Cameron Diaz on Motherhood, Aging, and Trusting Your Gut

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1:50bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers. Here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. This week we're sharing a gem from the Goop Podcast archives. lives.

2:17Today's guest is my dear friend, Cameron Diaz. Over the years, it's been incredible to watch Cameron's path unfold. What I admire most about Cameron is her curiosity and willingness to be a student of life. Her organic wine company, Aveline, is a testament to Cameron's passion for transparency and her unlimited capacity for learning. In our conversation today, we talked about honoring our instincts, the power of permission, why aging can be a mindset, and the joy of cultivating a friendship that gets stronger over time. Let's get to my chat with Cameron Diaz.

2:55Hi, honey. Hi, ma 'am. How are you? I'm good. How are you? We're on the Will Cole protocol. Aha. So we're in the soup phase now. Oh, wow. I love it so much. Okay, wait. So can Can I ask you about this? Is it like an inflammation reduction program? You know, this is like my porn. I know this is your porn. So I feel like it's like his standard cleanse, right? Probably would use everybody to start. So exciting. Do you feel good? I feel amazing. Wow. Not only just like my head, but my body. And then we did all the blood tests. We haven't gotten all of our results yet. Oh my God. It's so fun. It's so good.

3:35good. I'm really excited for it because I feel like it's like the reset for in our life. You know what I mean? Like a real reset. From here, there's no going back, you know, except for when we're in Italy. Right. Then you have to go off piece. That's what I always do. I would like to just sort of pick up on that. It's so interesting because you wrote this book, Longevity Book, which is such a great book. And it was, you know, all about understanding aging on a cellular level and you did a shit ton of research on it. I'm curious now that you're doing a reset, was this in your research, like autophagy?

4:11I don't know if you're doing like time-restricted eating. Is this kind of aligned with your philosophy around longevity that you learned from researching the book? For sure. It definitely is. I know this, right? So I have this information. Exactly. I've read, I've done the research. I've written the book. I'm now 50. I wrote that book when I was 40. You're not 50. Well, I am. No, you're not. Every year I'm going to be 50. You do this every year, every time. Because once I get past six months after my birthday, I'm essentially my next - No, we are not 50. We are 49. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm almost 50.

4:59I'm almost 50. Thank you. I am at that point where it matters. Like everything matters now, not that the, for the last, you know, 49 years didn't matter, but it matters in a way now, because I'm right up against, you know, menopause. And that's when these big shifts come. When we start to lose our estrogen, our hormone production just disappears essentially. And with that, you know, it becomes that next phase of life. And, you know, I have this chance now and I know it, the last eight years have been really about building other aspects of myself. I had been focused so much on my physical, you know, wellness and, you know, training constantly.

5:46And I, the last eight years I shifted into another gear. I went in and did some really deep personal healing and healing with Benj and, you know, built my life in a completely different way, you know, surrounding at the center point of it being my family, my marriage, my child, my husband, and that was a complete different shift. And it really took me away from, you know, that other aspect of myself that I had solely focused on really, you know, for so long. Do you feel like there's a correlation between your physical strength and like a self-protection mechanism? One thousand percent. One thousand.

6:28I mean, you know me well now. I love that. You're like, that's actually a rhetorical question. That's actually a statement. An observation you've made. yes I would say for sure that a lot of that was like self-protection I mean gosh to look back on my former you know self prior to this work my heart breaks a lot for that person you know and the sort of sadness of total unselfawareness and is that a word I'm self-aware it is now It is now. Y 'all know what I'm talking about.

7:11But, you know, I look at it and go, oh, yeah, that's what that was for. That was what that was about. I've been contemplating this a lot lately as I've been driving myself to, like, achieve, achieve, achieve since I was young. And I feel like so much of it comes out of injury. For example, if I, you know, do X, Y, and Z, then it's like data points to my little broken kid that like, no, I must be okay because I achieved X, Y, and Z. And I assume that it's like that with physical strength. Like if you're really strong, you know, it's data points to yourself that like you can survive anything. I can survive anything.

7:49It was always life or death for me. I know. Yeah. No. So it, it always felt that way anyhow. And in some cases it was, but it always felt life or death for me from my youngest age. I can remember I was always trying to prove my strength and I know where it comes from. It's, you know, from being the scrawny little wiry, little crazy child in a neighborhood with a bunch of boys, you know, picking up boys, you know, five times my size, you know, to just prove to them that I was strong. And it was like a parlor trick. They'd be like, get over here. And then I'd lift them up, you know, from their legs.

8:30But all of that came from trying just to prove myself, you know. And so now you're at a place where you've given yourself grace from that, which has been really beautiful to watch you traverse through because it takes a real different kind of strength to unpack those systems that kept you safe in your mind and kept you moving forward with great velocity. and I really have watched you over these last, gosh, it's a long time now, like seven years since you met Ben or something like that. We're going on eight years of marriage. Wow. That's crazy. Is this like your age thing where you say you've been married for 10 years, but you really only - Probably.

9:15Well, we got married in 2015. There you go. Okay. Okay. So, but that being said, one of the things that was like, helps me realize like how sort of essential and to growth it was to do so was that all the tools and skills that we, we learn as a child to survive really do work because we're here. Right. So we survived it. Right. The, whatever tricks we learned or behavior or whatever it was really worked because we, we got through our childhood, but that was our childhood. And what worked then doesn't necessarily work now in our adult selves. You know, I went, Oh yeah. Like, why am I still using the mechanisms of a five-year-old to survive when I'm one, not, I am that five-year-old.

10:14So I I'll always be a part that she's always a part of me, but I can now choose to function different in the world and make different decisions and not have to use those mechanisms that were completely unconscious, by the way, it's the, it's the, it's the recognizing them, right. And pulling them out of the darkness. Yeah. It's an integration, right? It's like real integration. How does your marriage help you do that? Well, I'm really fortunate to have, like you are a partner who does the same work, you know, I mean, just having somebody who does it with you is like everything you can't do it.

10:54You can do it alone, but you can't do it to the degree of which you do with your partner in marriage. you know, it's an interpersonal relationship. You can do it on your own, but if you're not engaged in a relationship where the two of you are in entrenched in life with one another. And by the way, those are where all of those, those things come from is from the, the entrenchment with your family and your childhood with your parents and your siblings. And, you know, all those things are woven together at that point. So like to practice doing things differently, you have to be in yet another relationship that has that, you know, that enmeshment.

11:36And so I have, I have a great partner who is, you know, just an incredible human and just really lucky to have, you know, found him when I did. And we were both in the same place at the same time. He said this to me the other day. He was like, you know what I noticed about us? And I was like, about the both of us. And I was like, what? And he's like, we're not half steppers. You know what I mean? he's like we go hard you know and I was like we really do like we go hard we don't like half step you know we go in and well life is finite you know and as we said you're almost 50 right it's like almost 50 she's almost before you barely what's interesting is like you know because you're you're 49 you have a two-year-old which is mind boggling to me.

12:29Like I'm exhausted watching you follow her around when I'm sitting in my chair. I know. It's like just busy, busy, busy, busy. Right. So how much of it is like, do you think like, you know, we think of ourselves as, oh, we're on the decline, we're aging, et cetera. But how much of that is a mindset? How much of that is a factor of inflammation or of like wear and tear and how reversible is it? The human body is magic. You know, it really is just that every living being, all it wants to do is live. So you give it an opportunity in any condition and it'll find a way to stay alive. But if you create the optimal environment for it, if you give it everything that it really needs, you know, or the best that you can do, at least, I know it's really hard.

13:22I mean, I find it, you know, having a two-year-old, if I didn't have, you know, people who were supporting me in it, I couldn't do it as well as I'm aspiring to do it. But, you know, really hard to do everything, you know? So I think that it's, it really is a mindset.

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14:52What do you think are like the most kind of basic accessible wellness tenants? Like if people want to start feeling better right away. I think it's about, I think it's about elimination really. Hmm. Yes. It's not what you do. It's what you don't do, I think is kind of like the easiest thing to do. Right. So like, you know, if you, if you eat a lot of sugar, if that's one of your vices and that's one of the things that you do and you're, you know, you do it and you always regret it, you know, find what it will take for you to not have to satisfy that craving of sugar. Cause it really isn't in, it's an imbalance in the body and the gut.

15:36when you find yourself up against, you know, an absurd, like a crazy craving for something and you can't stop yourself. At that point, it's not you. It's all the microbes in your body controlling your brain and making it. We know this by science now that these microbes exist and they do have a direct line to our brain and they influence our behavior. It's not a little thing. That's a big thing. That's why I love goop so much because you can find it on goop.com because you have that information of several different ways to, to approach that. And that I think is probably for most people, the most challenging, and it also is the most devastating to your wellbeing, you know, because it does take a major toll on the body.

16:26But I also think it's just like, you know, anything that you're, if you're looking at anything that you're doing in extreme, how can you moderate that behavior? You know, how can you come back to some sort of center or eliminate it completely? I think it's what we don't do that benefit us a lot more. Yeah. Not spending so much time on our phones, you know, that's for sure. Not sleeping with electronics in your room. Do you do that? Do you take your phone out? Well, I have, I used to, but now I just, I have the monitor on my phone. So I sleep with it, but I push it as far as way as I can for my head, but I don't have any other electronics.

17:07Like we don't have a TV in the bedroom, the led lights for the light switches are all turned off so that there's just no light in the room. Right. And how do you balance? So like also what's been happening in the past couple of years, you've become an entrepreneur. You have a fantastic wine company. It's called Aveline, not Aveline, guys. I learned that the hard way. Aveline. Aveline. Aveline. And one of the reasons that I love it, aside from the fact that it's really delicious, is it's really thoughtful. And I think as we think about the component of wellness with alcohol, like the fact that you guys have stripped out, you know, their organic grapes, you've stripped out all the fillers and the weird additives and the added sugar.

17:54And to be honest, it's a big difference drinking a wine like that than a conventional wine. And, but then some people are like, oh, you know, alcohol and wellness don't go together. I personally don't subscribe to that theory because I think everything in moderation, you know, but, but did you think of when you were starting Avaline, did you think of it like in, in terms of how it pertained to overall wellness and the, the impact that it would have on the body? Yeah. I mean, I think that it was born out of a personal desire on both Catherine and my part. I mean, we were feeling like even one glass of wine wasn't feeling good to us, you know, and conversation was like, but we just want to have a glass of wine.

18:36Why can't we have a glass of wine? You know, because it's not an excess, you know, and we're not asking for like, you know, to be able to drink a bottle of wine and not have a hangover. We're just saying like, let's have a glass of wine and enjoy ourselves and not feel terrible the next day. And what are the things in conventional wine that make us feel terrible the next day? I can tell you personally, when I drink a wine that has added sugar in it or colors, concentrates, or aren't, isn't made by organic grapes, I can feel the effects of those wines more so than when I drink a wine that is organic, that doesn't have any added sugars, that doesn't have any colors or concentrates or any of the other, you know, 73 additives that can be utilized in the winemaking process for multiple reasons.

19:27You know, I just, I feel better personally. That's what I seek out in all aspects of my lifestyle, how I live my life. I eat organic, you know, vegetables I have for a really long time, you know, grass-fed meats and, you know, trying to, you know, in the pursuit of clean, clean meats and humane meats in my home, I don't allow any, you know, toxic cleaning products. I haven't very important to, you know, all the things that, you know, detergents for my clothing, my body, my hair, my face, everything that I try to find, you know, the, the, it to be just as, you know, in this category of clean that, you know, for us, Catherine and I didn't create the category of clean for wine.

20:13Clean exists across every category of consumption at this point. It's table stakes and everything from cosmetics, skincare, food, you know, it's that you have to have like an organic product because that's what the consumer wants. You know, what I want, what you want is what, you know, the it's overwhelming at this point. And it's so smart that you identified that as a white space and then you guys created the business because it really is what people... Well, I have a phenomenal partner. You know, Catherine, she's like so smart. She's such a baller. She's amazing. She's so amazing. I mean, obviously I wouldn't have done this without her because I don't know how to start a business and it's what she does in her sleep, literally.

21:00But that brings me to my next question for you, which is, you know, you are super engaged in the business. It's been really fun to see you, your entrepreneurial side emerge. I'm wondering like, what have you learned in this one plus years, you know, like versus the early days? You know, I think I've learned so much. I mean, whether or not I can actually apply it anywhere or ever do it like repeated, I'd be like, I'd, you know, I'd still be, Oh yeah, I remember when we did that, you know? But I think that the biggest thing is really just understanding what your brand is, like really staying true to what that brand is.

21:40You know, why did you start it? What is the sort of the values of that brand? And how do you keep maintaining that through all of the challenges that you come up across, especially with a product like wine? I mean, believe me, forget about just the industry itself and how challenging the industry is. You're working with also, you know, you're working with an agricultural product, right? So we're so reliant. I think that it's just sort of like, how do we keep from, you know, diluting what the brand is and why, you know, why we started it and what, how we can just maintain its integrity and keep pushing it forward and building it and innovating and growing and just trying to keep ahead.

22:28And then just the business aspect of it, if you're breaking it down to like business, that's a whole, I mean, that I've learned so much about watching, you know, how this all unfolds and, you know, watching Catherine, she has so many companies as it is that she runs and has already built herself. She's so like, I don't know, business-like. She is. Like, you're so like professional. and I'm like always like and then I bring myself down I'm like calm down Cameron put it away put it away slow it down straight back try to be try to be an adult here well I think you make a good point you know it's like when you're a founder and you're coming at something with a ton of passion it's hard I mean it was hard for me I'm still working on developing like my corporate persona I remember when we were releasing our first Netflix show and the great marketing department at Netflix, I had this idea for an asset or I saw an Instagram and I was like, what the fuck is this?

23:35Like, this totally goes against the whole point. And it's like, okay, breathe, breathe. You know, but I think it's because there's so much passion around enabling a vision to come to life. And there's so much work and dedication that goes in from a founder, especially when it's all passion, right? And no MBA. Right. So you kind of have to like learn your, the vernacular and learn the sort of more corporate persona. I mean, honestly, it's still something that I work on. Well, it's so funny because I remember when we were in London, when you were doing just the Goop newsletter and your computer would sit open for like a day or two with like the letter, which is kind of like compose it as you went.

24:17And then like, hold on, I got to send, I got to send the letter out. And then you'd like push send. And then like when you moved to LA and then you started like really building Goop out, I remember you were like reading all these books about, you know, entrepreneur and, you know, entrepreneurial pursuits and, you know, business. And then you've got mentors and then you started building this. And I was like, whoa, like that's serious. And then now where you're at, where you're just like full on, like you're a CEO, you are a boss. You are fully running the ship and it's like so awesome to watch.

24:57And so amazing that that just like literally started on your countertop. You know, I feel like it was a little self-serving for you to put out those letters because you were like, everybody calls you for everything. And yo, everybody just relax. My letter's coming out. You'll get all the information, put in your requests. I'll try to meet them. Like, you know, you're like trying to get back on the phone calls. but yeah I uh you know but also Catherine you know Catherine doesn't have any degrees she's got a GED out of high school I love it

25:34it's really testament to the fact that we have unlimited capacity to educate ourselves and especially in this day and age when I think you know there's a generation really questioning whether college is worth it and, you know, all the student debt that people accrue, like, is it worth it? And I do think there's like perception around, you know, especially from like my parents' generation, did you go to college or not? And I always had a little bit of a, you know, like I felt like I had something to apologize for that I dropped out of UC Santa Barbara to try to be an actress. And like, I don't have my college degree and I don't have an MBA, but you know and I think you are the absolute pinnacle example of this like you have educated yourself to a degree that is astonishing and and I just I love the fact that we have all of these ways and you know this generation to educate ourselves and what's available online and online universities it's so true and you know what the truth is is like a lot of people go to school for shit they don't want to even be there for.

26:39I know the example of Catherine, she took her journey to this, but it was always inside her. And as she was like looking at the landscape of the professional world, you know, she was looking for the innate sort of instincts that she had and where to apply it. Right. Totally. And I think that there's something to be said about that journey over like picking one thing and saying that that's what you're good at, or you're going to dedicate yourself to being good at when there might be a quality about who you are, that that makes sense that you would choose that, but maybe it's not quite that, you know, maybe that thing that you chose that you could take that quality and apply it to maybe it's something outside of it.

27:24I know more people who have gone to school to do something who have got the degree and then decided once they got the degree that it's, they hated what it was that they were doing and what they got educated to do. And they took what their real sort of love was. And they went and did that instead. We don't teach our children to honor that in themselves. You know, I agree. And I, that's why I'm really encouraging Apple when she goes, you know, and she's looking at all the courses. And I said, you know, just do things that light you up, that make you happy, that will keep you interested. Don't prescribe yourself that you have to do this or be X, Y, and Z.

28:03It's like, enjoy the process. If you're going to go to college, enjoy the fact that you have this four-year buffer. Well, it may end up being less than that, but that you have this buffer between childhood and adulthood where you can explore who you are and your intellectual capacities and what makes you excited. And so I just, I think these kids put so much pressure on themselves. I mean, you know, it's like, it's wild. Because they don't have parents like you who say that to them. But even I've said that to her and she's, you know, like drove herself really hard to get in. And, you know, it's like, because it's the community around them.