, that came out of agriculture,

bushels yielded per acre of land. If you planted your crop the different way and that number went up, you're like, oh, this is a better way of doing it. Knowledge work emerges as a major sector in mid 20th century, right? The term is coin 1959. How do we define productivity here? Well, those did not exactly apply anymore because individual knowledge workers weren't producing one thing.

They were doing many things. And maybe what I'm doing is different than what you were doing. These are the projects I happen to have taken on. You've taken on these projects. The systems by which we were doing our work also are no longer transparent. So in knowledge work, how you organize yourself or manage your work is personal.

which is a big change actually in the history of economic activity, but it's personal productivity. So there's nothing to even improve in an obvious way. So we couldn't use standard definitions of productivity. So what do we do instead? We said, let's use visible activity as a proxy for doing useful effort.

which is just a veneer of productivity, the appearance of productivity, the pseudo-productivity that you talk about. Exactly. My contention is this really went off the rails when we had the front office IT revolution. So now we have computers and we have networks and we have laptops and then we get wireless internet. Now suddenly you can demonstrate visible activity at any point wherever you are.

The fine grainness of these demonstrations is much smaller, right? It's now not just I see you in your office. It's I have to actually be answering specific messages and work can follow you wherever you go. Also, the low friction nature of digital communications made potential work, really skyrockets, so workload per worker really went up because it was just much easier now for things to be put on your plate.

If I can just send you an email, like, hey, can you handle this? That's much lower friction, much less social capital costs than having to actually come to your office and ask you to do something. So workloads also spiraled. Sutter productivity did not play well in that environment. So if I could demonstrate busyness at any point in my life, and there was a never-ending queue of work,

This was going to create a crisis because now every moment at the office or not at home, home office, down to home office, on the soccer field, wherever you are, you're constantly now in the psychological battle, internally speaking, between do I demonstrate more productivity or not? This is what I think started to burn people out. It's what began to create a burnout crisis and knowledge work that you really don't see pick up until the early 2000s.

Right. If you look at time management books from the 1990s, look at, you know, first things first by Stephen Covey, all optimism, all figure out your values and you can carefully plan your day to actualize all of your best interests, like rah, rah, very positive. You get to 2004.

David Allen's getting things done. And now it's how do we even find some moments of Zen-like peace among the onslaught? Everything is gone except for how do we survive the onslaught? So by the 2000s, digital technology was cracking pseudo-productivity. And so I think this is what began to rapidly burn out knowledge workers, that combination. So slow productivity is much more based on producing stuff that's good.

And it's much less based on activity. So it's results oriented more than it is activity focused. It has three big ideas. The first is to do fewer things, which terrifies a lot of people would have shown it. The second is to work at a natural pace. So this idea, which is possible in a world of pseudo productivity, that you're going to just be full intensity.

9-5 week after week, month after month, year after year with no variation. You can pull that off of what you're doing is just lots of email. You can't pull that off if you're doing serious cognitive work. So we need more of a natural, varied pace. And then finally, obsess over quality. So counterbalance that or support that.

with an obsession over the quality of what you produce. I think that combination is engineered to be much more sustainable. It matches the human condition much better, so you can pursue that definition of productivity without, by default, burning out. And I think it's actually effective. It's going to produce a lot of valuable things in your company, your career. These things are going to do well. If you're a knowledge worker, this is why you're feeling the way you're feeling.

is pseudo-productivity is soul-deadening. There's other ways to organize your work. The key thing, if we do anything, is just at least I'll admit, we have to start talking about alternatives to pseudo-productivity. We have to name pseudo-productivity. We have to realize why this is not producing stuff and it's making people miserable.

and then we have to declare clearly this is what I do instead. And not everything that everyone declares is gonna work for everyone else and some might not even work at all, but we have to actually start having that conversation because what happened in the pandemic is people got completely burnt out from pseudo productivity and it led to this anti-productivity backlash.

But the whole thing, I think, was really confusing and mixed up, and it was unclear who was mad at what, and is it capitalism's fault, or is it Instagram hustle culture? And it was like this weird sort of everyone wants to be mad at something, and nothing. It was just a mix of upsetness and sort of like justified exhaustion.

Like that didn't really get us anywhere. This is what, and I made this argument. I coined this term a couple months ago in The New Yorker. The Great Exhaustion is where we are. We had the Great Resignation. We had Quiet Quitting. We had the Hybrid Work Wars. Now knowledge workers are at the Great Exhaustion. And my argument is a lot of that stuff that was happening in the pandemic was a proxy battle for this real battle.

We just didn't realize it. Like, why were we fighting so much about some of the details of where work happened or didn't happen? It's not that the key to our happiness was schedule flexibility. It was just the only thing that was there for us to fight about. But our real discontent was not

the details of a hybrid schedule, the real discontent underneath it all with pseudo productivity. And so quiet quitting also were burnt out. So we quiet quitting, you know, maybe I'll just stop doing work and that didn't work out. The great resignation had a lot of knowledge workers just leave the workforce because they were exhausted from this stuff. But all of these things were circling without actually identifying the real issue, which is pseudo productivity is not sustainable.

So we looked for enemies and we looked for reform and resistance, but we weren't actually reforming or resisting the underlying thing that mattered, which is as long as visible activity is our proxy for useful effort, and we have computers and email and laptops and smartphones, we're going to be miserable.

For anyone navigating the complex terrain of women's health, understanding the brain's role is crucial. So here to give us guidance on the menopause brain is neuroscientist and author Dr. Lisa Moscone, who joined me this year to talk about her groundbreaking research on the connection between menopause and Alzheimer's disease.

Women's brains age differently from men's brains. And that difference is very, at least in part, related to differences in our reproductive systems and the hormones that drive those systems. So this is actually a nice thing to talk about as a woman and a scientist is done.

We are born with a very important and powerful system, which is the neuroendocrine system. It's like a pathway that connects the brain, the neurological system, with the ovaries via the endocrine system that is powered by our hormones. And this system we're born with, but is effectively activated during puberty for both men and women.

And then for women, it's reactivated every time you go through a pregnancy. And then it's eventually deactivated or turned off, at least in part, once women reach menopause. Now, what's important about this system is that men have it, women have it, but the hormones that drive the system

differ in their types and quantity. So when women are born, our brains come equipped with estrogen receptors. The far out number receptors for other hormones like testosterone, for example, for men is the other way around. You have a lot of androgen receptors in your brain and some estrogen receptors.

which means that women's brains are regulated for the most part by estrogen or the women's brains run effectively on estrogen. Men's brains are more modulated, more heavily modulated by testosterone levels and other androgens. Now that has consequences because hormonal fluctuations

for women who are on a monthly basis for as long as you have a menstrual cycle, then there's a long period of time that I'm hoping we'll talk about. It's called perimenopause, the menopause transition that can last a decade during which there are strong hormonal shifts.

that can kind of hijack your brain a little bit. This is what we're going to talk about. And then this hormones effectively recede, at least some of the estrogens recede, after menopause, which could be a bit of a shock to your system.

So I think it's really important to clarify that manopause is not just something that happens to your ovaries, but as a society I think that insofar as we have understood manopause at all, it's traditionally or historically being just the half that speaks to the functionality of the ovaries.

And brain scientists were really not involved in that definition. So now we understand that menopause is actually a neuroendocrine transition state, which means it's a neurologically active phase, during which your brain is impacted just as much as your ovaries are in some ways more.

Because when your brain is impacted, then you have all these symptoms that sometimes really prompt fear in many women who have no clue what is happening to them. And when women talk about having half-wash, it's a nice sweat, and depression, and anxiety, and insomnia, and brain fog, which is scary, and memory lapses, and forgetfulness, or panic attacks, or even skin crawling sensations.

If you don't know why you're having those symptoms, it is legit to really worry that there's something really bad happening to you and your brain. So those symptoms are in fact symptoms of menopause that have nothing to do with the ovaries. Those are neurological symptoms that are prompted by your brain because menopause is in fact changing your brain. When it comes to brain health, quick fixes don't work.

They just cannot. Because from the neck down, our bodies are engineered for change. Right? So if you think about cellular turnover, blood cells renew every few weeks. Even the skeleton is renewed at the rate of 10% a year. So your body can respond to changes quickly. And if you go on a diet, if you start exercising, you can see the change is relatively fast.

Not so much in the brain because the brain is built for stability.

are neurons, the vast majority of our neurons are born with us and stay with us for a lifetime. And they are very, very protected from changes in the environment, from changes in the diet, from changes in exercise activity. Because if every time we went to a different diet that had an immediate impact on our brains, we would all be crazy. Yeah, we'd be lunatics. We would be lunatics. Can you imagine? We would damage our brains very easily.

That can be. So lifestyle changes are important and are impactful, but they only have a gentle effect on your brain, which means that you have to build up the effects over time. And that's why consistency is key.

Right, you can go to the gym two weeks. The best exercise is the one you're actually going to do. Yes. Time and time again. Exercise helps also patients who have Alzheimer's disease. It really has a positive effect on their mental health for sure, but also on cognition.

You can see that in patients with dementia who work with a trainer sometimes. I know quite a few and it really has an impact. So if you don't have dementia, the impact is much more obvious, I would say. And it is true that it's never too late.

It's never too late to start. I would love to see more clinical trials that really are done by age. But I also think that exercise and the type of exercise you decide to do can help your brain in different ways. So we know, for instance,

Aerobic exercise is really good for cognitive health. It seems to be given the strongest boost to neuronal health because it stimulates so many different parts of your brain in different ways. But it's also important for thermal regulation.

So, for instance, when women are having heart flashes and night sweats, then aerobic activity can really help mitigate those symptoms, which I think is really important, like there are studies showing that women who are physically active in midlife have almost up to 50% fewer heart flashes than women who are sedentary.

There are studies that followed by hundreds of women for many, many years, up to 40 years. And they showed that women who were physically active in mid-life, more with the cardiovascular fitness style of exercise had a 30% lower risk of dementia later in life as compared to those who were sedentary. Mid-life is up to 65, right? But there's no non-fiction limit. That's massive for significant.

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Everyone wants to be fit, we want to be healthy, but parsing fact from fiction when it comes to nutrition science can be much harder than it seems. So here to simplify and clarify our approach to nutrition and fitness is Straight Shooter, Dr. Lane Norton, who delivered a blunt and powerful primer on evidence-based strategies for sustainable health.

I think one of the things people miss is when you talk about some of this stuff, what you're talking about is a mechanism of a biochemical pathway, right? Oh, this double bond can be oxidized and that's gonna cause oxidation in your body and inflammation and heart disease. People don't realize you just made a lot of assumptions right there. That's like looking at single stocks inside of a mutual fund, okay? So a mutual fund is a bunch of stocks inside of an overall fund, right?

What do I care about if I'm investing the performance of the mutual fund? And this is like somebody coming to me going, oh, you don't want to invest in this. Look at these two stocks that are down by 50% this year. And you go, but if the mutual funds up 30% who cares, right? Like there's going to be some stocks that underperforming there. And what I would submit to people.

Any food you eat probably activates negative and positive biochemical pathways. But the question is not whether or not it does both good and bad things. The question is, what is the summation of that response, the outcome of that response? Because outcomes, inflammation, heart disease,

changes in body weight. These are the summation of hundreds, if not thousands of mechanisms in biochemical pathways. And so what I always tell people is like, well, if only we had studies that actually measured that, oh, wait, we do have studies that measured this. And here's what they show. I look at this stuff as kind of tools in a tool belt, right? And when we look at

long-term, and now I'm specifically talking about weight loss. We look at long-term weight loss studies. They see really no differences long-term between any of these popular diets. But when they stratify them for adherence, there's a linear effect. Again, going back to, you have to do some form of dietary restraint

in order to get results, right? Whether it's counting calories, whether it's plant-based, whether it's low carb, intermittent fasting, whatever have you, but probably pick the form of restriction that fuels the least restrictive for you. Like you talked about, like, plant-based feels easy for you. You don't have to think about it. You do it. It feels easy.

Yeah, I don't know that it was easy in the beginning, but it's easy now. It's just like any change that you make, you have to understand that it's going to be uncomfortable and you have to weather that discomfort because you're being deprived of the things that you crave and that you're used to. But there is light at the end of the tunnel like those cravings dissipate. You acclimate to this new environment and what used to feel like a heavy lift now is second nature. I mean, that's just that's like any behavioral change. Right.

Everyone has an opinion on nutrition. If I tell you I'm a theoretical physicist,

And I study string theory. I mean, we might have a short conversation, but most people aren't gonna challenge me too much or really go down the rabbit hole with string theory, right? For the most part, you're just gonna listen as I try to explain it. But if we talk about nutrition, everyone has a personal experience and belief system. They've developed around it because everyone eats. And so regardless of, and they have made some association between something they've ate and something that's happened.

And so I think that kind of makes it to where people have really strong opinions, but don't understand like the physiology behind everything. And so you have a lot of really strong, uninformed opinions out there.

Yeah, we all have our anecdotal experience and we tend to over index on the importance of that and how much can be extrapolated from that to apply to the general public. And if somebody has had an experience in which they lost a tremendous amount of weight or they had some kind of epiphany as a result of making a significant dietary change and that has affected them positively, obviously they're going to want to share that. And I'm no different. I've done that.

You know, I've had that experience and I have evangelized. But the more that I learn, the more humility I have developed around the complexity of it. That is really appealing to people because this idea of like secret knowledge, you know, that people who are getting results, there must be some kind of secret they have to have gotten the results that they've gotten. And quite frankly, it works. I mean, people buy it.

Um, but you know, you, you've been a very high level athlete, right? And my guess is there wasn't a whole lot of magic in it. It was just a lot of repeated consistent work. Like obviously I'm sure you had, you know, good coaches and those sorts of things and had a good game plan to follow.

But the magic you're looking for is in the work you're trying to avoid for the most part. All the gains are in the least sexy stuff ever. And you know that as a power lifter and bodybuilder for many, many years has been training forever. There's just no way around it. And nutrition is obviously fundamental to your progress as an athlete. But there isn't any kind of magic secrecy to that at all.

Everything is about consistency, obviously. But there is something about the kind of primate human brain that lights up when it's been told that there is this thing that's hiding, you know, behind the curtain. And I'm going to tell you what it is that gives people a sense of agency and excitement, makes them feel special. That overrides that, you know,

default to good judgment and experience, you know? We believe what we want to believe and it is especially when it comes to like you kind of pointed out the conspiracy aspect of they're lying to you. It's the food companies and the government conspired to get and they made you sick and then that's a very sexy thing for people because

Nobody wants to believe that their actions led to them being... Right, it wasn't your responsibility. Right.

How do we balance the demands of a high-profile career with the needs of personal well-being? Well, answering this important question is the life's work of Giselle Bunchen. Yes, she's a world-famous supermodel, but she's also quite the wise wellness advocate. And you're going to find out, because here's a glimpse into our delightful exchange about holistic living.

What I did for a living is something that kind of just happened to me at 14 years old. It was like, hey, do you want to be a model? And I thought, oh, I can help my family. I can make a living and help. I have five sisters. And now that's so modeling to me is something that is an opportunity that came along. I think in life you have this

opportunities that either you take that train and then see where it goes, you know, and I never even believed that this was going to take me. And I was going to be doing this for almost 30 years. You know, it's, it's one of those things that I was like, Oh, I'll start doing this job and, you know, send money home and help my sisters go through school and do all that. And, um, and maybe in five years, you know, I'll get a house because I didn't even go to school. You know, I, I, I was emancipated at 14 and you were in Tokyo at 14. I was living in Japan without speaking English.

or Japanese, and that's when I start learning the language of energy, you know what I mean? Because if you don't have to understand the language, you just have to feel something. There's a lot more that has been said without words, you know? Sure. So I start learning about that. But I think that I went through this journey of modeling, which was something I thought was going to last five years, and I was just going to help my family out for a little bit.

And it just kept going. It just kept happening in my early 20s. I developed anxiety and panic attacks and all that, because when you drink a bottle of wine and that, because you're like, I used to be a smoker, so I can't even imagine, I used to smoke. It feels like a whole different life.

You know, but it was the late 90s and there was a lot of drugs in fashion and all that. So I thought I was saying just because I was like having some wine and smoking cigarettes. Everybody was doing way worse than you. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen a lot. I've seen a lot. Yeah, that's a whole other show about that. That's a whole other story.

Yeah, so that was the beginning for me to start reconnecting with myself, because I think when I was 14 and I got that train, my only focus was like, how can I be the best that I can do on this? And that was my focus. And I didn't measure any sacrifice. It was like, if I had to work 360 days a year, and I felt like I couldn't say no, because people were giving me a chance. And then I was like, in this really overdrive,

and burned down my adrenals. I found out later when I found this amazing natural doctor who told me like, listen, you don't have any more adrenals. They're shut down because you burn them basically. I'm like, but I'm only 22. So basically, I had to change the habits that I, you know, smoking a pack of cigarettes, drinking alcohol every bit to calm myself down, coffee all day to keep myself up and also going from

you know, one time zone to the next. I was three days in Paris, two days in London, one day in New York, going back to, you know, my life was living in a suitcase. And of course your nervous system is going to freak out, you know? And the way I was eating, it was very, you know, anything that was in front of me, I was just like not mindful about anything. You know, I was just kind of like a workhorse. And I think, but that was a big wake up call for me because I think sometimes, you know, you have to reach rock bottom. And when I had those anxiety and these

are becoming like almost crippling because I couldn't get on planes. I was going to all these doctors and they were like, you have to take this stuff. And I was just afraid of taking anything because I've never taken anything. There was a T for this. My grandmother wasn't there.

So finally, I wasn't going to take medication because just the idea of taking something. I was like, I was normal before. How can I go back being what I was? I didn't have these issues. So what's happening? Long story short, I found this doctor. I had to replace my habits. It was that simple. I had to replace these habits that had created the reality I was living at that moment, which was really

killing me in so many ways, you know, killing my spirit, killing my, and, and I replace it with good habits. So now instead of smoking cigarettes and having a mocha frappuccino in the morning, I'll go out and do breath work and go out for a run. And, you know, I replace in one day, I gave up everything because you see, he looked at me, he says, you call me Adriana Lena, he says, do you want to live?

And I said, I do. So we're going to change my diet. And that's for the first time in my life that I realized that I was really

like the one who got myself there, and I was the only person who could get myself out by the choices that I was making. So I had to take full responsibility for what I had created, but it was in my power, only in my power to change that. There were no doctors, nobody was gonna save me. I had to change, you know, the choices I was making. And I did that, and it was incredible because after over a year and a half, like really struggling with anxiety and panic attacks and all that, within three months, I was like, I never had another incident. And it was,

You know, and ones just are meditating. I mean, at that point, this was 20 years ago, right? It wasn't like people were talking about meditation and yoga and other. It was just, you know, when you sit in silence and you reflect, which is what we don't really give ourselves time to do because the world is so fast paced and everything is...

catching your attention is trying to throw you off your center. You know, everything is so busy. It's like an overload of information to have that space to go inside and reflect and look and really take a step back. I think that was the biggest blessing of my life. So really, I think what could have killed me is what gave me a whole new life. And it was amazing because since then, like, everything changed. I realized that food is my medicine. I realized that I

and the director of my own movie, that I'm creating my reality based on the choices that I'm making, but what I'm choosing to, not only the people I'm choosing to have around in my life, but what type of energy, what kind of thoughts I allow to, what am I feeding, what kind of thoughts am I? So all of that, so that became like a big changing of seasons for me in my early 20s.

This year, we also welcome the renowned psychiatrist in brain health pioneer, Dr. Daniel Ayman. Making his debut on the podcast, Dr. Ayman shared groundbreaking insights on brain health and why understanding our brains is crucial for overall wellness, his approach to psychiatry, particularly the use of brain imaging is innovative for some controversial, and for others, revolutionary. Here's a fascinating excerpt from this eye-opening and memorable discussion.

If you're blessed to lift 85, you have a one and two chance of being diagnosed with dementia. One and two, one and two, which means it's either you or your partner and that's horrifying. But what most people don't know is

you can have an impact on that. And since 2005, I wrote a book with my friend, Rod Shankle, called Preventing Alzheimer's.

And I updated it in 2017 with Memory Rescue. And the big idea is if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And you talked about your mom having it. The mnemonic that we'll talk about is called Bright Minds. And the G in Bright Minds is genetics, but we don't think about it properly.

Oh, well, I'm overweight because my family's overweight, or I have hypertension because it runs in my family, or I have diabetes because it runs in my family, or I have Alzheimer's disease, or I'm vulnerable to it, and there's nothing I can do about it, and that's a lie. Genes increase your vulnerability, and they teach you what you should be doing. So I started looking at the brain in 1991, and we've looked at over 250,000 scans.

But early on, I came to realize you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better and I can prove it. And so if I look at your brain and then you have a car accident, your brain is going to be worse. If I look at your brain and then you go on a drug binder, your brain is going to be worse. If I look at your brain and then all of a sudden you stop sleeping or you go through a divorce, odds are your brain's going to change in a negative way.

But I also did the big NFL study. When the NFL was sort of lying, they had a problem with traumatic brain injury and football. 80% of my players got better. I could see the damage, but when they go on a brain healthy program, 80%, their brains looked better anywhere from two to six months later. That's exciting.

In 1995, I got a call late one night from my sister-in-law, Sherry, who told me my nine-year-old nephew, Andrew, had attacked a little girl on the baseball field. For no particular reason. And I'm like, what? And she said, Danny, he's different. He's mean. He doesn't smile anymore. I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn. One of them he was hanging from a tree.

The other picture, he was shooting other children. So if you think about it, he's Columbine or Sandy Hook or Parkland, Florida, waiting to happen. And I'm like, I want to see him tomorrow. And they lived eight hours for me. So they brought him to me. I'm like, buddy, what's going on? And he's like Uncle Danny. I'm just mad all the time. I'm like, is anybody hurting you? Is anybody teasing you? No. Is anybody touching you in places that shouldn't be touching you? No.

999 child psychiatrists out of 1,000 would put him on medicine and therapy. And because of my experience, I already scanned 1,000 people at that point, I'm like, he's got a left temporal lobe problem.

And so I'm like, I held his hand while he held his teddy bear and got scanned. And he was missing the function of his left temporal lobe. I'd never seen it. I've seen it a hundred times since then. Turned out, he had assists the size of a golf ball occupied the space of his left temporal lobe. And I told his pediatrician, I said, you find somebody to take it out because he wasn't in my neighborhood.

And he talked to three neurologists, all of them said they wouldn't touch the cyst until he had real symptoms. At which point, I lost my mind and I start screaming at the pediatrician of a homicidal, suicidal child who attacks people for no reason. What do you mean real symptoms?

And he got anxious and he said, I think they mean like seizures or he loses consciousness. I'm like serious. And in my head, I'm like neurologist, neurologist, neurosurgeons, neurosurgeons will do stuff. So I called UCLA, talked to the head of the pediatric neurosurgery department, Jorge Lazarev. And he said, Dr. Ayman, when these cysts are symptomatic, we drain them.

He's obviously symptomatic. And after the surgery, I got two calls. One from my sister-in-law, who said the surgery went really well, and when Andrew woke up, he smiled at her. She said, Danny, he's not smiled for a year.

Then I recall from Dr. Lazarov, who said, oh my God, Dr. Amen, that cyst was so aggressive that put so much pressure on Andrew's brain that thinned the bone over his left temporal lobe. So his skull had been thinned. He said if he would have been hitting the head with the basketball, it would have killed him instantly. Either way, it would have been dead in six months.

Next up is Olympian Cara Goucher, one of the greatest long distance runners of all time. Cara shared deeply impactful experiences in professional athletics and her fight for integrity in sport. Here's a slice of that exchange. When does it start to appear that things might not be as they seem?

There were little signs early on of things that were just a little off the way people were talked about or certain rules that were sort of like laughed off. But honestly, the first couple of years, we believed in what we were doing and we believed in Alberto. I mean, it wasn't like we got there and we thought, what are we doing here?

It was weird, you know, we were sleeping with a tent over our bed and Alberta was so involved in our lives in a way that we weren't used to, you know, talking, seeing us every day, calling us a lot, constantly checking in. It was just different. But, you know, it was a couple years in before anything

came up that felt uncomfortable. I think that's why I stayed for so long, because it was sort of like this slow burn of just sort of compromising my values as we went along. But I think that's one of my weaknesses is searching for this figure, and this will make me emotional, but I realized now I had it the whole time in my grandpa. But I worshiped my high school coach, it was a male, I worshiped my college coach. But with Alberto, he brought me into his home.

He had me eat meals with him. I was at his house all the time. Mark Wetmore, I've never been to his house. I've known the guys since 1996. Same with my high school coach. I have no idea where he lives. It was just different. It was so much more invested in what felt like so much more invested in me. It was very easy for me.

Looking back, this was a huge mistake I made, but to allow him to be more than a coach and to be that person. And I know that he enjoyed that. He actually would say, like, I feel like I'm a father, he would call my mother and say that I was brought into his life for a reason. And that looking back was extremely unhealthy, but at the time it felt

almost like God had the interview. And I was brought into his life and he's there for me. Which makes you so confusing, you know, but also makes the transgressions all the more egregious when the deception and the abuse, emotional and physical, you know, starts to enter the picture. I'm sure people have asked or perhaps you had to think through what's going to happen when people ask me, well, you didn't even tell Adam these things. Your husband, what was going on when they were going on? How do you expect us to believe what you're saying about how Alberta was behaving?

Yeah, I mean, I've been asked that a lot, especially on Twitter. Thank you, social media. Twitter's pretty reliable for that kind of thing. Look, it's a great question. As I've gone through this and I've met with other victims, it's actually very, very common, but I didn't know that. The first time that Alberto touched me inappropriately, I'm in a foreign country with him in 2006. It's the first trip we've ever taken together. It's the first trip where I am the focus. And I truly

I mean, in the moment I was so frozen with fear, I couldn't believe this was happening and I just convinced myself it was an accident because he's a dad and he's a devout Catholic and he loves me like a daughter, he tells me. And again, like with those boxes, if I think maybe he did that on purpose, it ruins everything that I'm living for and that I've built my life around. So the first time it happened, I really truly just convinced myself that it was an accident.

It wasn't until three years later that that happened again. And at this point. And when it happens, it involves substances. This guy's like, you know, at least a couple of glasses of wine in and sometimes an ambient, et cetera. Like it feels like he has a substance issue. Yeah, oh, yeah. But now I'm thinking like, well, what am I gonna tell Adam? Like he touched me inappropriately three years ago and I didn't tell you.

It feels like I'm soiling our marriage and I hid something. And I know that I just should have told him, but I just didn't. I came back from that trip. We were in Lisbon, Portugal and came back and I said, I never want to travel without you again.

And that was my way to solve it. I'll never be alone with him again. And I wasn't until a plane ride two years later. The doping piece was that we went, Adam and I went together to use SADA in 2013. And there was already a case open. I thought, oh, I'm going to shock them. There was already an open case going on.

Which should have been comforting to you to realize, like, oh, I'm not the only one. Like people are looking into this. They don't know if they can trust me. That's what it felt like. You know, for the first two hours, they just let me blabber on about what I think happened. And then they're like, oh, go have some coffee. And then let's go back in. And then the questions start. And I appreciate you saw this so much. And I understand all of it. But in the moment, it felt like, oh,

They don't know if I engaged in this or not. Which, how would they know? So that was very uneasy, right? But then, so, you know, for years, people would say, we know why you left. We know why you left. And I'd be like, you have no idea. I left, but okay. A lot of media from the UK constantly asking. And so there was this documentary in 2015 that they were doing, and it was BBC and ProPublic Howard being a piece together.

And I cried. And when Adam told me he was going to do it, I said, please don't do it. I'm still running. I want to run for at least another year. Everyone's going to ask me about this. I'm never going to be able to escape it. Please don't do it. And he, he said, I have to do it. And I respect him so much. And I respect his values that I knew it was the right thing to do, but I was too afraid. So they came over from the UK. They interviewed Adam for hours. The next day before they fly out, they want to meet with me so that I feel better about the situation.

I meet with them. They were very nice, well-intended, I believed. And then that night, I just started eating at me like, why didn't I do it? Why couldn't I be brave like Adam? Now, I'm going to have to answer questions that I could answer. I could be on the front end.

Yeah, it just ate at me. And a couple of the bigger decisions in my life, I've just really, really preyed upon it and I preyed upon that. And I just said, I really regret not doing it. And so Adam reached out to them and they got another plane and came back. The final thing I wanted to ask you is pertains to the athlete who's listening to this or watching this, who is starting to realize that

The dynamic that they're in on the team that they're on or with the coach that's overseeing their progress might not be the healthiest. Maybe it's not terrible. If they told somebody who knows what the reaction would be, what do you say to that person? How do you guide that person to address a situation that on some level is somewhat relatable or similar to what you endured?

I think we have intuition for a reason and I stopped listening to mine because I thought, I know this feels uncomfortable. I know this feels not good, but it's so small and the goal is right there. We have intuition for a reason and listen to it. And you know what?

Maybe for other people, that is a great situation, but the same situation isn't good for everyone. You trust yourself. You have that ability to know what's right and what's wrong. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if someone else thinks it wasn't a big deal. If it's making you uncomfortable and your little bells are going off, that is not gonna help you as an athlete. You're not gonna run or perform the way you want when you have those constant questions in your mind.

So listen to yourself and trust yourself. You will make the right decision.

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Beneath countless problems in our society lies a sleeping giant, and that is the crisis of masculinity. To shed light on this critical issue and offer a fresh perspective, we welcome Scott Galloway to the podcast. Scott is a professor, he's an entrepreneur, an influential voice on technology and modern culture, and he really brought his trademark insight and wit to this discussion about the challenges facing young men today.

This is something that I'm passionate about. I think the data is overwhelming. Three times as likely to be addicted, four times as likely to kill themselves as women, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated, 70% of opioid overdose. We don't have a homeless problem.

We don't have an opioid problem. We don't have an incarceration problem. We have a male suicide, homeless, and incarceration problem. And if any other special interest group were committing suicide at four times the rate of the control group, we would talk about it in different terms. We would talk about the need for social programs, intervention, empathy,

But when something like this happens to young men, there's a lack of empathy. You hear words like accountability or if they were just more in touch with their emotions. And I think that's really gotten in the way of a productive conversation. And because there hasn't been a productive conversation and people out there feel and see what's going on, some voices have entered into that void that are sort of on productive voices. And sometimes that kind of this pro-man rhetoric oftentimes is just suddenly veiled misogyny or a lack of empathy.

or what I'll call the Manosphere. It starts off fine. It's the action-oriented, be fit, take control. Then it goes to really weird places. It treats women as property or talks about immigrants taking your job or just sign up for my crypto university. It just goes to weird places.

What is going on? Like, how did we get to this place? What are the tectonic plates that have led us to this situation that we find ourselves in? So just to make the point around accessibility, I don't know the numbers in Stanford, but when I applied to UCLA in 1982, the acceptance rate was 76% and it cost $1,200 a year. And I had to apply twice and I got in.

The acceptance rate this year will be 9% and it's $34,000. So it's just inaccessible to anyone who's not remarkable, remarkable or rich. So how did we get here? I think there's been a variety of things, a confluence of factors that have all collided around young men. One, there's just a lack of empathy. People see it as a zero-sum game where if you feel empathy for men, it must mean that you are anti-women.

And so there's a lack of empathy and what I call zero-sum gaming it. Civil rights didn't hurt white people, it helped them. Gay marriage doesn't hurt heteronormative marriage, it enhances it. So to talk about empathy for young men is in no way and shouldn't in no way be seen as anti-women. I think the group that wants more viable young men, first and foremost mothers, that's who I hear from the most, who see what's going on with their daughters and the difference between their daughters and their sons and also women.

Women are, I think, ready for more economically and emotionally viable young men. Women are dating older and older because they're having trouble finding what they would perceive as viable young men. So a few things. One, just biological. Men's prefrontal cortex matures later. They just don't have the same executive function or adult in the room. They're less mature, literally less mature. Two, we have an education system that is biased against them. If you talk about the behaviors we would reward in school,

You're essentially going to describe a girl, be organized, be a pleaser, sit still. You also have an education industrial complex. 92% of kindergarten teachers are women. There's more female per capita fighter pilots than kindergarten, male kindergarten teachers. It's about 70, 80% K through 6 and about 60, 70% in high school.

And naturally, you're going to empathize with a little version of you. So I just don't think there's the same level of empathy for young men. We've also done away with metal shop, auto shop, wood shop. So the guy who's not cut out for college, who doesn't sit still, who's not academically focused, has fewer and fewer on-ramps into a middle class lifestyle. And then these guys get into the workforce. There's fewer middle class trades jobs.

In America, parents have done a really good job of convincing themselves. They've failed as a parent if their kid doesn't end up at Stanford or UCLA. So there's a lot of rage and shame in the household. There's not visible on ramps into a healthy middle class life.

3% of LinkedIn profiles in America say, apprentice, it's 11% in the UK in Germany. 50% of Germans have some sort of occasional certification. That's not true here. It's kind of become this. You either get to Stanford or UCLA or you and your parents have failed. And then a lot of dynamics, dating apps where you have two, three to one men to women. And you also have this effect where because everyone has access to everyone, not everyone, but women who have a much finer filter

are all drawn to the kind of what I call same guy. So you have 50 men on 10 to 50 women, 46 of those women will show all of their attention and interest to just four guys.

So it's great to be in the top 10% on a dating app if you're a guy. The bottom 90, it's really difficult. And the bottom half of men on dating apps were now one and two relationships begin. Get validation that they have absolutely no worth in the dating market. So a lack of economic prospects, a lack of maturity, a society that doesn't seem to have a lot of empathy for them. And then a mating market,

that validates they don't have a lot of value. And you see these men go down this downward spiral where they start, and this is where you know that we've really lost them. They start becoming ultra-nationalist. They start blaming immigrants. They start blaming women. They become prone to conspiracy theory. In some, they just become really shitty citizens. And the final thing I would say is that the most profitable, valuable companies in the world have one thing in common. And that is they're tapping into a lack of regulation

and instinctive flaws. Men are more risk aggressive. So the fastest growing technology sector right now is gaming, which is the play way of saying gambling. Men are more risk aggressive. They like to gamble. 85% of gamblers are men.

They're four to six times more likely to develop a gambling addiction. You then put it on a phone and you have Kevin Hart and Charles Barkley telling you that you're smart and you should bet on March Madness. And then you have social media apps or Robinhood or Meta or YouTube sort of tapping into these instincts, these flawed instincts of men where they become prone to conspiracy theory, much more risk aggressive, much more inclined to develop a relationship

with you porn as opposed to saying, okay, how do I go out there and develop the skills in the game and the economic and emotional viability to find my own romantic partner? They're mistaking Reddit and Discord for friendship. They're mistaking Robin Hood and Coinbase for making a living. They're mistaking you porn for establishing a relationship. And so a lot of these men have had the real world

or the motivation to find real relationships replaced with algorithms and screens. It's a low entry, low risk cost of having a reasonable facsimile of life. And if you're not careful, you wake up a few years later, you don't have those skills and you're depressed. Because getting out and finding a job, getting out, going into work, getting up, putting on a tie,

learning how to read the room, learning how to make a woman laugh, establish body language, be persistent, endure rejection.

You know, there's a reason romantic comedies are two hours, not 15 minutes. This shit is hard and it's humiliating, but that's what real victory in real life looks like. And I think there's a disproportionate or a small number of young men who are ever going to experience that real joy and that real victory because of the low cost, low entry, reasonable facsimile of life that these companies prey on. I find young people are totally unrealistic. I call it the myth of balance.

I mean, you can have it all, but you can't have it all once. When I survey my kids, I mean my students, I say, how much money do you expect to be making? They expect to be in the top 1 percentile of income earning households, 80% of them, by the time they're 30. And then they talk about balance. Balance in the context of an expectation.

They want balance. They want to work that hard. They want balance. They want hobbies. They want to spend time with their family and their dogs. I'm like, okay, unless you're born rich, I don't know how to do that. I just, I don't know anyone that's successful who didn't for a good 10 or 20 years work pretty damn hard. Maybe Beyonce, but Beyonce, I suppose it works 60 hours a week.

Next up is vegan bassist Tanya Okalahan, a truly remarkable person who, alongside her gig as a professional touring musician, has dedicated her life to fighting for animal rights and environmental causes. Our conversation is centered on her journey from Irish roots to global rock stages with bands like Whitesnake, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, and Dee Snyder, and how she uses her platform for positive change.

It makes sense, right? It's like as soon as I discover this, it's like, well, I don't want to eat them because I like animals. I don't want to stay here because it's wasting my time. I know my time has better spent over here. But maybe that's not obvious to most or the pressure is too hard. But to be able to live a congruent life and to know that you're in alignment with your morals is something that was very obvious.

like a natural from a young age. So I don't think that it's unique or different, but I think that it is also probably why there's so much frustration in the world and why people are so divided and that because we are often out of line and we're not living in congruency. We actually feel inside and we obviously do that a lot when it comes to morally justifying or morally compartmentalizing things just because it's convenient.

So you're in the Deep South, you're on tour, maybe you're in Arkansas or Mississippi or rural Louisiana or something like that. And you come upon somebody and you find yourself in a conversation. And suddenly this person seems curious and receptive to, they're like, wow, I've never seen anyone like Tonya before. What is this person all about? And then,

There's an opening where they're like, how do I make that lifestyle change? What do you say to that person who suddenly seems receptive to doing something different?

Usually something like you're already vegan because you're vegan but you also eat meat and cheese. So I look at it. What does that mean? I look at these things in reverse because I always find it really funny when people say that it's hard or it's extreme because everybody eats

pasta, pizza, potatoes, broccoli, fruits, veggies. I mean, if you're going to tell me you don't eat any of those things, it's a good base to start with. So I'm like, you're already vegan. You just, you also eat meat and dairy. So it's about kind of breaking down that what people might think is complicated around food. But also, like I said earlier, just say, if someone's asking about, for instance, how do I eat out?

Order the sides instead, or try to add more veggies to every meal. But I'm not a big fan of the labels of the diet. So I try to keep the buzz words out a lot, because for some reason they're a big trigger, if you're saying vegan or vegetarian. I mean, I'm not sure why, because it's literally about being kind to animals. I don't know why it got tagged with the tagline of it being extreme choice.

Sometimes you're gauging like if a person is trying to come at something from a health perspective, if they have a very obvious health issue, of course you can go with the we know like the science is stunningly clear that there's a serious benefit for heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, you know all these the obvious things but if it's not a health thing then

Maybe it's animals. Maybe it's, well, do you really love animals have ever looked into what, you know, mass animal agriculture actually looks like and what factory farming looks like? Because, you know, people are like, oh, I get grass fed. Like, it's funny that everybody's saying they get grass fed when it's very small, very, very minimal percentage that actually is. So you're, I guess you're trying to gauge what the person is curious about. Is it their own health or is it maybe they love animals? But the cool thing about the whole plant-based umbrella

It's about the closest thing to a panacea we have because you look at ocean acidification, rainforest deforestation, antibiotic resistance, and soonotic diseases. Like, there's no real...

negative to shifting towards this because for your own health obviously the health of the planet and then all these ripple effects that it has out. Surely one of these things speaks you do have children like this is what we're doing to the planet and their generation is going to be affected by this. The planet's going to be fine you know I hate when you get the sort of performative activism of save save the planet of course we all want to save the planet but the planet's going to be fine but

whether or not we want to exist here on a healthy planet while we're here and your kids and their kids. So, you know, I often talk to older families who have two-entry generations that like by the, you know, they're starting to shift toward plant-based because they saw the soil, like, you know, places and I was talking to a farmer and his family in Kansas a couple years ago and he was telling me the story of how it was when his granddad

was on the land and how different it was by the time he had to work under the contracts for Big Agree. And they're tied into using these specific fertilizers and pesticides. The soils changed, the food changed, the financial system structure changed for his family. And then he's like, I don't want to pass this down to my son and their kids. So they were starting to kind of think about shifting, but

A lot of, you know, the information is being kept away. So I really like getting into, it just depends on where the person is coming from. If someone's asking you from a health perspective, I'm like, go listen to Rich Roll and Simon Hill. I read these books. But that's the really cool thing about this whole sort of movement per se. There's a positive no matter what way you're looking at it. There's really no negatives that we've yet to find.

In episode A27, we welcome the brilliant social psychologist, Jonathan Hight, to the podcast to explore his groundbreaking research on social media's impact on youth mental health, which is the subject of his seminal book, The Anxious Generation. Hight's insights into how digital technology is reshaping adolescents made this one of our most impactful episodes of the year. So here is an excerpt from that conversation.

We were at a tipping point, even if I didn't write this book. And I just had the very good fortune that I kind of rushed through, you know, writing the book and I felt like I had to get it out soon and it just happens to come out just as America is ready to tip in Britain. They actually tipped last month in Britain. The parents are rising up. People have had enough. I've been studying this since, uh, intensely since 2019, but a bit before then.

In 2019, it seemed pretty clear that the phones are doing a number on the kids. There was an academic debate. I couldn't prove it, but I was making the case along with Jean Twangy. And then COVID came in and confused us all for several years. What kids really needed before COVID was a lot less time on their screens and a lot more time outside playing with each other. And then COVID came in and what American kids and kids all over the world got was the opposite.

a lot more time on their screens, a lot less time playing with other kids face to face. And it was became clear by 2223 that the kids are really a mess. I mean, the mental health is horrific. But what Gene Twankie had shown, what I've been showing is that COVID actually didn't make things a lot worse. It's been getting worse and worse since 2012. Something happened in the early 2010s.

mental health fell off a cliff for those born after 1996, not for those before. And what we're trying to figure out is what on earth happened and how do we roll it back? So I'll start in the 1990s because that's when most of us got our first look at the internet. And it was marvelous. It was miraculous. It was as if God came to earth and said, would you like to know everything instantly all the time? And we're like, yes. And so I certainly was a techno optimist.

I first used, I guess, Altavist in 1994. In the 90s, we thought that the technology, the internet, was going to knock down tyrants, one of the best friends of democracy. So most of us are very positive about these developments, and it really was amazing.

Then we get the early social media, 2003, 2004 Myspace, Facebook. They're connecting people. It's also amazing. You get Uber and Amazon. Totally amazing. 2007, the iPhone comes out and it's not at all harmful. It's a digital Swiss army. Now you pull it out when you need a tool. So everything's great until 2010 or so. The mental health of teenagers is fine. It's stable. It's actually getting a little better in some ways compared to Gen X.

And then between 2010 and 2015, everything changes. The technological environment changes and with the mental health. And what we can discuss later, the evidence on whether it's causal, but at least it's incredibly well correlated.

What you have to see is that in 2010, of course, kids were on their phones all the time. They're always texting, but that's what they could do. They could text and they could call. That's what a flip phone does. That's it. They didn't have high-speed internet. They didn't have front-facing cameras. They didn't have Instagram. They just used their phones to connect. It's okay. Over the next five years, that's when everybody flips over to a smartphone. So by 2015, 70% of American kids are now on a smartphone, mostly an iPhone.

Most of the girls have Instagram, front-facing camera, high-speed internet, unrestricted data plan. And so now you could be online literally all day, today, like in 2024. About half of American kids say that they are online almost all the time. This is what's so devastating. Puberty is this really important period of child development in which the brain is rewiring based on input it's getting.

And all around the world, adult societies helped their kids through that transition. How does a boy become a man? How does a girl become a woman? And what we did in the early 2010s is we said, how about if we don't help you with that at all? How about if we give you a device which will take up all of your attention, like every thing that isn't nailed down to something, it's going to go to your phone?

And a lot of that attention is going to be to random weirdos on the internet who are selected by an algorithm because of how extreme their performance is as voted by other random weirdos on the internet. How about if we let that socialize you? So in all these ways, going through puberty in, say, 2005, like a millennial, versus 2015, like Gen Z, made all the difference in the world. And I believe that's what has caused, there are many clubs, but that's the biggest single cause.

The gigantic increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide that are the characteristics of Gen Z. To end this on an optimistic note, your analogy is like the Berlin Wall. It's about the burst. It's not this incremental thing that we're going to be sitting around waiting for forever. There's enough energy behind this that the dam is going to burst soon and then everything changes. Exactly.

There's what's called preference falsification. There are situations in which if people are only supporting something because they're afraid to speak up or if they're kept in place by fear, as soon as the fear calms, everything can change very, very quickly. And that happened in Eastern Europe. Everyone hated communism. I traveled there in 1987. I don't think there were many communists or any back then. Like everyone hated it, but they were just kept in place by the secret police. They were afraid.

And once it became clear that actually, if we all massive the wall and try to knock it over, we win. And then it fell everywhere. Now, that's a little bit too dramatic for what we're talking about here, but the social dynamics are actually very similar because why is it that we're all giving our kids phones at such an early age? Because we're afraid that they will then be left out and they're afraid of being left out.

So it's not the fear of the secret police. That's the most powerful human urge. That's right. Yeah. I mean, being afraid of the secret police and being abducted in the night in torture, that's pretty primal too. Right. But it's the same pathway, right? We want to be a member in good standing of a group. We're terrified of being isolated, being cut off, being alone. That's why banishment used to be a punishment in the ancient world before they had good prisons and things like your punishment is to be banished. We're not going to kill you. We're just going to send you away. And that's like death, social death.

and teenagers are really, really vulnerable to social death. So anyway, my point is, if the kids themselves say, yeah, I'd like to get off if everyone else does, well then why don't you get off because everyone else, so if a system is held in place by the fear of missing out and we can all get out together, then kids aren't missing out. We give them back childhood, we give them back play, we give them back each other.

Renowned sobriety advocate, coach and former pro footballer, Andy Ramage returned to the broadcast to drop wisdom on the merits of an alcohol-free lifestyle, personal transformation, mindset, and cultivating a life of purpose. Here's a look.

What is the sense of growth, like how many people are doing this now? Well, I guess if you flip it into the alcohol-free drinks industry, for example, when we last had our conversation over the next five years, it's growing by about 500%. We've still got about 70% of the adult population in the western world are still drinking in that middle lane, but all the stats are starting to show that that's rapidly

declining and my big mission really, 2030, I'd love to see one in two, it's a 50% of adults on the fun side of the island with me rocking it and it's escalating that, you know, rapid growth, younger people are drinking less or not at all. I think there's still a huge band of people, this middle lane, which is probably 35 to

75 that are stuck in that old ways and behaviours of drinking. And again, it's the middle lane that I worry about the most because I think in you know this yourself rich, it's very obvious if you've got a severe problem with alcohol or an addiction, you know that there's an issue with it. But the middle lane, for the last however many years, I've been drinking completely unaware that their relationship with alcohol, those one or two drinks in the week or two or three more at the weekend, are having a massive negative impact.

on their life it might just be on their sleep, it might be that they're a little bit more grumpy, it might be that they can't quite be bothered to exercise, they're not consistent in the way that they nourish their body because they've got those hangover blues or that their mental health is not where it wants to be and that's in the middle lane and I think most people are so unaware of it and that's what's really exciting for me that people are becoming aware of their relationship with alcohol as middle lane drinkers, average drinkers and the change is starting to happen rapidly and it's just wonderful to be a part of.

It's just growing and growing all the time, and I think that's another thing that I love. There's a great quote from T. Lawrence of Arabia. He says, dreamers of the night, dream dreams that sit in the rust, the recesses of their mind, and they wait to find it was just vanity. But dreamers of the day, they're dangerous men and women, for they dream with their eyes wide open, and they make their dreams a reality.

And I love that because I believe that's what happens when you go alcohol free. You're seeing people coming through this movement that are dreamers of the day. They're actually saying things and taking action. Whereas I was one of those for many a year, I sat in the pub and how many people in the pub talk a great game about all the things they're going to do and then never quite happens. Whereas I think the alcohol free space itself is producing all these incredible dreamers of the day like Bill, like many others.

that are turning these dreams into reality on a massive scale. And it's changing the face of culture. I'll give you a beautiful example of this. I went to Ireland just recently. I spent a lot of time in Ireland, as you know, my wife, Cyrus. I went to a place called the Adair Manor, a beautiful place. They're going to get the ride a cup there in 2025. And I went for a drink in this local pub in Adair Manor or Adair, and we sat down to have a drink. And as soon as I walked in, the lady said, what would you like? I said, I don't drink. She's brilliant. We've got loads of alcohol-free alternatives.

This is in Ireland. In Ireland. Right, and they're all over it in Ireland. That's wild. Gave me this lovely drink and I sat and I'm getting goosebumps, very even told the story. And I watched a scene that's played out in a million Irish pubs for generations. There was an old guy at the bar drinking a pint of Guinness. And he was sitting there drinking his Guinness as, you know, many Irish people do. And in walked his son. I knew it was his son because you could tell they looked alike. The old guy was probably 70, the son at about my age, probably 49, 50.

and his son sat next to him. Again, a scene you would see in every Irish bar and his son sat next to him and he ordered his Guinness and his Guinness came out and he started to drink his Guinness and I looked at his Guinness. His Guinness was zero zero. That is a cultural shift right there. He was able to be with his father

In this space, the Irish pubs are the best pubs in the world. You'll see three generations in Irish pubs. They connect and he was able to do it in a way that felt connected, felt grown up, but he didn't have alcohol on his drink. And just to set the scene like I described earlier, I would describe myself as a middle-lane drinker.

Was I drinking too much? Absolutely, but who isn't? Especially in that environment, you know, and that would involve a few drinks in the week and a few more at the weekend. There was no major problem, there was no rock bottom, an average drinker drinking too much, which most people.

Oh, and then I tried to remove it and it was so incredibly difficult because there was so much social pressure. You know, alcohol still is the only drug in the world. When you try and stop it, you get berated for it or you get the mickey taken out of your people try and force it upon you. And this is 10 years ago, when the middle lane didn't have a voice, there was no alcohol for alternatives. So trying to take a break was difficult. But I finally cracked down. I got about 28 days in and all of the things that I hoped it would bring it did.

I suddenly felt well rested and slept like I hadn't slept in years. I got my energy back. I was suffering from anxiety. The anxiety started to disappear and dissipate. I got my time back, my zest for life back, and this just snowballed. That 28 was only ever meant to be a 28-day break. And here I am 10 years later. That 28 days became 90 days. I lost that three stone in weight, got fitter, faster, healthier. My broken business, when everyone said it would fail,

We grew it seven times bigger in half the time because I was always on the ball. I wasn't writing off half of my week to underperformance and I think what I realized is an important message for people. My new normal, because of my relationship with alcohol, I think was probably 50 or 60% of my optimal best.

And it wasn't until I removed alcohol as a middle-lane drinker that I got that peak performance back, which allowed me to perform my peak in my business. My relationships blossomed at home. I was fit again, healthy again. My spark would come back again. It was just such a transformational experience. I thought, I've got to share this. So I wrote a little e-book.

called One You Know Beer. We put it out into the world. It was never meant to be a thing. A few people picked up on it. That turned into a book with Pam McMillan. I got Roori on board. Roori was inspired by my first break. Roori is the co-founder of One You Know Beer. Originally, we create this movement called One You Know Beer, which still exists today that's inspired many, many people. And I stepped down from there in 2000.

and 19 not long after our last podcast to really look at this from a completely different angle and create lots of new ideas and initiatives to inspire people to take a break. That's what it's all about for me.

How do we navigate the complex world of the new weight loss drugs? Well, uniquely suited to address that question is returning guest Johan Hari, who through firsthand experience, as well as extensive research, explored the promises and the perils of Ozempic, which made for one of the more lively RRP episodes of 2024.

So I'm taking it as epic, right? I started taking it for the book that I've written because as soon as I heard about these new weight loss drugs, I felt a massive mixture of emotions. First thing I thought was, well, I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be. He died when he was 44 of a massive heart attack. Those of the men in my family get heart disease. My dad had terrible heart problems. My uncle died of a heart problem. If there really is a drug that can reverse obesity

We usually reduce it and we know the average person who takes a Zen pick or wagobi loses 15% of your body weight. I thought, wow, that could mean a lot to me, right? We know that obesity causes over 209 diseases and complications. A drug that can move you away from that, that could be a big deal. But I also immediately thought, wait a minute.

I've seen this story before. I think people should be very wary of anyone who's saying about these drugs either just uncomplicatedly, yay, everyone should be on them, or boo, nobody should be on them. I think it's missing the much more important nuance and complex point, which is, you know, the subtitle of my book, Magic Peel, is the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs, because the truth is both halves of that are true. There are extraordinary benefits, and there are 12 disturbing risks.

There's no one-size-fits-all for that, and there's a lot we don't know, but there's a lot we do know. And I think what people really need to do is go down the list of the benefits and risk, see which ones apply to them, which ones don't, and also just be prepared for some of the psychological changes that happen when you take these drugs, some of the big cultural changes that are going to happen now, 47% of Americans want to take these drugs. This is blowing up all around us. Everyone who takes these drugs becomes a kind of walking advertisement for the drugs.

This is huge. This is going to change so much. Barclays Bank commissioned a very sober-minded financial analyst called Emily Field to go away, research these drugs, to guide their future investment decisions. She came back and said, if you want a comparison for what these drugs are going to do, you've got to compare it to the invention of the smartphone. I think she's right.

Why did obesity blow up, right? It's really important to understand because I think it's been kind of forgotten. Obesity has exploded in our lifetimes. I would just urge anyone to just pause this podcast for a second and just Google for a moment photographs of public beaches in the United States in the 1970s, so when you and me were born, right? Just look at them for a minute.

to us they seem really weird because almost everyone on those beaches looks to us what we would now call skinny or jacked, right? And you look at it, you go, well, where was everyone else that day? Right? Was it like a skinny person convention at the beach? And then you realize, no, that's what Americans look like when we were born, right? You basically have

around 300,000 years where you have humans and obesity is very rare. It existed. We know it's there in the historical record, but it's always remarked upon because it's so unusual, right? And then essentially in our lifetimes, this staggering explosion. So between the year I was born, 1979 and the year I turned 21, obesity doubled here in the United States. And then in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again, right? And you look at that and think, well, what happened?

What's going on there? Because it goes to the heart at this point you were making where you're absolutely right. We know why this happened. This change, this explosion in obesity happens in every country that makes one change. It's not where people suddenly have a collapse in willpower. It's not where people suddenly become lazy. It's where people move from mostly eating a diet that consists of whole foods that they prepare on the day.

to eating a diet that mostly consists of process and ultra-processed foods, which are constructed out of chemicals in factories, in a process that isn't even called cooking, it's called manufacturing food. And it turns out this new kind of food, which never existed in the past, which is a totally new thing, affects our bodies in a completely different way to the way the old whole foods used to affect us. No one can deny it. A big motivation is to look better as it's defined by the culture, right?

And I think that can make us...

Excuse your judgment. You want to overplay the benefits and underplay the risks. I think that was a factor for me. I think I've got to be candid about that. And you think about some of the risks you were talking about. This particularly plays out, you think about muscle mass, right? So I'm sure you're listeners know, but muscle mass is the total amount of soft tissue in your body. It's really important for movement, right? And naturally, as you age, you shed muscle mass every decade, depressingly from the age of 30, which I just think I don't like.

So just whoever you are, you're gonna lose some muscle mass as you age. The risk with these drugs is, as with any other form of radical weight loss, you don't just lose fat mass, you lose muscle mass. So the danger is that you go into the aging process with a diminished amount of muscle mass. Now this is particularly true for category people we haven't talked about who I think are really important to think about, which is not people who are overweight or obese who are taking these drugs to get down to a healthy weight, but people who are, in fact,

skinny, who are taking them to be super skinny. You know, we've cracked the code of what regulates weight. It's gut hormones. There are more than 70 gut hormones that affect weight. So, azempic works on one, GLP1, or simulates one. Muñjaro works on two, GLP1 and GIP. Triple G works on three. But now, there's 70 of these damn things, right? There's going to be all sorts of combinations. Increasingly, it's going to be pills.

Eight years, we've got big issues around cost at the moment, but eight years from now is then it goes out of patent. It doesn't cost much to make this as a pill. Eight years from now, unless we're in a fen fen situation, which I don't rule out, and if someone's watching this in the future on YouTube and go, ah, right, okay. But eight years from now, it'll be a daily pill, it'll cost a dollar a day, barring a catastrophe.

I would anticipate 47% of the population using it is a low estimate actually. Wow. Wow. Given that 70% are overweight or obese, and a dollar a day ain't much, right? And I would be worried about that. And the biggest thing I hope is it wakes us up to go how, like I said before, how the fuck did we get here and why are the Japanese not there, right? How come in Japan, when I went to Japan, it's the weirdest sensation

to walk around a school of 1,000 children, just a normal school and realize there were no overweight children in that school, right? Because Japanese people protect their children from processing ultra-processed foods. And there's very few obese adults, right? 4% of Japanese people are obese compared to 42.5% here in the US. But yeah, so the hope is that it wakes us up. Now, as I say that, there's a little bit of me that goes, bullshit, it'll send us to sleep. If you've got a little technical fix,

Why would you bother fixing the environmental problem? It blinds you to getting at the root cause of what's driving the problem in the first place. So it moves us further away from the actual solution.

This year we welcome Dr. Phil Stutz to the podcast. Phil is the renowned psychiatrist and protagonist of a Netflix documentary, Stutz, and our conversation delved into all kinds of things, personal transformation, the art of embracing life's challenges, and the current state of mental health care. His practical, no-nonsense tools for navigating life's difficulties really resonated with me pretty deeply, and I'm thrilled to share a glimpse into our powerful exchange.

Well, here's the situation as I see it. The old models of therapy and a lot of the old models about human nature are wrong. They're particularly wrong now. And the reason is no one is satisfied in our culture, no one. So you have a lot of people, almost everybody, feeling they didn't get paid, so to speak.

And the dissatisfaction is only going to grow. And the reason is human beings only can feel satisfaction if they're co-created with the higher forces. It's not like a philosophy or something I figured out. It's just what I've observed. And that's the secret.

This is the real secret. You'll never be satisfied if you're doing something in a completely isolated manner. Part of the ethos of what I do is you never let the person leave without something. It could be a tool. It could be just a sense of hope.

relating differently to the world, but something that they can actually do. And I'm a little shaky today, I'll show you this. We're gonna get a drawing. I'm not gonna be allowed to keep the drawing. We'll see, we'll see what you do. I don't think there's gonna be a drawing because my fucking... That's all right. We got all the time in the world. Okay. So we got a pyramid here with two lines through the middle.

Yeah, so this is the right pathway to look at the world, as far as I'm concerned, and it has to do with faith. The bottom of this thing is called faith. Now, people don't understand what faith is. People want to have faith because it's proven to them, which is impossible.

The idea is you have to have a freely chosen. You have to choose to have faith for no reason without proof and without anything. If you do that, then you can act, which is the second level of the thing. And then once you can act, then you become confident. See, people think that they can't act until they become confident.

And it's not true at all. It's part X just wanting to paralyze them. So faith at the foundation of the pyramid. Yeah. Action.

in the middle, confidence at the top. And your confidence isn't about any one result. That's the disaster to look at it like that. The confidence comes because you know you're going to repeat the pattern over and over and over again. You have to choose to have faith. And some of the tools are just to help you in that direction.

And the tools all being action oriented because action is the engine of whatever sort of emotional result you're aiming towards, as opposed to upside down, which is the way that most people think of it. Yeah, I can't believe you said that. Yeah.

A lot of this stuff in our culture is to, people are selling stuff all the time and what they're selling you is, follow me or buy this product or whatever it is. You're exonerated from, you get it paid out.

Yeah, you gotta pass. And that's one of the worst things that's going on. I would say post-World War II, it's really gotten out of hand. And something that also, for me, has to do with the economics of it.

Like, if I make less this year, it has no consequence to me. It's not real. But with the people, you know, on our level, I financially don't understand. Well, you understand, obviously. Is that the guy who works, maybe he makes $69,000 a year and he works his ass off and is a good person?

If he walks around in terror that his kid is going to get sick, fucking terror, which brings us to, because I'm like half in one world and half in the other world, I could see it from both points of view.

I don't know the exact numbers, but it's easily, I would say 30, 40% of the population. And that's just an example of other things that are happening, which means the institutions that we've always relied on and that we felt, well, the safety here, there's somebody on my team over here, they're all cracking and they're all corrupt and they're

People don't trust them anymore. So the last bastion of denial, to me, is broken. Right, because that's always been an illusion or a delusion. Yes. But now it's just more evident how delusionary it is that there's some kind of safety or capacity for us to exert control over things we have no control over. Yeah, that's correct.

And the other side of that, I call it institutional corruption, is not the middle level people, because most of them are good people and they do this job. But I know a lot of people on the higher level, and they actually think they're exempt from all of this.

And because of that, they can't penetrate deeply enough into the other person's experience. And if you can't penetrate into the other person's experience, no matter what, and I mean from here, that you feel it. If you can't do that, you're out of touch with reality, which brings us to another point, which is the role of groups. And you're 12 steps, so you understand this.

Only a group, even if it's two people that you're working with, can allow you to have the relationship with these higher forces. They're not meant to be experienced in a singularity.

Sam Harris is one of the most influential voices in contemporary intellectual discourse. So it was an amazing experience to break bread with the neuroscientist, philosopher, and mindfulness advocate, to discuss critical thinking and our age of misinformation, the transformative power, meditation, and strategies for navigating our increasingly complex world. So here's a clip that illustrates Sam's unique ability to bring scientific rigor to the challenges of our time.

It seems to me that consciousness either exists on some sliding scale that is calibrated with the complexity of a brain, how many neurons do you have, or it's endemic to everything, what's known as panpsychism. And it sounds like you're relatively agnostic on that and that exploring the truth behind that

isn't necessarily the best use of time and energy, because at the end of the day, we have this experience, and that's what you're interested in trying to better understand. Yeah, and I think the gradations of consciousness are more a matter of the contents of consciousness, right? So what you obviously get as you scale up in information processing and intelligence is more mind, right? You get more distinctions you can make, you get more

You know, you get ideas. I mean, we get language. I mean, just having language is an enormous difference, right? You know, it's just like everything about us that's recognizable human is a matter of us leveraging the power of language, right? And are being able to conceive of a past and a future in explicit terms and

to plan across that time horizon. I mean, that's something that chimpanzees can't do. I have no doubt that chimps are conscious. There's something that is like to be a chimp. Some of that would be recognizable to us, but the fact that they are not language-using in any deep sense.

Deprives them of so much that is, there's so much mental real estate that can't be actualized without language. And so you're noticing impermanence, you're noticing that the more closely you look, the more fleeting experience becomes. So it's like when you start and you have very little concentration,

And you're told to just feel your body sitting in the chair or sitting on the cushion. Well, you just have this kind of gross feeling of, okay, I feel my body with basic proprioception. I feel the energy in my body. I feel my knee. I feel my shoulder from my back. I got a pain in my neck. I hope that goes away. Okay, I'm back to the body.

As you do this hour by hour by hour, you get more concentration. The difference between being lost and thought and being really present with your sensory experience becomes clearer and clearer such that eventually the present moment gets enough kind of.

gravity to it where your attention more and more naturally rests there, and you can actually pay attention to the breath, and to sounds, and to sensations. And the moment that begins to happen, you begin to notice impermanence just rains. Nothing is solid, nothing is stable. You thought you had a body, but when you pay attention,

You just have this cloud of fleeting sensation. You have these tiny points of pressure and tingling and temperature and pain and tightness and movement. And your hands disappear into this pointless painting of sensation. And so it is with everything you can pay attention to. The sounds or everything becomes very punctate and fleeting. You begin to pass through this

layer of concepts where you're no longer hearing traffic and birds and the rustling of somebody's rain jacket.

you're hearing just the raw data of sound. You haven't become a moron, you can still think about what you're hearing, but you notice that automatic conceptualization is something you can relax, and you get more into the flow of just raw data of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thoughts arise to try to grab hold of it, and you just notice them too as appearances and consciousness. But for the longest time,

It can feel like there's a subject doing this, right? There's still you, there's still a meditator aiming at objects, right? And even if the aiming becomes effortless, even if you're just noticing attention go out to the sound or go down to the feeling of pressure in the body or whatever it is. The locus of which is in the head.

Yeah, I mean, most people start with a very clear sense that there's a, you know, they're up there in their head and now they're paying attention to the body and the body's down there, right? They're aiming attention to sensations in the knee, say, or when you're doing walking meditation, you're aiming attention down to the sensations in your feet or your legs. But it can become very effortless and it can become, you can notice so much impermanence that you can begin to extrapolate from this kind of just blizzard of change

that there can be no stable self to be made out of all of this, right? There's just this next moment of hearing, this next moment of seeing, this next moment of sensing sensation. There can be a lot of great feelings of freedom that come with this because there's just like a real relaxation into the flow of the present moment and you're not trying to do anything with it, you're not trying to change anything.

The goal here of noticing all of this is to, at least in this system, to increase the mental factor of equanimity because you're noticing the pleasant stuff disappears. There's nothing to hold on to there in a pleasant taste or a pleasant sound. You're also noticing the unpleasant stuff disappears the moment you notice it. So there's nothing to, there's no problem. There's nothing to push away even in very strong feelings of physical discomfort. And you can get to a point where

You kind of really strong pain in your body, excruciating pain in your body. It certainly would have been excruciating yesterday. But now you've got such equanimity that it's just change. It's just changing. It's twisting and burning and stabbing. But there's no there, there, even. The moment you try to find

the stabbing sensation that was a problem a moment ago, it's not there. There's something new, but it's gone the moment you notice it, right? So everything's just falling away from attention, the more you pay attention. And there's a lot of immense freedom that comes with that.

Rounding out our incredible lineup is Dr. Alan Goldhammer, a true pioneer in the field of medically supervised water only fasting. For over four decades, Dr. Goldhammer has been at the forefront of using fasting as a powerful tool for healing and longevity. And our conversation dove deep into the science behind fasting and its potential to revolutionize our approach to chronic disease.

What is fasting? What are we talking about when we're discussing this topic? Well, the type of fasting that we do is the complete abstinence of all substances except water in an environment of complete rest. So it's therapeutic, medically supervised, water only fasting.

But the fact is it can be done safely. It can be done effectively. And when it's needed, there's nothing else that does exactly what water-only fasting does. Right. So at True North, the typical hard case that finds his or her way to your doorstep is somebody that you're going to supervise over a period of how long as they undergo this protocol.

Fasting ranges from 5 to 40 days on water only, and there's a period of half the length of the fast recovery in the supervised setting. So a typical patient might fast for two or three weeks. They might be with us a month. And those patients will oftentimes come in with specific complaints, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, or some forms of cancer, particularly things like lymphoma.

Everybody's worried about obesity and being fat, and they think of it often as a cosmetic issue, and it's far from just a cosmetic issue. On your body, there's a type of fat called visceral fat, particularly accumulates around the abdomen and the organs, that it has hypermetabolic effects that produces inflammatory products, IL-16 and IL-alpha, acute phase reactive proteins, and these

inflammatory components are thought to be responsible for the heart disease, the diabetes, the autoimmune disease, and some forms of cancer. So getting rid of it, you can think of visceral fat like a tumor. So if you had a multi pound tumor in your body, you would be appropriately alarmed because of its effects. And we go to inordinate effects to get rid of those types of tumors. And interestingly enough, let's say you went on a fast and lost 10% of your body weight.

You might think, well, I lose 10% of my visceral fat, but that's not the case. You may be losing subcutaneous fat or muscle mass. You would lose all those things. You'd lose muscle, fiber, glycogen, water, and fat when you fast. And when you come off the fast, you regain water, fiber, glycogen, and protein.

but not fat. When you follow a whole plant food, SOS-free protocol, you'll continue to lose fat. And what's interesting is you don't just lose equal amounts of fat and visceral fat. You will lose preferential mobilization of visceral fat. For example, we used a DEXA scanner to do some studies. Typical male, fast for two weeks, loses 20% of their total fat, but 55% of their visceral fat.

So the visceral fat is being mobilized much like tumors are. In other words, if you lose 10% of your body weight, you don't lose 10% of your breast tumor. You might lose 50% or all of the breast tumor. So how does the body know that it wants to get rid of the breast tumor versus anything else? Because there is mechanisms in the body that preferentially mobilize materials and inverse proportion to their need. And visceral fat shouldn't be there.

And as a consequence, the body appears to go in and deal with that first, which is really great, because it's one of the great benefits of fasting, is the preferential mobilization of visceral fat. Three billion people globally have chronic diseases. In the US, 150 million people face chronic disease, despite substantial healthcare expenditures. Six out of 10 US adults have some form of chronic disease.

There's 40 million deaths annually as a result of these illnesses. US healthcare costs have exceeded 3.5 trillion in 2022. And in the US, over 70% of adults are overweight with 40% being obese. Like that is shocking. So help me understand how we got here.

We got here because of the pleasure trap, the hidden force that undermines health and happiness. We fool the satiety mechanisms of the brains of humans by putting chemicals in our feed. If you put these same chemicals in the feed of rats or mice or birds, the rodents will gain 49% of their body weight in 60 days, the birds will get so fat they can't even fly. There is no obesity in wild animals.

You know, even whales are what 9% body fat. They're lean mean machines. They just wear it on the outside of their body. Unless those animals get exposed to our highly processed foods, with these chemicals added to it. And then they'll get fat just like we do, and they'll get the same diseases we do. The breast cancer, the colon cancer, the heart disease, the diabetes, these changes occur in animals the same way they do in us. And the chemicals that we put in our feed

that fool the satiety mechanisms allows to overeat in our responsible for the obesity and overweight that we see are salt, oil, and sugar. SOS. And that's why we advocate a whole plant food, SOS-free diet. Because salt, oil, and sugar are not food. They're hyper concentrated food byproducts. They're added to food to make food

taste better, and that's what tasting better is, is the artificial stimulation of dopamine in the brain. And foods do taste better to us with those. In fact, they taste so much better that we'll systematically overeat them. If you ask a person to eat their fill of, say, rice or anything, they'll eat a certain amount.