E112 - Become Mentally Strong & Train Your Mind To Overcome Anything | Cory Richards

44:01I'm not trying to encourage people to do it. Right, right, right. Go get lost in a K-hole. you know because there's obviously there's there's two ways that could have gone like some people just obviously they start to experience the recreational drugs and they get hooked on it for sure and take it too far and destroy their lives yeah whereas it can also be used as a reset or just to think differently about life and what it is that you're doing yeah yeah and it's so weird because i hear i hear people talk about ayahuasca and it annoys me because i don't know what it's like i can't relate to them and i'm so curious about what it first of all what it entails the process of it the experience itself and then the aftermath but then i'm also scared if it was to affect me negatively so let's say for example you know like i'm ambitious you know i'm driven i've got all this stuff going on you know i want to focus on my business and progress right but then i don't want to go and do ayahuasca and then be like hey none of this matters yeah like ah social media is stupid yeah yeah and then i go off social media i don't care about business i sell my possessions and just live in a hut in bali or something i'm like i probably don't want that to happen well yeah yeah no and that's fair that's really fair two things i'll say i think it was timothy leary he said the worst thing that's going to happen and as you're going to wake up the same.

45:30Most people don't decide that they want to throw away, and I wouldn't even call it throw away, fundamentally alter their lives in the way that you're talking about. But then there's the other reality is that if that were to happen, you wouldn't care. I guess so. You wouldn't care. So it's more of an attachment to what you have now, which is fine. my my very very i would call it educated guess is it's not going to do any of that in fact it might amplify what you're already doing because it's going to broaden your understanding of the different aspects of it and most of what happens that i see with and i've not done ayahuasca amplifies gratitude, amplifies service, amplifies compassion, and amplifies curiosity.

46:20And so when you take those amplifications and you apply them to your life, you're probably just going to expand. That's not to say you might make some alterations around relationships and different things and different behaviors, but... Sometimes I just think I want like almost like a nudge or just pointing from a higher power saying to me, do more of this. Yeah. Stop doing that. Do more of this. Stay away from these types of people. Spend more time with these people. What's interesting, though, is you already have the knowledge. You're already. So you just said it. You're like, I would like the nudge.

47:01I'd like the cosmic nudge. But you already have the knowledge. And so more likely what's going to happen is you're going to go, oh, I already know what to do. I've known all along. You are, again, avoiding the woo-woo. You are the higher power directing the life. That's not to say you're God. It's just that you are part of that consciousness that has a profound intelligence around what we already know to be best for us. the hard thing is living in that and that's integrity living in alignment with your values i'm not saying i always live in integrity fuck no i mean there's still a deeply hedonistic side of me that loves to engage in some fuckery and you know like and and that's okay you know that's that's okay but your resistance to it i find a lot of resistance to the ayahuasca crowd too because oftentimes i see people who have sat with ayahuasca 50 times and are still behaving like a raging narcissist yeah and it's like it's not the drug that's not the thing and it's like they're going back for the experience that's fine but if you're not integrating that into your life you're just getting high yeah and that's also okay but don't don't confuse the two justifying why they yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly they're like oh no it's doing me good it's good for me yeah how is it benefiting your life how is it benefiting your life and there's a balance there you know so how come you never did it i just haven't yet i mean i just haven't felt um called to that specific experience yet okay so i'm sure i will at some point in my life um but right now i'm i'm happy doing this other work and and i don't do it a lot um a couple times a year you know if i'm in a really difficult spot i might engage with a little bit more but from from a mental health perspective i believe that psychedelics are uh the leading edge of um how we can really address some of these issues on a on a broader scale yeah for sure so once they get legalized you know it's interesting though this episode is brought to you by whoop the all new whoop is here the only wearable that turns your health and fitness data into personalized guidance now seven percent smaller with 14 days of battery life i've been wearing whoop since 2021 and i've been wearing it every single day it's a device which i have used to improve my training improve my sleep and stay away from the things which are definitely not good for me.

49:37It's been a game changer. Now, Whoop includes a heart screener with on-demand ECG readings, so you can check in on your heart anytime and share results with your healthcare provider. It also includes a health span, a new feature that demystifies the aging process and shows how your daily habits impact your pace of aging, as well as hormonal insights for personalized guidance throughout your cycle or pregnancy. It's the only wearable that gives you a truly comprehensive view of your body designed to help you improve your performance longevity and overall health so you can join now at join whoop.com forward slash first things thirst to get your first month for free let's get back to the episode what what do you do with yourself now that makes you feel like i guess happy or i don't know fulfills you with that and by the way what was your word which one oh my my my purpose no the what you know the word where you were to describe your purpose yeah yeah my purpose of compassion compassion okay yeah compassion um what and and service again it's it's compassionate service meaning like one of the one of the pieces of feedback that i get most commonly from from the color of everything is people to to some degrees this we have very different life experiences but i felt seen in a way i've never felt before.

51:01So there's a relating to the internal and the book uses the external as a way to bring people into that. And my purpose is, you know, compassion, but to more clearly articulate that is to invite people into a more compassionate relationship and understanding with themselves. And when we do that, we become more compassionate to others. When we're confronted honestly with our own paradoxes, our own contradictions, our own struggles, and we get honest about them and we make space for them, then when we see those things in other people, we have a much broader space to understand them as a whole human.

51:41And that compassion is contagious. We live more simply, more gently. My dad always said before he died, his words were, go gently and he was it was this constant beautiful reminder just to live with with a bit less force in the world and a bit more allowance and allow yourself to step into a flow with with the world around you rather than forcing and thrusting yourself upon it yeah it's funny because when i think about some of the people i've interviewed all these really successful entrepreneurs yeah that have made loads of money and they're just obsessed with the grind and the work yeah i don't think they're living generally they're not living just and and there's there's a there's a place for both right yeah like i'm taking on now to answer your question about joy a more entrepreneurial path i'm starting a brand um i'm really excited about it i of course i want to um engage with a grind and of course we live in a capitalistic a culture i want to make a shitload of money i'm not ashamed to say that people always say america yeah there's that spirit and yeah it's the land of the you know it's the it's it's the land of opportunity and but i've aligned that with being of service meaning that my point the more money i can make the more i can give yeah right and one of the ways to have a broad influence and impact in this culture, specifically as it relates to mental health, is to invest in initiatives, research, resources, access to mental health care.

53:28And the more I can make, the more I can give and influence that and hopefully be of service to a broader demographic of people and invite them into a more compassionate and holistic existence that doesn't require that force and thrust because i don't believe that you have to have that to be successful in the way that those people have been no and i think if i was too much like them i would be miserable yeah yeah and remember it's only very rich people that will tell you that money doesn't matter yeah exactly you know so um but it's true because they have it so they have that experience too yeah it definitely can help with a lot of the problems you might be having and it certainly can make life easier in some ways yeah but it isn't always guaranteed to make you happier and it doesn't mean you're gonna have a better relationship yeah it doesn't mean that sure you can go on cooler vacations but some of the most unhappy couples i've ever seen are you know people in the celebrity space that have all the money in the world and for whatever reason they're like this isn't it but like it's supposed to be it why am i not happy well it's like a lot of them are they're workaholics and I look at them, I'm like, I would not trade lives with you.

54:43I think if you can somehow, you can make more money, but then you still have your freedom and you can still pick and choose what it is that you do with your time. That's the goal. If you can wake up and you're like, today I want to do this. And then next week I want to do this, but you're in complete control of what it is that you do. A lot of these people I've spoken to, they can't do that. There's far too much responsibility with the business they're trying to build or businesses that they're running, whatever it might be, or they're trading and they've always got to be staring at screen. It's like, yes, you're making a lot of money, but you're trapped.

55:20You're trapped by the pursuit and you're not, well, I see it as you're defining success as more versus seeing money as freedom units. i mean that's all it is it's freedom units and if you're not using the freedom units for freedom then what are you doing you know it's the amassing of more ultimately is a pretty it's a no-sum end game yeah it just doesn't and then you go away you hit the target you're like okay now this is the new target now there's the new target yeah i mean i'm more of the mind that like yeah make a lot of money to have a lot of impact and then to be able to grab coffee coffee with a friend on tuesday at 11 32 you know i want to be able to do that yeah instead of like yeah i'll schedule you in in a week and a half when i'm in town for you know five minutes and we can meet at this one spot and hug each other and have it you know like i don't want to do that yeah that sounds terrible to me you know so do you ever miss um doing some of the crazy shit like do you ever do you ever think oh what could be the next crazy adventure or do you think like it's been done i don't want to do that anymore well i'd want to do it from a different place meaning to say that that the photography came from a place of service for others would be not accurate i did that to be seen and it had great impacts but i loved being seen and i loved climbing i did love the act but i also loved being seen and validated externally and that was an extension of a lot of what happened and a lot of what i talk about in my childhood in the book um is going back to the story of something's wrong with me it gives you a little bit of fuck you watch me energy yeah and look you know look who i am in the world now if i were to go back and go climbing it would be from a place of i love the way this smells i love that this environment i love being above clouds i love really engaging with that and doing it um again for me but not feeling like i have to hide it behind this is all for you yeah you know and of course sometimes i'm like fuck dude all my friends who are still out doing it i'm like that looks really great you guys have but i but i think the next adventure for me is is is the evolution of how i can take all of that again that that energy and redirect it into something that has more impact yeah that's exciting and as you know entrepreneurship is really scary you know it's horrifying and you're taking big risks and you don't know if it's going to work and there's the potential of catastrophic failure at least financially and it can really impact your life in negative ways it's a carbon copy of going and climbing huge mountains yeah it's just different you know it's a different arena that you're stepping into yeah so i mean did you always did you always know you wanted to be more entrepreneurial was that always i always knew i wanted to be my own boss yeah i had the experience of in my late teens early 20s working for other people and i just remembered getting i was working at holistair i remember i was working my ass off yeah to try and i was assistant manager trying to do what i was supposed to do and then i remember my senior just telling me this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong it's not good i'm like literally busting my balls and it's not good enough and even if i work harder i'm not rewarded financially for working harder yeah so it was a combination of i want to do something where when i put more effort in the rewards come back i also wanted the freedom to choose when i would work like i could happily work non-stop three weeks but if i want to take a couple days off i want to be able to take a couple days off and then i just wanted the control of doing what i think is right yeah not somebody else tell me this is what you should do it's like no i want to do do it my way and have the full creative uh flow to do what it is i want to do When you were younger, when you were like a teenager, was there, did you fight against authority?

59:59Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even in school, it was kind of battered out of me eventually because it was quite a strict school. But when I was in primary school, I was just running around wild and doing what I kind of wanted to do. But the reason why I got away with it is because my grades were still quite good. Right, right. You were one of those lucky people. I wasn't failing in school. like i was i was going home and getting the work done but i still like i wanted that freedom when i was at school but then i went to the secondary school which was leeds grammar school and they were really strict right right and i remember getting told off a lot letters getting sent home being like if he doesn't stop messing around he's gonna get suspended yeah and the worst thing for me was uh disappointing my dad that was always the thing i wanted the least i never wanted to make him disappointed so i cleaned my act up so that he would not be disappointed is he still alive yeah yeah and how are you guys close yeah close yeah i mean i want to see him more but that's the only problem with me relocating to dubai i don't see him as as much as i would want to see him but he's yeah he's like being the best role model that i could have had for sure well it's i mean you're you're obviously he you've you've picked up some good things from him i mean is this evidence by your life it's interesting my dad died in in february and he was 80 um and just his his his birthday would have been i think uh thursday and um i was thinking about him so much but i was also just thinking about like because as i'm sure you're aware there's this there's this really interesting thing happening with men and boys these days and and i think about how much we learn from our fathers and how much we learn from culture and and how we can communicate

1:01:52um more clearly and honestly the experience of being men in a very confusing time to be a man and it's it's a yeah um i mean it's weird as well because even as good of a role model he was there was still a lot of stuff I had to figure out for myself. For sure, yeah. Which I feel... if i'm gonna be a father and have a son like i'm gonna tell him everything yeah i'm gonna prepare him fully yeah but i feel as though maybe i've if i compare my life to a dad's life he's stayed in one place pretty much he's worked at a corporate uh company you know it's been a fairly risk-free stable stable life yeah whereas mine is i feel like it's been the complete opposite like i'll take the risks i'll go all around the world i'll do whatever and uh with that there's I mean, we sit down and we talk, I'm like, there's like probably a lot he's not experienced.

1:02:53Yeah. Yeah. So it can be hard to kind of, I remember even just some of the, the business ventures I started and some of the risks, which I took, and I would tell him about it and he would just look at me like, good luck. Are you sure about that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think as soon as it started to pay off and especially with the whole social media thing, I mean, older people just don't get it yeah yeah and for him to kind of see i think what changed his mind was when some of his friends or people were coming up to him being like oh what's your son yeah he's like oh and they they always have nice things to say yeah yeah he's like oh okay yeah he must be doing something good then yeah i think that's ultimately mostly what parents want is they they want to see their children doing well but also doing good in the world yeah i think that provides a lot of pride for for many parents but i you know he and my dad i don't know how old your dad is but um they they they operated from a different generation that you know where stability was sort of at a premium but stability looked and and it is still in many ways but it looked and felt very different it was like i'm gonna work at this corporate job until i get my pension and then i'm gonna you know and then i'm gonna garden or whatever it is you know and that's that's one way of doing it and the world has shifted so much but we still value um i think still as men we are our culture values us from a performance perspective like how well are you performing how much status do you have how much wealth do you have and certainly i think there's a biological component of that when when we're picking potential partners um specifically women but i think they're what's so challenging at times especially for me is like how do we move away from the performance or at least less in the value of performance especially these days if you're if you're an impressionable teenager right you open up instagram like you're not told this is a good role model you should right listen to this person this is a bad role model it's like you kind of decide i'm going to follow this person and just because that person either has followers or oh look they've got these shiny cars and jewelry and all these nice things you're like okay well i want that so i'm going to follow this guy right and then this person is not necessarily teaching them good lessons or values yeah yeah so that's what i see nowadays it's just like it's a lot of females as well but also males there's a lot of role models which are not very good role models and the problem is once you accumulate a following you really have a responsibility whether you like it or not to be a good role model i totally agree and i think one of the issues is and we're going to do it today we're going to cut um you know we're going to cut some juicy sound bites out and we're going to put it on instagram and people are going to like what we say potentially and then one goes you say something and it goes viral or whatever a lot of times what i've noticed is what gets put out is too reductive it's juicy so it sticks and also So it can be just bad advice.

1:06:26Yeah. Especially in the mental health space. You know, as much as 50, there was a study that was done recently and it was, you know, a pretty loose study, but it's like they took a hundred TikTok mental health influencers and then they, or videos, right? And then they gave them to psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals and said, what's the accuracy of this? Over 50 of those videos were either contraindicative or bad, just bad mental health advice, completely factually wrong. And that's mental health where people are basing their ideas on something that they heard, a 15-second piece of advice from somebody who has no clinical education, who's picked it up from reading a couple books.

1:07:16And this is true with everything. It's true with diet. it's true with exercise it's true we because we live in a soundbite culture we just take on these ideas and then we form identities around ourselves and ideas around the world that then can then be completely off base yeah and lack values and and it can be coming from a role model who is potentially just not educated at all or is just not a very good i don't want to say not a good person i don't really believe in that but has an idea that can be harmful and young boys and men are especially susceptible from the perception or from the side of what we're supposed to look like in society in terms of our performance and young women are especially susceptible susceptible in how they should physically show up you know what their value is and that's mostly sexual sexuality that's mostly sexuality and for us it's mostly money and are those really the things that we want to be trading on no yeah it's so fascinating yeah what advice do you have for like the the younger impressionable people would you just say be careful of who you're choosing to follow i was i feel there's a lot of younger guys in particular who are just a little bit lost in particular many of them are just kind of like well i don't know what i should do with my life and that causes anger yeah right and scott galloway talks a lot about and i'm going to get his numbers wrong here so this is not information to take away as truth right listen to scott Galloway, but he talks about how, you know, 98 % of what were some huge disproportionate percentage of women are seeking this disproportionate tiny percentage of men.

1:09:16And so this vast swath of young men and boys have no access to potential partners, right? And what that does is it makes them very angry. So they look for ways to access those potential partners and they look at the metrics of those men that are that are sort of they think are getting that and then they pursue that and they don't pursue it with thinking critically about it they don't pursue it with looking at is this actually true is this what people are going is it the money or is it ambition you know ambition is really great to go after um is it is it status and wealth or is it self-respect and confidence?

1:10:00You don't have to have the money. Ambition is great. You don't have to have the status and fame, but self-confidence and self-belief and self-respect are absolutely essential. Those are attractive qualities. It's kind of like when, this is another great one, it's kind of like when people hear, oh, grip strength is about, If I have a strong grip, that's an indicator of longevity. Yeah, yeah. Right? So then they start doing grips, right? While they're eating potato chips. Grip strength is an indicator of longevity because you've lived a life of doing hard, heavy shit. Yeah. Right? The same is true.

1:10:40We think that it's about the grip strength. No, it's about your lifestyle. We think it's about the money. No, it's about what actually got you the money. and you might not end up with the same amount but that thing is attractive yeah rather than the money and and for the people that are pursuing the guy with money they're actually not pursuing the guy with money yeah that's the trap yeah it's funny because there's a lot of a lot of the young guys who've come into money just purely from crypto right right so they got lucky with like the crypto to meme coins whatever it might be and they haven't actually developed those characteristics that most successful wealthy people have accumulated right from just going out and doing hard shit and yeah communicating making deals like learning to to just socialize yeah yeah and i and i would say this like if you you ask for advice my advice is this be careful of who you follow question them critically just because they're saying something that resonates doesn't mean it's true um and and i would and i would hope and this is this might sound a little soft for people, but I don't fucking care.

1:11:48The quality of your heart is the most important thing that you can cultivate. At the end of the day, at the end of your life, that is going to attract the most beneficial things to you. It might not be money, status, fame, but it will attract amazing people. And amazing people are the ones that are going to make your life fulfilling. It's community. It's love. It's time well spent. And when you're surrounded by those people, the extraneous stuff becomes less important because you're not trying to fill the void of value and love with something that can never fill it. So my advice is always like, yeah, that's great.

1:12:30Be ambitious for sure. Be able to define your purpose for sure. But really focus on cultivating being a good human yeah that's so important that's it you know the cars are cool you know the the sex drugs and rock and roll it's cool i'm not saying don't do it but what's the heart underneath it yeah and then also i would suggest choosing to surround yourself with people that have good hearts and choose you based on the quality of their heart, not how you perform in the world. Yeah. It's weird because I'm at a point now where, you know, I could speak to someone, you can almost feel their vibe. It's something you can't really explain, but you feel it.

1:13:21Maybe it's your gut instinct, your gut feeling. It's your nervous system. Yeah. that is something which definitely improves over time yeah because when you're i remember when you're younger like teens early 20s i was always i was too nice and too naive and i just assumed that everybody was a good person right obviously i learned the hard way and as you go through life and you meet more people it's it becomes easier to filter the bad people out and to keep the good people in yeah um and it's hard because i i don't know if i was younger if you know this the certain regardless of what people may have told me like oh watch out for this person watch out for that person i just don't think i would have known yeah yeah well i mean think of it this way like you can teach knowledge but you can't teach wisdom one of the issues with Instagram and TikTok is that we get these nuggets of wisdom and then we start parroting them, but our actions aren't in alignment with that.

1:14:28However, on the other side of that, this is a process and there is something definitely true about being a young man that asks us to be sort of the warrior archetype and go out and be a little forceful. and so it's still a process uh it's still something that people have to discover for themselves and that oftentimes takes hard knocks and it takes learning that not everybody can be trusted and it takes learning that the ambition doesn't actually fulfill you necessarily or that the attainment doesn't fulfill you but those lessons are vital they're vital you have to go do it in the same way that trauma everybody's trying to avoid having trauma trauma makes us resilient yeah being born is traumatic yeah right it life is savage we don't want a a culture in which we're not faced with challenges yeah you need it sometimes sometimes i actually miss like even you go through a bad breakup as much as it sucks oh you're not going to be more motivated to go to the gym and sort your life out during that pit like that that that hunger of yeah i'm gonna prove them wrong yeah they're gonna they're gonna regret doing that yeah yeah it's it sometimes i wish i had that like you know when you get too comfortable in life is going great you you do fall into becoming a little bit more complacent and i want to like snap out of that a little bit sometimes well it takes you know like it takes more when you're younger it's it's easy to just be like okay i'm gonna go get it i'm gonna go get it and then you get a little bit comfortable And you're like, well, I don't need to go get it as much.

1:16:09Breakups in specific are an incredible source of, you know, empires have been made. Whole swaths of people have been killed, you know, like in the wake of a breakup, you know, like, all right, I'm going to take over that whole fucking kingdom. Watch me, you know. and and and yet we to be in them and to to experience heartbreak is truly one of the most i i would argue the most painful experience that we go through aside from maybe death like observing loved ones dying it is fundamentally life-altering when you especially well i don't want to say especially as men i'll speak as a man when you you actually decide to give your heart to somebody freely and that heart is then rejected it cages us up it has the potential to lock us up and be like well you asked for my heart but and i gave it to you and you didn't want it i'm never fucking doing that again yeah that's that's dangerous because that leads to more anger that leads to more resentment and and anger is sort of the primary emotion that men are taught from a very young age is sort of the the only the only real reservoir that's appropriate for us and that's tragic yeah you know like i'm sad well i'm fucking pissed off i'm frustrated i'm fucking pissed off like i'm hurt i'm fucking like and we just we just get angry and heartbreak can can do that to people yeah it's i've experienced it and someone i remember someone asked me on a q a they were like what experience is an experience that everybody should have i didn't answer i didn't answer that question but then it came to me after I filmed it and I think one of them is the feeling of being in love with someone like really being in love with them and them loving you back it's probably not always going to be completely equal but when two people are truly into someone and you have that moment of love it's like a drug it is it's like it's crazy but the problem is when that person has fully let themselves go and you've given them yourself to them, usually it doesn't end well.

1:18:37I mean, even if you do stay together, that intensity of the love doesn't last. It just kind of evolves into a different type of love. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. There's to some degree it is a game and I've, you know, i am a person who has given myself fully at times too fully right to to the point where then that becomes unattractive um that's a tricky one somebody it's a tricky it's tricky right but i also think the challenge on the other side for women if we're talking about heteronormative relationships or anybody on the other side is rather than running away from somebody who's giving themselves fully is to engage with it and say, Hey, like, I love that you're doing this.

1:19:25And I'm requesting that you make yourself a little bit more inaccessible to me. And that allows me to want you more. That's a healthy adult dynamic that's operating on that polarity. And, and, and being able to communicate that and articulate it is essential for long-term, i think is essential for long-term health and the longevity of a relationship in general is to is and that that rather than withdrawing the partner at that point is actually leaning in yeah even though they're saying can i get a little bit more distance i'm not leaving but can i have a little bit more distance yeah they're actually leaning into the issue versus like well fuck it you've made yourself too accessible now i'm out yeah and it's but it's hard to do yeah i wish like The first time it happened, I wish my current self could just go back and be like, hey, look, okay, this is how you feel, but this is how you need to navigate through this feeling.

1:20:21Because if you're not carefully going to fuck it up. You're going to fuck it up. You're going to push them away. You're going to push them away. And then we end up in that situation where we're like, man, I, God, I just, I was just trying so hard. Not in a bad way. I was just, I was, I was doing the thing that I thought I was supposed to do and it didn't work. Yeah. But going back to like the feeling of heartbreak. I think even now, as much as I don't want to experience it, I'm willing to take the risk to experience it again because that feeling of being into someone is so rare for me. Yeah. And it is, although when I think about it, it's scary.

1:21:04If a woman can make me feel like that and open up, then that means a lot. Like that doesn't happen often. And I almost thank the universe for that person being in my life to make me open up. Even when now I'm so resistant to it. And I'm like, I've got thick walls up now. But the fact that there is somebody out there that can still break them down and make me open up, I'm like, oh, it's kind of nice. Two things. A, the fact that you can articulate that you have thick walls up is beautiful. That's actually going to invite people in because they're going to be like, oh, he's aware of the walls, right?

1:21:45That's a beautiful thing. And to say it the way I say it is like, hey, I'm not sure what I'm capable of right now, but there's an invitation into my life to explore that. And then that gives them the room to make that decision. The other thing I'd say, and this is something I'm really playing with recently, is I don't believe that other people actually make us i believe that all love is and all emotion is self-sourced meaning all the relationship is is a container in which you feel safe enough to generate that amount of love you're actually not feeling love from another person you're all emotions are coming from within and when you learn that you can also learn to generate those feelings even when you're not in a relationship and that creates an environment in which other people feel drawn to you because you are literally walking around in love yeah you're just in love it doesn't and it doesn't have to be with anything or anybody you're just creating that feeling internally and it's infectious people like it like wow they can feel it yeah they want to they want to yeah just be in love with the world be in love with yourself all of that is self-sourced and all it takes is when you're sitting there and just think of it as you think of ramdas talks about this but like think of somebody you love or you have loved or anything that you love and feel that feel what it's like just generate that feeling and then push it out and then just go being in love actually is it's accessible to you right now in this moment to drop into that quiet place and know and feel what love feels like and generate it in yourself and then live in that that is magnetic yeah it's powerful that's fucking cool yeah but we think it's about the other person yeah it's not about the other person it's about the container that you feel safe enough to express that in but you don't need a container actually the world is your container your life is your fucking container that's enough yeah when was the last time you when was the last time you were in like when i had those feelings yeah yeah uh i think it was last year yeah yeah and then what happened was it just fucking terrible breakup it just smashed you yeah yeah but it was oh i guess it was kind of flawed from the start i don't know how much i should get into it but it It was, first of all, long distance, not ideal.

1:24:27And then second of all, it was just maybe I confused it a little bit with passionate love a little bit. And then at the same time, I don't think I truly knew the person from the beginning. I mean, this usually happens a lot in relationships. You see the best version of each other. Even me, like, I'm on my best behavior. Of course. They're on their best behavior. and it's just as time went on the mask is revealed yeah and then there were there were red flags where i thought oh shit like yeah i thought this was like the one yeah yeah and then there's these moments where you just realize okay this is this is not going to work and then i had to come to the fact that like this this person is not the right person for me long-term relationship it's not going to work but like this thing right now that i'm experiencing is great and um it's just really weird how you can be so close with somebody like literally they are your best friend and you spending so much time with each other and it's very intimate it's very passionate and then the next moment is just gone no like literally no contact and then you're just kind of you left there thinking what the fuck was that it's confusing like you just it's almost like they've died so they've just they've gone and it's painful yeah and it's and as much as you want to like you just want to reach out you just want to message them you're like hey how you doing you're like it's not a good idea it's that's that's something that i that's that's advice i would give to all young people all people in general when you break up stop reaching out yeah it's not a it's not a form of cruelty and some therapists people might disagree with this this is just what i've sort of come to.

1:26:15I agree. I'm not saying it's the best way. I don't want people to mistake what I'm saying is this perfect therapeutic advice. I've just realized if there's, and you can't do it from this perspective, but if there's a hope for a future at all, you need to give people space, considerable space. If you're having ideas about, oh my God, these realizations about what I did and how I, that person is not the person to share that with. Share it with your boys, share it with your dear friends, share it with your parents, but give it space. Because the constant reaching out is actually going to push that person further away.

1:26:52And then if they choose to reach out again, which I mean, especially if your life is on a upward trajectory, they usually do reach out. Then decide what it is that you want to do. And then you're in a position of power. And I don't mean that in a disproportionate way. you're just in a position of power to say, actually, I want to look at this more critically now and go, what was I attracted to? Was it an image of you that I had? Was it your beauty? Was it your money? Was it like, or was it your heart? Yeah. Because if it was your heart, then I'm more willing to explore. But if I can get really honest about like, was it your celebrity?

1:27:29Was it your whatever? And I've dated incredible women, you know, who are actresses and and and are you know that are very public and and and and and i've always asked myself the question is it because i was i was enamored by their visibility or their beauty hypnotized or yeah or is it because i really love their heart yeah and i would say in general it's because i love their heart but that doesn't mean it's a great match yeah that's good yeah sometimes I, that's one of the reasons why I don't like to fall in love or have those really intense feelings because I start to not think properly. Of course.

1:28:10Like my rational brain and logical brain, which is, I believe has got me quite far in life. Yeah. Yeah. Is silence. It's offline. It's completely offline. And then I just start making some wild decisions. Well, you're in your, you're in your, you're in your feeling brain. You're not in your rational brain. and then you're just in your stupid brain, you know, and it can be about sex. It can be about, it's all the things. Yeah. It's crazy making. It's so funny because it happens obviously with some of my close friends. Yeah. I'm like, oh fuck. Oh shit. Here we go. I try sitting down and be like, look, you're not thinking properly.

1:28:45Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do this. Don't do it. And they're like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. Totally. They're texting at the same time, you know, like I'm coming, you know, like it's just, it's so, it's so funny. And then also, I think it's important not to be prescriptive about, you know, how relationships should be. And because, because again, we get on Instagram, we hear, oh, it has to be this way or this is what we're. No, man, love is crazy and it has many different forms and they can all work. So stop trying to be prescriptive about don't get too rigid about what it has to look like either.

1:29:23You know what I mean? Yeah. Because, again, bad advice. It's like, it has to look this way. You have to be, don't sleep with the guy until the third. I do half of my friends who are married hooked up on the first date and they're happy and great. You know, some people that doesn't work. They want to create a longer, a slower burn that can also work. But like we, we live in this prescriptive world. It's like, it didn't work this way last time. So it can never work that way again. Of course, it's good to be aware of that stuff. But yeah, I think we, man, we overthink fucking everything, dude. speaking of love do you still have that love for photography so this is funny we haven't talked about like the any of the reason why i would be there or be here with you like nobody knows who the fuck is this cory guy um so i worked for national geographic magazine for about 15 years as a photographer and i was you know i was a working photographer for about 25 years um And this is something which you taught yourself.

1:30:25You literally just, you went and picked up a camera and you. Initially, yes. And then I got some guidance from a guy named Andrew Phelps. Actually, the book Bipolar is dedicated to Andrew Phelps and my first photo editor, National Geographic, Sadie Courier. um so i'm mostly self-taught yes um but and alongside of that career i was working as a professional athlete uh climbing uh mostly himalayan climbing so everest and um and i was wildly in love with it at first like wildly in love um and over time like any relationship you know it burned hot for a long time and then it started to fade and then i realized i was in an unhealthy relationship with it do i still have love for it yeah in the way that you have love for somebody that you were with for a lot of years and and then you broke up and you can look back and go god thank you god what a beautiful gift you were both as climbing and photography you know um and do i still love picking up a camera occasionally and making a great image of course of course that doesn't go away um but as a career i'm more excited about broader broader scopes of creativity and creation yeah so but i look at the work now i feel like even just skimming through the book you've you've captured everything is there anything you like not captured uh there's a lot of places i haven't been but but you know i've done everything from you know adventure to to conflict zones to climate change to disappearing cultures and um i've seen a lot but there's a lot i haven't captured but i've but i've i've been able to touch on and and visit some of the biggest concepts and um sort of aspects of human nature and i feel so grateful for it yeah i mean even with social media as a whole especially instagram i miss the days when it was all about the pictures yeah me too i i love photography a lot more than i love video but that's coming from me who has a big youtube channel yeah i do do you ever shoot do you just pick up cameras and wander around and take pictures no well i think this is this is something which made me think when i reflect that i was maybe meant to do this so whenever there was a holiday with the guys when i was like 15 16 17 i was the only one there with a camera so it was this was before iphone side cameras i had a digital camera and i think i realized if if nobody was going to take pictures there would be no evidence of this even happening so i wanted it for the memories and also i think the only social media platform at the time was facebook so i wanted to also share the holiday on facebook with my friends so without even realizing that was i was becoming a content creator yeah just by documenting the trips that i was taking and i'm so glad i did because i have all of these old photos was still on facebook today from when i traveled and then uh when i went to university the same thing happened i was still the only person there with the digital camera capturing things and then i think it kind of the fact that when i found my love for the gym and i was getting in shape i also wanted to show off like hey look what i've look at my bicep and you yeah you want that kind of recognition from it so it was a combination of both um was i good at photography no everything was on auto mode right and shit some of mine still are but um it's something i'll always i'll always like i mean now it's a lot easier when i have my team yeah yeah uh one of my guys rob who just he loves photography a lot yeah and he's i don't even know how many pictures he's taken of me yeah the tens of thousands yeah yeah but i love it because it's it's you're capturing a moment in time of your life and i know when i'm older and even now i look back at the trips i've taken i can just see like everything that's happened and it's amazing and i think i would like to i would like to learn how to use a camera more but then probably means that i'm not going to be in the picture which is which is my most famous picture by the way is it the avalanche yeah it's post avalanche in pakistan in 2011 in the winter of 2011 and you know i'll let people read the book um but yeah we got hit by an avalanche and i and i took a picture of myself afterwards after we survived um and then that was the cover of national geographic and it was this whole you know thing but one of the things that i encourage people now is is is outside of that is like what i see is people taking pictures of themselves in environments and but not the environment but not the environment yeah so turn the camera outside of yourself like document what's happening around you versus just yourself.

1:36:02My friend was just at the Louvre and he had this funny comment about looking at the front of the line as people were going up to see the Mona Lisa. 90 % of the people were facing away from the Mona Lisa, looking at their camera, taking a picture of themselves in front of the Mona Lisa. You're not there to show yourself. You're there to experience the most famous piece of art, for better or worse, in history. Put the camera down. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit that you went to the Louvre. That's a place just to be with yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Like you've completely taken yourself out of the energetic artistic exchange that Da Vinci, you know, had intended.

1:37:01It's the same with some of the nightclubs now. Yeah, yeah. You're going there to enjoy the night, to enjoy the music, and to be present. And I see the videos now on social media. Everybody's like that. Yeah. Wanting to show off to the world that like, hey, I'm here. Yeah. Like, be jealous of the fact that I'm here and enjoying myself. i got bottle service bitches and then you you see the the point of view from the dj nobody's dancing everybody's just like that yeah and i was fortunate enough to go to enjoy a party especially visa when i was like 18 19 years old yeah and it was a completely different experience yeah i wish i wish more nightclubs would actually um and it's counterintuitive to uh to our culture but i i wish more nightclubs would actually prohibit phones yeah i think that they are trying to do it there's um michael bb he he throws an event every so often in dc 10 where it's a no phones event yeah and the energy is completely different totally different because people are connecting yeah people are are there for the human experience and the phone you know suicide rate, if you look at the graph of suicide, the incidents of suicide and how steeply it's gone up, it starts around, I think, 2011.

1:38:23What happened in 2011, 2010? The iPhone. Right. And then we had social media. And so this is not just a fundamental issue of like people being self-involved and taking themselves out of the moment. This is actually an issue of isolation where the phones are creating a deeper sense of isolation. We need, as humans, deep, intimate, emotional connection with other humans. And the more we spend time on our phones, and now both of us are content creators, so I get the irony here. The more we spend time on our phones, the more we're eroding the fundamental need of our biology, and that's making us fucking miserable.

1:39:05and not only that but we're comparing ourselves to the snapshots of the best moments of everybody else yeah why the fuck am i not like that well you're seeing literally when you think of it this way i think of photography shutter shutter speeds right you are looking at one one two hundred and 2 ,500th of a second. That's how long it takes for the shutter to snap. Or 1 ,500th of a second of somebody's life. 1 ,500th of a second of somebody's life. And you're judging the totality of your life against that? That's fucking crazy. Yeah. And it says nothing about if they're actually happy. and my guess is is that they're taking tons of pictures of themselves they might not be as happy you know yeah so yeah i know when i'm on social media i'm less happy yeah i know the doom scrolling uh makes me feel very strange afterwards if i get carried away with the endless scrolling and i came i come out of it i'm like what did i just do like overload of information yeah and a lot of that information and content was something which i didn't really hasn't really benefited my life right i'm better off just being present and just thinking reflecting or feeling yeah you know and i think that's that's the fundamental issue that we're getting to in in humanity right now is that we're we're not actually um allowing ourselves to think and feel we're outsourcing our attention and we've built an economy around it that demands our attention or at least we think it does and uh and yeah we black out we literally black out and it's not just social media it's you know for men and boys it's porn it's it's all of these things that hyper stimulate us exhaust our dopamine systems and then make us feel shitty because we're in a you know a deficit like a literal hormonal deficit and we're wondering why do i feel like shit so we go back to the phone or other candy or the porn or the drugs or whatever it is yeah it's so weird well we have to wrap up unfortunately studio time has come to an end so first of all i appreciate that conversation i really enjoyed it i didn't even need to look my notes right great i love it that flowed um where can people find you first of all and the book the books yeah the books so i'll go with books first the first my my memoir is called the color of everything um you can find it on amazon that's the easiest the one thing i always ask with the books is if you buy it and enjoy it buy it for somebody else don't tell them about it buy it for them because we're much less likely to to read a book that somebody suggests um and i say that because that's how we support artists and people doing that the second book is called bipolar um and it's a collection of photographs from my life and obviously it's a nod to the diagnosis but also it's both poles i photograph this is going straight on my coffee table i love it um so and then and then cory richards.com or at cory richards on instagram and it's just C-O-R-Y, no E.

1:42:37But yeah, and I hope people engage with this stuff because like I said, it's about making other people feel seen and heard and that's what I hope for my life. But thank you for having me, man. It's been, yeah, I love these. This is one of the best podcasts I've done. I say that, they get better and better, but I fucking love it when people aren't looking at notes. so you crushed it I just want to say this was amazing thank you thank you man I appreciate it yeah