The Best Of 2023: Part Two

28:40It shouldn't be hard work. I am not disciplined. I'm not working hard at spirituality. I am in a state of beingness, of connection to the breath, the moment, the presence, the allowing, the surrender, and the greatest secret that I can share on your show today and right now in my life, the superpower is relaxation. That is the superpower. So everyone listening to this, just consider how you are when you're working so hard, you're going for things so committed, you're wanting this so badly. It's like, just observe all the things in your body that are constricting. It's closing off your life force.

29:29It's causing a closing down of energy. And what if you knew that the more you could relax, Just everybody just let your belly go. Let your body just relax. Start to connect to your breath. And what if you knew that the more you relaxed, the more light could enter you, the more help you can get from the universe, the more you merge with that, which is really sourcing you, living you, breathing you. So this whole idea of this work, you know, we got to work and it's got to be so hard, doesn't. It's actually not true. It's an illusion. So again, many years ago, when your beloved friend who was on the cover of Time Magazine, the Olympian, the swimmer, he's a reverend.

30:20Byron Davis? Yeah, Byron Davis. He was sitting at our kitchen table and you guys were having this conversation. We were having this conversation. And I was like, how about training for the love of it? Like just for the love of it. And he told this story. He was training for qualifying round or something. And he woke up with the flu and he was not in his best self and he was swimming and he was getting beat. And then suddenly he said something beyond himself came in and he entered this relaxation and he won. and we had that conversation back then. So it's not foreign to you, I know that, but I'm reminding you and I'm not saying, so then don't say that, oh, well then how does anything get done?

31:08You know, I do 29 things all the time. It's the way it's done. It's the intention that it's done in. And so this world is a beautiful world where we get to evolve through experiences. And that's why every single one of your desires, you should experience it. You should do it. You should go for it, go in it, feel it, you know, be it, become it. Because that's evolution. And that's what we're here for. So much more on its way. But first, a quick word from our partners who make the show possible.

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35:13Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford University Prevention Research Center, Dr. Christopher Gardner joined me to share an evidence-based rational model for nutritional health, as well as a discussion about how to distinguish good nutrition science from bad. Here's an excerpt from that conversation. The American Heart Association has regularly for 50 years updated their dietary guidelines. And the previous most recent update was 2006. And in 2021, they did it again. Didn't honestly change all that much, but they refined a few things. And they spent a ton of time in this paper looking at all the literature that was available before 2006 and between 2006 and 2021.

36:00one. Here's all the data we have on who has a heart attack, myocardial infarction, stroke, any kind of cardiovascular disease. Here's 10 domains that cover a heart healthy diet. And those are sort of individual things about whole grains and veggies and beans and salt and saturated fat. And they said, here's the things to include or avoid. And then the public said, so what does that mean? Should I be vegan or should I be Mediterranean or should I be paleo? I said, ah, you know what? We should do another paper on patterns. So instead of individual components, how many of these popular dietary patterns out there could be consistent with this set of domains?

36:40In other words, like the overlap in the Venn diagram between all of these different perspectives. And so I want to focus on the overlap at first. So the 10 patterns we picked were the DASH diet, that's the dietary approaches to stop hypertension, Mediterranean, three types of vegetarians. We had pesca. We had the ovo-lacto-vegetarian. We had vegan, sort of a higher fat vegan. We also had a really low-fat vegan diet. We had a low-carb, a low-fat, a paleo, and a keto. I hope that was 10 because we had 10 patterns. And we tried to match them up to the 10 domains. And we scored them from high to low.

37:20And Dash and Mediterranean got the best score and paleo and keto got the worst score as you were matching these domains. And happy to go into some of those details if you want. But one of my takeaways that I thought was great was across all 10, they all said more vegetables, more whole foods, less added sugar, and less refined grain. Across all 10. Now, this could be a trivial response if those are things we already did. Those are four of the biggest problems with the US diet. We don't eat many vegetables. We eat a lot of ultra-processed food. We eat a crap ton of added sugar and a crap ton of refined grain.

37:59So for me, this is a kumbaya moment. Oh my God, all the patterns agree on 50 % of probably what plagues human health associated with diet. Why don't we all get together and work on that? That's no fun. Yes, it's not as the clickbait doesn't work, but we really all agree on those. And those are all big issues. the one extra one I'd love to add in there is beans. I actually think eating more beans is probably the biggest thing Americans could do to change their diet in a positive way. And there's so many kinds of beans, culturally appropriate, lots of unapologetically delicious dishes with lentils and chickpeas and kidney beans and refried beans.

38:43Oh my God. But you wouldn't get the paleo and keto in there, right? Because they're super low carb and beans are full of carbs. So if you, after the four things I mentioned first that they all agree on, the next ones I would add would be beans. We kind of all agree on beans. That would come next, yeah. I mean, I like that way of looking at it, like this heat map sort of perspective that allows you to transcend all the labels and the tribalism and all of that and really just focus on, you know, this is, I think you've characterized this as being like 50 % of the, but it's kind of like 90%, isn't it?

39:21I mean, it's really like if you do those four things and then maybe the fifth with the beans, like you're on the five yard line pretty much, right? And another way to appreciate, to acknowledge that, appreciate it is I do think there are arguments for some of these low carb, low fat, high protein, individual things. For whom and when. At the margins. Yeah. At the margins. After you've got the foundation right. So there'd be a lot less bickering if, yeah, I do all these things. And I actually prefer avocado to steel-cut oats or something. I prefer this higher protein to this higher carb, whatever.

40:04Yeah, I think you could hedge your bets. And at that point, sort of biohack your own metabolism and come up with something that's a little better for you than the other thing. but can you please fix the first 50 or 90 % because we all agree on that and you're doing that wrong. Right, so this first tier of the heat map, less added sugar, less refined grains, way more starchy veg, more whole foods, less ultra processed foods, and then with the footnote around beans, but then there's a tier just below this, right? Okay, we've done that. Now, how do we get to the next level? Now, I would flip that one little thing.

40:38You said starchy veg. So the one things they all agree on is non-starchy veg. That's what I meant to say. Sorry about that. Broccoli, cauliflower, leafy greens, red bell peppers. But then you get to the avocado, the avocados, the nuts, the seeds, the olive oil, fruits. Are we gonna eat fish? Are we gonna eat eggs? Like that kind of all falls into that next tier. You're talking about this core that has a second ring. And my second ring is beans. Oh my God, with lectins. Fruits. Oh my God, they have sugar. Nuts. Oh my God, they have fat. But eggs, oh my God, they have cholesterol. Fish, oh my God, they have a face.

41:15You know, at that second level, the lectins don't matter. The sugar in fruits is fine. It's in the fruit matrix. The nuts have unsaturated fat. So that next tier of foods is pretty good. But it's at the margin after you deal with that thing in the middle. And let's assume we've now mastered this tier. Okay. What comes next? Where are we gonna, to go behind the velvet rope and put the cherry on top of the sundae. Yeah. So to be honest, Americans eat too much wheat. They eat too much grain. They even eat too much whole grain bread. So glycemic index is how fast the glucose from the food you're eating ends up in your blood.

41:58And a shocking thing for people who read into this and look it up is that white flour bread and whole wheat bread have the same glycemic index. It's like, wait, Very high. High glycemic index is not good. I switched from white flour to whole wheat flour. Why wasn't that better? And the reason it wasn't better is because it was ground to a powder and most of the digestion was done. So the time it takes you to eat it and absorb it is really small. If you had used the whole grain, which is the wheat berry, it would have taken much longer for your enzymes to digest it and make the molecules small enough to absorb.

42:35So you were saying go to the next level of these concentric rings. So grains. So a funny thing that I learned from doing some studies related to protein and trying to figure out where our protein comes from is looking at the USDA's fabulous website of all the food we produce and what we eat. And under grains, it said, okay, grains include oats and barley and wheat and this other thing. but because Americans, 90 % of the grains they eat are wheat, we're simply using the value for wheat for this thing that we're analyzing. And I stopped for a moment. I said, really? There's all these grains out there and 90 % of what Americans eat is wheat?

43:20And most of that is bread, right? Pizza crust, donuts, some kind of bread-like thing. So at that next level, I think is grains. So I've actually, I hosted a debate one time between a paleo person and a Mediterranean person and a middle of the road person. And I tried to force them to say, what do you agree on? I know you guys disagree on some things. What do you agree on? And the first thing I got them all to agree on that people didn't expect was grains. Even like the vegan person said, yeah, if I was gonna get rid of anything next, it would be grains. because so much of it is refined, even the whole grain bread.

44:06Your darkest moments will either break you beyond repair or they're going to make you stronger. Well, this was the choice faced by Steph Kachudahl as her husband, beloved ultra runner Tommy Rives, battled a very rare form of cancer that nearly took his life. Steph joined me in episode 787 to discuss the big things in life, trauma, mortality, love, grief, and meaning, all of which are beautifully explored in her memoir, Everything All at Once. If you co-sign to the idea that all of us have capacity and potential that we're walking around with that we're just not aware of, or we haven't really brought forth in our own lives, do we really need to be in that kind of a tragic event or to suffer extreme pain in order to manifest it.

45:01It's a choice. It just rarely happens short of, you know, basically being boxed into a corner in that kind of a way. Yeah. Well, similarly, Rives and I are, for lack of a better word, happier together than we've ever been. And people are like, how are you so happy? I'm like, just make him almost die. And then you'll, you know what I mean? you'll go through together this recognition of how much you love each other and how important you are to each other and things that we take for granted that are sometimes only shown to us in the depths of despair. Sadly, how do you access that feeling of gratitude and awareness when you're not in the depths?

45:44And I'm struggling with that now even. Please tell me how to do that. Oh, you don't know? Because I'm now even, I want to maintain the lessons I learned, be present. There's no better moment than this moment right now. And all the love you ever need is inside of you. All of these truths, I know them, but it's harder to feel them when life is good. What I learned and what I'm learning is that memory is the cursor to things that are always happening. These memories are actually ever present and we can access them and go back to that time in a moment. Well, they're consciously or unconsciously impacting every decision that we make.

46:26So they do live in the present. Yeah, they do. Absolutely. And I mean, the most, the like the starkest example of this was when Rives was at the end of his life. And I went in there to say goodbye is what they told me to do. And I rested my head on his chest And in a moment, we were dancing together and we were living that moment together in the present. And nobody could tell me that didn't happen, that I was not metaphysically there because I was. My body was here, but I was there with him and we were dancing together. And that memory, I feel, drew us back together into this world and called him back to this life.

47:13And I think that example was why I wanted to weave the malleability of time into my whole book. Because I realized that it was memory that was saving me over and over again, mostly the memory of love. And that's what I feel kept me my whole life from going over the edge. These ever-present moments of presence that I was called back to. and on the other hand, Rives, he lived lifetimes in his coma. He was, I mean, he has some incredible stories about where he was and where he went and how many different families he had and who's to say that those weren't real, that those weren't really occurring lives, you know?

48:03I'm not, I would never say, he says some of those memories of when he was in the coma feel more real than this life memory, you know? Wow. So I'm really, really interested in the quantum aspect that I don't, I wish I understood on a physics level. Yeah. But all I know is my experience with time. And yeah. So what do we take from that? How are we supposed to interpret that? Or how is that meant to, from your perspective, inform our lives? I mean, really it's that love is woven into every aspect of our lives in the form of memory. And that in the most tragic moments, love or the memory of love is still there.

48:54And I like to think of my father, whether he exists in a spiritual realm or just in a memory, I think that the memory of his love is the same as saying that he lives in some spirit world. And that love is entwined in every aspect of my life. And it's in all of our lives. And one of the most pivotal moments of my life today was recognizing how that love had been in everything, absolutely everything. When I I was drunk, crying under a table, when I was hitchhiking through Guatemala, when I was, you know, everything that I did, love was there. I just didn't recognize it in myself, so I couldn't recognize it in other people.

49:45up next is serial entrepreneur and the host of the united kingdom's number one podcast diary of a ceo stephen bartlett who shared some really great wisdom on how to hone discipline and balance ambition with self-care in this moment how i'm feeling is i feel like i've overextended myself in my life. I feel like 12 months ago or six months ago, I must have said yes to too many things and not have been cognizant of the nature of my, the fact that my time is finite. And this is a constant battle I have in my life, which is my ambition is maybe exceeding my capacity, which I need to put into check because I pay the price for that.

50:30I end up having, letting someone down somewhere and also therefore myself in the process. And right now where I'm at, I've definitely taken on too much stuff. So endurance is great. What we need is consistency and sustainability. We don't need intensity. Intensity is maybe useful in spurts, but you can't maintain intensity for a consistent enduring period of time. Nobody can without something falling by the wayside. That matters. And the frame I try and apply to the decisions, when I see something on my list, a request that comes in is how would I feel if I had to do that tomorrow? And that's the frame I should be applying, which is how would I feel if I had to do that later on today or tomorrow?

51:11Because I fall under the same bias, which is I defer it to a future Steve, who I can't yet understand the circumstances of the day that he's currently in. And by bringing it to today's Steve, it kind of helps me filter out things against my values and intentions. And that whole frame generally, I was talking about this last night to one of my friends, of really being cognizant that when you wake up every day after spending eight of your, as I talk about my first book, proverbial chips on sleep, you have these 16 chips left. And how you place those 16 chips on the roulette table of life is the center point of your influence on your own life.

51:48The allocation of those 16 chips on this proverbial roulette table of life. And when the wheel spins every day, you find out the returns you've got. So these 16 chips, how do I place them? And what are my values? And you're trying to place them where your values are. And if you land on your values, you get great returns. So placing two against spending time with my girlfriend in the evening, placing four against my podcast, four against my businesses, two against DJing, one against Jim. That's time I'll spend. And I might also, it's important to say this, I might place one against binging Netflix.

52:21If it was intentional, it's not wasted time. It's only wasted time in my regard when you didn't do it consciously and intentionally. And that framework is so important because if you look at anyone's, how we allocate our time, it's so clear we think we're going to live forever. It's why on all of my desks, on my bookshelf behind me on the diary of a CEO, I have this sand timer because I don't believe humans can imagine in infancy or finality. I don't think we're capable of such a thing. So we allocate our time in trivial, regrettable ways, but our time is literally the currency we have. The allocation of my time up until this moment where I'm sat with you today is the thing that has put me in this chair today.

53:01It's like well-allocated time in my regard because I managed to get, you know, to have a conversation with you. So thinking through that framework and reminding myself that, you know, time is so precious and so finite allows you to hopefully make decisions about what you're doing with your day that are unregrettable, which is my goal at the moment. Yeah, I think it requires or it demands a certain, type of discipline that might not be immediately obvious. Because when we think about discipline, we think about how hard can we work or how can we make that hard choice to delay gratification. But discipline comes in many forms.

53:42I think the chapter in the new book about discipline, you come up with this equation, right? About that, which kind of speaks to what you just mentioned. I actually, the title of that law in my book was about time. It was about time management. I started out to write about time management because everyone wants time management techniques. And as I go down there, and as I start doing my research on time management techniques, I discovered there are hundreds, right? And I also, if I'm honest with myself, there's none that I use. So I asked myself why. And in the same way that there's lots of fad diets out there, the reason why there's so many time management techniques is because none of them fundamentally work.

54:20So people keep going in search of new ones and creating new ones because they lack the fundamental skill of discipline. So I asked myself, okay, why does discipline matter? Well, in a world where time is finite, as we've just discussed, you can only do so many things. And so I try and figure out why in some areas of my life, I've been disciplined with the gym, six, seven days a week, with DJing, with my businesses. And why in other areas of my life, has my discipline lapsed? So I try to write a simple equation, which is, and I'd love you to interrogate this with me, me because I'm still trying to refine the equation.

54:56But at the start of the equation, you have in simple terms, why does the goal matter to you? Plus the psychological enjoyment you get in the pursuit of the goal minus let's call it the psychological disengagement or the psychological friction associated with the goal. So with going to the gym, I started going on March 2020. And I've been going for over three years now. March 2020, I watched a pandemic sweep the world and I watched through my TV screen people dying because of health, their health circumstances and the correlation between outcomes and your health circumstance. It was so traumatic to me that it increased my why to so much so that the habit stuck.

55:41And it was so clear to me now that the foundation of all my goals, my businesses, my girlfriend, my relationship, my dog, my family was my health. I saw the tectonic plate shake underneath everything I care about. The pursuit itself of going to the gym is psychologically enjoyable as long as the gym is close and as long as it's private. So I'm not spending a lot of time just talking about the podcast with people minus the friction associated to it. So reducing the friction means me finding a private gym. I actually stopped going to the gym when people knew who I was because people came up to me a lot.

56:16The friction increased. and Simon Sinek challenged this the other day with me and he goes, well, you know, like I get up every morning and I go and empty the bin outside my house because he goes, I don't enjoy that and it's not meaningful to me. I go, yeah, but it is, Simon. Because what happens if you, so if we examine that through that framework, what happens if you don't empty the bin outside your house, Simon? Well, you're going to get fined and it's going to overflow for the whole week. So your why is actually pretty high. The psychological enjoyment is low. Sorry, the enjoyment is low and the friction is high, but the why is higher than the friction is.

56:49Getting out of bed at 8am. It matters more to you, the why, the pursuit, you know, achieving that goal, than the friction is unmotivating for you. If at some point they reduced the why, so you would no longer get fines and you had a second bin, you wouldn't get out of bed. The friction would win out. And so the reason it's important to think through that framework is you can influence it. If there's something in your life where you're not disciplined, you can focus on that first half of the equation Remind yourself why this really, really matters to you. And then do everything you can to make the pursuit of the goal as enjoyable and as engaging as you can.

57:27What do you do when you have two very different dreams vying for your attention? Well, this is the dilemma faced by five-time world champion professional triathlete and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of last year's Best Picture winner, all quiet on the Western front. Her name is Leslie Patterson. And here she shares some wisdom gold from that exchange. My whole life, like there's athletes and there's artists. Right. And never the twain shall meet. These are people who are configured differently. Yep. And it's up to you to figure out which one of those two, if you're interested in both, you kind of have to pick one.

58:07Totally. And nobody's gonna tell you that it's cool to do both. No, absolutely. and you're kind of like an outlier in both right so you know as an athlete you're you're you know everyone makes fun of the artists and they have a completely different time clock they stay up all night smoke they don't take care of their bodies they have they cannot understand the athlete um and then equally you know um the the the artist is like you know they have no sense of the athlete, what that's like, you know, neither camp can truly understand. And yet I feel like there's so much similarity and there's so much you can draw down from, from each craft.

58:51So what would be some of those things? So I think the main thing is the discipline that I learned from sports really helped the creativity because as ethereal is being creative and when is that good idea gonna come? If you still give yourself some sense of structure, then you're working towards something. And certainly when it comes to screenplay writing, right? There's a lot of structure. It's almost like... if you know the structure enough, then you can let it go and it becomes intuitive. And that's the same in sport. If you train enough to push yourself to the limits enough, then in the race, you'll find your zone.

59:36So it's kind of like the same. And then equally, I think in sport, if you really wanna get to the top, you have to be creative. You have to think outside the box about how you're gonna push your mind and your body to truly achieve greatness. And I went down a lot of systems in sport. a lot of national bodies, the British national body. And certainly this was back kind of in the nineties and the early two thousands when they weren't as developed as they are now. But it was so, it was like, okay, there's one way to do this. And if you're not good at this one way, then you're never gonna be a world champion.

1:00:10And I wasn't good at that one way. And I'm like, well, yeah, but I still think I could be good. So the creativity allowed me to investigate so many other ways. And I love it because my husband, Simon says, it's a cargo net, it's not a ladder to the top. Explain that. It's a cargo net, not a ladder. A cargo net means there's many different ways to the top. A ladder, there's one. The one way, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's kind of a beautiful analogy because that's how I think I've gotten to the top in both is just kind of like really going to the side and up and down and up and to the side and across and being at peace with that as well, which has taken time.

1:00:54Right, because you are an outlier and you are bucking the system. And as a result, there will be pushback or resistance or criticism for trying to find a different way. Oh yeah, all the time. Yeah, and I think it puts the lie to the test, this notion that the artist is struck with inspiration after a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of, you know, bourbon at 3 a.m. And, you know, helps one to realize, and this is a very kind of Steven Pressfield, Seth Godin kind of thing, that creativity is a discipline in the same way the pursuit of excellence in sport is. It requires rigor and structure, accountability and all of those things.

1:01:38You have to create those structures in order to make space for the creativity to appear. Exactly. In that idea of like, you know, the war of art or turning pro, like, are you a professional? Like if you're a professional creative, then you show up for it every day in the same way you show up for practice for your sport. You can't say I have writer's block. That would be like saying, you know, I have sport block today. Like I'm not gonna show up for practice. But equally, it's like, even if you do have some kind of block or you're not making the forward momentum that you want to, it's saying, how can I get a positive result today?

1:02:18What does that mean? What does that look like? And having, again, that's that cargo net analogy where, you know, what you deem to be successful on any given day, you know, is different for every individual. But certainly for me in sport, right, I would have many shitty days. I mean, any top athlete will tell you that. Many, many shitty days. I've dealt with Lyme disease, chronic injuries. so how can you find something positive that you can still make a step forward in some capacity whether that's mentally or physically and similarly you know on the art front on storytelling front on script writing front you know it's understanding how your brain works what suits you what doesn't how to still find some kind of momentum even when you're having a bad day and maybe that's I'm such a positive person I love to find the positivity in anything.

1:03:14And I don't know if that's because I grew up, you know, my dad's pretty tough Scottish man, you know, nothing is ever gonna impress him. However, it has. Now I'm getting the truth. This is what I was getting at earlier. Yeah, but you know, nothing really impresses him, right? You know, and that real Scottish, you know, bring people down that were successful. You know, whereas my mom is the opposite, right? Gushing and everything's amazing. And so it's like you kind of strike the balance between both, but they create your driving force to understand how to find positivity in any situation. Where does happiness come from?

1:03:56And how do we get more of it? If you find yourself grappling with these questions, then my conversation with Arthur Brooks from episode 683 is gonna be your jam. Arthur is a professor at Harvard Business School and the best-selling author of Build the Life You Want. Here is a clip from that conversation. Most people say, I wanna be happy. To begin with, that's the wrong goal because you can't be happy. Happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. You can't be, I mean, for somebody to be truly happy, it would mean that you would need to eliminate the parts of your life that are literally keeping you alive, like your negative emotions.

1:04:36You need anger and sadness and disgust and you need grief and you need all these things to stay alive and deal with the world. So pure happiness shouldn't be the goal, but getting happier is a legitimate goal for everybody. The biggest mistake that people make is thinking that it's a feeling and chasing a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling. It has feelings associated with it, but feelings of happiness are really evidence of happiness. Sort of the smell of dinner is the evidence of dinner. It's not dinner itself. That'd be a very disappointing dinner if it were just the smell of Thanksgiving, shoot it into the air.

1:05:08And then that's what chasing feelings is really like. It's incredibly ephemeral. And it's a terrible thing to live that way, to live hoping that tomorrow you'll feel a different way. And so the first freeing thing is that number one, don't worry about being happier. Let's work on getting happier. It's a project. That's number one, very empowering. And number two is that it's not a feeling. It's something that you really can work on. It's a skill you can really get better at. So that's the prelude to how people see it wrong and how they can be encouraged to see it correctly and start to get better at.

1:05:43Then the whole question becomes, okay, it's not a feeling, what is it? And that's a big, that's a controversy in the world of social psychology and social science in general, even neuroscience, what is happiness? But as a functional definition, you find that people who have the most wellbeing in their lives have balance and abundance across three things, sort of macronutrients. So the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three things that people actually need. And none of those things is as simple as it sounds. Each one has a literature of science behind it and has protocols and habits that we can all pursue and get better at.

1:06:23So the great news is that every single person watching us can get happier. And the better news is we know what they can work on to get happier, but they need the knowledge. Right, so this idea that happiness, we can have a debate on how we particularly define what it is, but the truth of the matter is that that's less important than this idea that it is evidence or something that comes about as a result of these three macronutrients that we should all pursue. that you're getting better at. That will, yeah, as a kind of way of life, it's not something you do once, it's something that you incorporate into the way that you're living your life, correct?

1:07:08That will time and again, produce that sensation of happiness, however ephemeral or fleeting it may be, but with some regularity, it will build more of that into your life. Exactly right, exactly right. And these are skills that you can get better at. This is the best news of all, but you have to know what they are. and it's not straightforward. No, it's not. When you say enjoyment as one of these, that could create some confusion. It can. And the biggest confusion is, especially for people that are really into improving themselves through knowledge that they can get on the Rich Roll podcast, for example, is they might make the mistake of thinking that enjoyment is pleasure.

1:07:48And it's absolutely not. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's an ancient phenomenon. It's a signal to you that something is gonna be good for your survival or passing on your genes. but the pursuit of pleasure will not bring you happiness. It will bring you addiction. That's as sure as we're sitting here is what it will do. And the reason is because it's a fleeting thing. It's a fleeting sensation. If you hit the lever and hit the lever, you'll change your brain chemistry to get really, really good to bring you that pleasure. And that will give you addiction. You know, all addictions are based in an excessive and unhealthy stimulation of dopamine, the neuromodulator dopamine in the human brain.

1:08:27So the reason that, for example, that drinking too much brings pleasure but doesn't bring happiness is because it doesn't actually bring enjoyment. So this is the key thing to understand. Enjoyment has a base in pleasure, but it adds two things. It adds people and memory. So anything that you do that brings pleasure that you do alone, look out. As a rule of thumb, anything that's pleasurable that you do alone is not going to bring you happiness. You need people involved and you need memory, which is part of your prefrontal cortex is your executive function has to be involved in that. And a good example of how we understand this intuitively, you know, Anheuser-Busch has a beer commercial.

1:09:05They never have how a lot of people are using Bud Light, which is pounding a 12 pack alone in their apartment. That's, and the reason that they don't advertise it that way, which is that they don't wanna advertise their product as a way to get pleasure, but not happiness. They have people drinking Bud Light with their friends or with their family and making a memory because it's pleasure, feels good, plus people, plus memory. And then you actually get happiness. And so this is the way to think about gambling if you're gonna gamble. This is the way to think about sexual activity. This is the way to think about any of these things that if it's alone and compulsive becomes a problem, but if it's sociable and it creates memory, it actually can enhance your happiness.

1:09:48Everybody who, and I don't drink alcohol, you don't drink alcohol. I don't know how to drink alcohol in a normal way. Why? because I started drinking alcohol when I was 13, 14 years old and it was nothing but solitary pleasure. And I never learned how to make it into a source of enjoyment. That's the reason that it became a problem is because I was never able to use it in a responsible way where it could enhance my happiness. We've got a lot more to come, but first.

1:10:17I own a bunch of spectacles and I made the grave error the other day of donning a normal non-Roka pair on my indoor trainer when I was riding my bike indoors. And I gotta tell you, it was a disaster. Every three to five seconds, I had to take my hands off the handlebars and push my glasses back up my nose until I got so frustrated, I just tossed them aside. This is the dilemma of every active but optically impaired person I know. And as someone who has relied upon eyewear every single day since I was five years old. It is also the source of endless aggravation. Thankfully, now eradicated thanks to Broca, the stylish performance eyewear company founded by two former Stanford swimming teammates of mine who have gifted everyone like me and quite frankly, the world with their fashionable line of super lightweight prescription glasses and sunglasses with patented no-slip nose and temple pads that are just impervious to sweat.

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1:11:51All right, people, enter Brad Stolberg, a writer and a coach specializing in human performance. Brad made his fourth appearance on the podcast this year, delivering a powerful primer on embracing transformation, how to cultivate resilience, and how to adapt to an ever-changing world. We tend to think of change as something that happens to us or these singular events, when in reality, we are just always in conversation with change. And because we think of it as these singular events, we often relate to change as something that happens to us instead of something that we're in conversation with. And the kernel of the idea, I know you said you want to get into it, so I'm sure we will in more detail.

1:12:41Early COVID, just article after article with the headline, when are things going to get back to normal. And it struck me that back to normal is probably never going to happen. And then I did what I do, which is I got really curious and I started looking at the literature on how we think about change and realized these two competing models of homeostasis and allostasis. And we spent a lot of time thinking about homeostasis and that's kind of the conventional prevailing model, but it's not necessarily the best fit one. So explain that difference between homeostasis and allostasis. What is that concept?

1:13:20So homeostasis is this notion that living systems crave stability. And anytime that they are confronted with change or disruption, they try to get back to that stability as swiftly as possible. So it describes a pattern of order or stability and some sort of disorder or change. and then back to order. Right, and that was sort of the prevailing, I don't know if theology is the right word, but kind of operating system for how things work, how biological systems operate, how ecosystems operate for a long time. That's right, since the mid-1800s, a scientist named Walter Cannon coined it, and science was very different in the mid-1800s.

1:14:05I mean, we're talking like pre-vaccines, germ theory of disease. Yeah, it stuck with us for a very long time. And it's really encroached upon not just scientific or biological change, but how we think about so many different changes, including habit change. I mean, if you Google homeostasis and change, you'll see like, this is why losing weight is hard. This is why starting a habit is hard. This is why stopping a bad habit is hard. But then about 20 years ago, researchers re-evaluated this model of homeostasis. and they said, actually, when you look at really vital, thriving systems, they don't follow this path of order, disorder, order.

1:14:45Yes, systems want to be stable, but that stability is achieved somewhere new by changing. And allostasis is a process of order, disorder, reorder. And what's fascinating is if you look at the etymology of these words, homo means same, and stasis means standing. So it's having the same standing by being the same. And allo means variable. So allostasis is literally translated into stability through change. And I think that it's this beautiful double meaning where the way that we're stable is by being able to change to some extent. So we stay stable not by resisting change, but by changing. Extrapolating on that idea, you can't help but think about evolution.

1:15:28Like if it was order, disorder, order, there would be no evolution. It is only through the reordering that you see the adaptation, really. So what you're saying basically is there's a status quo, there's an intervening set of circumstances, and then there's an adaptation to those circumstances that hopefully creates a new version of that impermanent homeostasis. That's it, yeah. And evolution is, I think, change on the grandest scale that we know of. and you see allostasis playing out at the species level, but then you zoom in on a given individual and you think about personal evolution or how we grow over the course of our life.

1:16:11And it's very much the same. Like we're constantly somewhere in that cycle of order, disorder, reorder. Even if you lived in like a container that was completely shielded from the elements, you're still aging. So I think it is really helpful to think of your identity like a house. And within that house, you want to have some different rooms. And you might have the room of parents, of partner, of creative, of athlete, of employee, you name it. It's okay to go spend all your time in one room for a season of your life, maybe even a few, right? I mean, a couple books ago, right? I co-wrote The Passion Paradox.

1:16:54It's literally in the subtitle, like a guide to going all in. So it's okay. You don't have to balance your time across all five of those rooms or six of those rooms. But I think it is just so important to make sure that those other rooms are available to you so that when shit hits the fan in the room that you're in, you can go step into another room. And this isn't just my hypothesis. In the literature, it's called self-complexity. And individuals that have higher levels of self-complexity tend to be more resilient to change. One of the world's most compelling and iconic public figures, the singular Arnold Schwarzenegger, shared how he reached the pinnacle of success in three very different careers.

1:17:36We also discussed why he believes adversity breeds character, as well as lessons from his book, Be Useful. I think that one of the things that you learn in sports is that if you just get stuck in your own training routine and not learn from other people, that you will never become a champion. And so open-mindedness was very important to me. And so I think, like I said in my book, I learned a lot of my lessons from sports. And to me, that kind of like, and having people like Freddie Gerstle, that mentor, that talked about open-mindedness and learning from others. To me, it was always kind of like learning new things and being able to, the more you become a celebrity, to be able to use that celebrity power for something positive, for something good.

1:18:32And so to me, it was, I learned, the more I opened up my mind, the better it was. there was a guy by the name of Vince Gironda. You maybe have heard of him since you're a fitness fanatic yourself. He had a gym over in the valley, Vince's gym. And I saw him doing an exercise, a triceps exercise. And I looked at him and said, what are you doing there? And he said, this is for the outside tricep that splits the one head from the other. and I said, this looks like kind of a Mickey Mouse exercise. Jesus Christ, it doesn't look like some heavy lift of some sort. And he says, well, just try it. So I said to myself, well, the way you try it, the way I tried it in those days was I would do an exercise, 40 sets of 20 reps.

1:19:24So I was lying there on the bench on my back, taking this dumbbell and going like this 20 times and take it over to this side, the same thing over here, same to this arm, back and forth, back and forth like this. The next day, this muscle here was just jumping all over the place. So I realized he was absolutely correct. I never, ever thought of that. There's actually a specific muscle. We always know about sculpting your body that you add more chest or more serratus muscles or some obliques or some biceps, but that you can actually dissect it to a specific part of the three muscles. That's why it's called triceps.

1:20:05The three muscles there. And one separates the bicep from the tricep and makes it appear, not that measurement-wise it's bigger, but makes it appear much larger. So I was doing that and that exists from that point on. And it just, it was, I said to myself, if I wouldn't have listened to him, I would have never learned that exercise. But I listened to him. I first said to myself, brushed it off. I said, Mickey Mouse, and say, no, no, no, no, let's just try it before we kind of like come to the conclusion. And sure enough, so you learn from those kinds of experiences, and you then apply this rule with everything.

1:20:43And so that's why I was always rather more hungry for more information, more hungry for listening rather than talking. You know, how do you think about the way that our culture now thinks about mental health and our relationship with this idea of powerlessness? I think that in general, I think what the book is trying to do is to say to people, you need to work on yourself. if you just try to be pampered and if you're trying to be soft and if you're trying to be the victim you're not going to go anywhere we need to get stronger we need to get bossier we need to get tougher we need to not be afraid of failure we got to go and do the work we got to face adversity adversity breeds character the strength and fighting and resistance.

1:21:54It doesn't only make the muscle grow, but it makes also your head grow, makes you a stronger person. We have to be willing to go through hardship, through suffering, through pain, through crying periods, all of that stuff. Don't shy away from any of that because it just makes you stronger. And I think today, a lot of times, our youth is so into kind of, oh, let's make him feel good. Oh, no, let's be more sensitive. Well, I totally agree with you to be sensitive about things, but I mean, there's also a sweet spot. Can we go too far? You know, it's like when someone says, well, today I just need to sleep in.

1:22:35It's that bullshit. You don't need to sleep in. This country was not built on sleeping in. So let's get up in the morning and let's get on that bike and let's do some exercise and don't even think about it. don't look at your email or anything like this. Let's just get going. Boom, boom, boom. Let's get going. Let's start building. And so that's the idea is just not to be overly soft and overly kind of like sensitive and everyone is in the victim kind of a thing. I just don't buy into that. But you have to understand that every person has to be approached also differently. It's like the mind is just like the body.

1:23:14I cannot give you exactly the same training routine that I had because your body is different. You're a much leaner person. You need kind of to do maybe lesser reps. And what this, you have to have a different diet if you want to bulk up and all this. So I have to be aware of that, that even within my family, one of my daughters had to be approached differently than my other daughter. One son had to be approached differently than the other son. So you have to be sensitive about those kind of things. But overall, it was discipline in the house. You don't turn out that light, I will unscrew those light bulbs and you will be going into a dark room at the age of three and you will be scared.

1:23:55So you better start learning to turn off those lights. You have someone else make your bed, okay, I'm going to take the mattress and throw it down the balcony. And then you carry it upstairs and you make your own bed again. Resilience. That's the thing. Yeah, I understand. You got to just kind of figure it out, you know, how to do that. and all this, but you know, it's not easy. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not an expert at this, but one thing I know for sure, I can help anyone to go and be a little bit better. Right. And I think that's what we want to ask. We cannot ask everyone to be a genius, ask everyone to be the world's strongest man and all this stuff, but to be better.

1:24:34Because when you're better, when you get better, then you feel good. When we improve, we feel good. When we have accomplished something, we feel good, and that then rubs off on everything.

1:24:48Our nation is lonelier than ever before, and this event is so severe, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Dr. Vivek Murthy, labeled it an epidemic. Dr. Murthy joined me in episode 784 to discuss the physical and psychological effects of loneliness and why it's become such a major public health crisis. Loneliness isn't something that's new, but what is new is this epidemic of loneliness that currently defines our culture. The statistics as you lay them out are quite shocking. Like you say, one out of every two Americans is experiencing measurable levels of loneliness, one in two people. That's more people than suffer from diabetes.

1:25:36Like this is a huge problem, right? So I guess the question I have is, How did we get here? What are the tectonic plates that have led us to this state that we're in? Yeah, the numbers are quite shocking. And you're right that this is extraordinarily common. And as surprising as the one in two number is, the rates of loneliness are even higher among young people, which surprises people who think, hey, aren't they connected by technology? Yet they are saying, whether it's in spite of that or in some cases because of the use of social media, that the sense of connection people feel has actually diminished.

1:26:16So how did we get here? Well, several things happened and we didn't get here overnight either, but I think that our sense of disconnection has been building for some time. So here are a few things that started to happen. As over the last 20, 30 years, we have become more mobile, right? So we move more often for work, for school, and we often move multiple times, sometimes in a short timeframe. frame. Whereas before that, people would often stay in the areas that they grew up in. They would stay connected to the people they were friends with in high school. They still lived around them. But as you move more, communities become more fragmented.

1:26:53So that's sort of one piece. The second thing that has happened is historically, going back generations, people tended to live in extended family environments. And so, you know, not that that was all simple or that it was all good, you know, but those environments, you know, more often than not ensure that people were connected with others. The shift away from, you know, from extended families has been one more factor. I mean, it's like people that live in smaller and smaller circles. But the other factors I think that are important here is that we've also seen over the last half century a significant decline in participation in the community organizations that used to bring people together, particularly faith organizations, but also service organizations, recreational leagues, youth leagues.

1:27:36These used to bring folks together from different walks of life to get to know one another, to break bread together, to engage in activities together. But that opportunity has also been lost. Two other factors worth mentioning. One is the rise of what I think of as convenience technology, right? So today, if I can sit in my home and get groceries delivered to me, I don't really need to go to a post office. I can get most things I need from Amazon. I don't need to go to a store. My need to go out and have interaction with other people is dramatically lower, just from a practical standpoint. So we have lost actually a lot of those informal loose ties, if you will.

1:28:16But finally, I think we have to look at the phenomenon of social media itself, which has dramatically transformed how we interact with each other and also has transformed how many people see themselves and their friendships. And this is particularly true for young people. But while there are some benefits of social media can be helpful to get messages out, to share useful information, to share honest reflections with a large group of people. More often than not, what we're finding is that for many people, well, I'll just tell you what young people tell me most commonly, they tell me three things.

1:28:49They say their use of social media often makes them feel worse about themselves as they're constantly comparing themselves to others, makes them feel worse about their friendships as they're constantly seeing what other people are doing without them feeling left out. But third, they say that they can't get off it either because these platforms are often designed to maximize how much time we spend on them, not necessarily the quality of time, but the quantity of time. And what is happening, especially to many young people, but frankly to many older people as well, is that that is taking time away from other critical activities like sleep, like in-person interaction and other activities that are essential for our health and well-being.

1:29:28So you put all these factors together, Rich, and what you see is that we have become lonelier, we've become more isolated. And I think we've realized, and this is not just an American phenomenon, by the way, this is a broader feature of modernity that the UK, Australia, Japan, and many other countries are experiencing as well. So we've got to recognize that. And it doesn't mean that we should go back to 1920 or 1930 or 1950. But what it does mean is that we have to recognize that if we don't consciously make rebuilding connection a priority in our individual lives and in society more broadly, if we don't do that through individual actions and the building of social infrastructure in our communities, then we will continue to see an erosion of our relationships.

1:30:16And we'll see not only the health consequences of loneliness, which are profound, mental and physical, but also the economic and the national security implications of loneliness, which make us more prone to division and to polarization. So we've got to make that choice. And right now it feels like the choice is being made for us, that we're steeped in this information environment that's extraordinarily negative, that's telling us everything is broken about the world, that nobody can be trusted and that everyone is only out for themselves. We've got to turn that off and tune in to what's actually happening in our communities and choose, again, love.

1:30:52I always say that every decision that we make we can ask ourselves a question, am I making this decision out of love or out of fear? And if we choose love as often as we can, then we'll build a kind of life that feels good for us, that's good for our communities, that our kids can be proud of, and that will help create the world that ultimately future generations need. 2023 marked the return of comedian and fellow podcast host, Pete Holmes. In episode 788, we talked about everything from spirituality to comedy, creativity, consciousness, fatherhood, and the many disorientations of midlife. Here's a glimpse into our equal parts hilarious and thought-provoking exchange.

1:31:44There are some truths so big they can only be told with lies. That's a cute way of saying metaphor is the only language we have to speak of God. and I say this in the special, it's Richard Rohr as well. Metaphor means always true, sometimes really happened. Because what's interesting about the Bible, one of the weird things about that text is that it's metaphor overlain with history. You know what I mean? It's like metaphorized history and we don't know where the line is. You know, opinions vary. But when you're trying to, and if you've taken psychedelics, and that was a huge part of my appreciation of metaphor.

1:32:24But when you're trying to talk about the ineffable, metaphor isn't just as close as you can get. It's the only way to do it. It stirs you and moves you in a way that it's... The truth of it is it's true in the way that energy moves in the world. It's true in the way the patterns of the universe are reflected in the story. Because you can tell a story and it's bullshit like you know, but the metaphors and the myths that stick with us, they'll rock you. And you hear it and your skin's lit on fire and we're fucking stuck with numbers and measurements and recipes. Like, get the fuck out of here. None of that shit helps you when your heart is broken.

1:33:08None of that helps when your grandfather is dying or when a baby is born. Like, poetry is similar. get that shit out of here until your wife leaves you then William Blake gets a lot more important but we've become interested in or fascinated or obsessed with the quantifiable and the reproducible and the material and it's like okay but you know we're leaving a lot in our rear view that's essential yeah you know it's so emasculated in our culture Well, because you can't have sex with it and you can't sell it, really. You know what I mean? So, like, what are you doing? I'll tell you what you're doing is you're feeling more at home in the universe.

1:33:56This is my whole thing. The fact that it's, like, cowardly to go to therapy, like the people where I'm from, if you say you're in therapy, they're like, it's like, oh. I'm like, is there anything more cowardly than not facing your demons? Like, who's the coward? I might just be sitting on a couch, but I'm going into the cave where the Vader mask cuts open and it's my face. Like, that's the hero. And it's easy to do the same with spirituality. Be like, it's a bunch of lies. Yeah, Santa Claus isn't real. Great. But what is the story of Santa Claus? What is the point? What is done in secret is rewarded, or whatever it might be.

1:34:37I don't know, man. Literalism is a fucking terrible body to snuggle up to. in your bed at night. And the warm bosom of myth has kept human beings alive. And by the way, don't get me started. Every video game, every movie, it's all right there. Sure. Every Avenger. Get the fuck out of here. And Joseph Campbell is like the gateway drug. Yeah. For a lot of people, especially in this town. That's right. Well, he changed my life. He said God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought, including being and non-being. So that I could get on board with. That's a God, I feel like that's a God anyone could agree on.

1:35:22It's a metaphor, meaning God is not an old man in the sky. An old man in the sky is a metaphor for a metaphor. God itself is a metaphor. And a metaphor for that metaphor is an old man in the sky. Old, he's older than you. He's been around. In the sky, he has a higher perspective than you. On a throne, he's powerful. These are just ways of understanding a force, right? But that's a metaphor for God, which is itself a metaphor for a mystery. Something unknown is doing something we know not what. So this is also in my special. Barry Taylor, the road manager for ACDC, says, God is the name of the blanket.

1:35:55We put over the mystery to give it a shape. God is the name of the blanket. We put over the mystery to give it a shape. And I say, shouldn't we have learned this in church? Why am I learning this from the road manager for ACDC? And it's not about solving the mystery. It's about appreciating the fact that it is a mystery. And we want to talk about it. And more than that, we want to commune with it. And to know that, we have to give it some sort of symbol. Carl Jung says, we're not transformed by ideas. We're transformed by symbols. This is why the crucified Christ is still a hot thing. Yes. But how do you, like, I'm thinking of the person who's listening to this, who hasn't had their reckoning yet.

1:36:34They haven't hit their pain moment. Like, how do you communicate to that person? Or how do you get somebody to, you know, connect with that possibility in their own life? That's why I'm not putting that question off to Eckhart Tolle, but when people email me, you know, on social or something, and they're like, I can't, it's nails on a chalkboard. You say, I'm God's child, it's nails on a chalkboard, or Jesus, or Buddha, or anything. Because of the baggage that people are carrying around from whatever experiences they had, yeah. I relate to that. I had that. And people like, first of all, Joseph Campbell, who's just going to say, it's a story, and that's great.

1:37:15But then Eckhart Tolle, who's all just the sacrament of the present moment. And when you start getting naked, I was just talking about this today on my own podcast. I was like, why are Adam and Eve naked? It's because they're not clothed in the ego and the story. just pure and when you drop through practices through reading that book whatever it might be and you start getting familiar with who are you like you're you're wearing a space suit you know right and we start thinking we're the suit this is ramdas ramdas would say i go hello rich and you go hello pete you're a comedian i go yes and we are americans i remember i was in Italy, I saw a ladybug and I was like, this ladybug has no idea it's Italian.

1:38:01Has no idea it's Italian. How many fucking things are we carrying around? And who are you when you drop them? And which of those things are undroppable? I don't, I don't think there are any that are undroppable. And Ramana Maharshi has this great thing where he goes, when you're stoking the fire of your own awareness, the last thing you get the fire going, the last thing you throw in is the stick you were soaking the fire with. You can even drop your practice. All of it can go. Because you're zero, you're your smallest, most irreducible, undividable you. That's the part that knows this, whether or not you vibe with this language, but there's a part of you.

1:38:41And I would also recommend Rupert Spiro. If you read Being Aware of Being Aware, which is a very short book and every chapter says the same thing. You can just read the first chapter. I know Richard Rohr, but I haven't read that book. Rupert is a beautiful non-dual teacher, but he will just go like, what is it that's aware of your experience? And he's like, nobody's asking that. He says, we're like the screen of a movie and everybody gets so caught up in the content of the movie, just like we do when we watch a movie, that you forget you're looking at a screen. But you're the screen. It's not colored or changed in any meaningful way by the light that's on it.

1:39:25Right now, I'm so, oh, I'm on a podcast. I'm a screen. What is the screen? What distance is an illusion? Like, this sound is farther than this. It's all happening on the screen of my awareness. And the additional delusion to that is that it's all happening in our head. Right. But that is also just an appearance in consciousness. That's what I, so science, I'm a pro-science person I hope I don't have to say that but science will say I saw a TED talk where they're like reality is a greed upon group hallucination and that's really right on with a lot of mystical traditions this is Maya or this is play or whatever you want to say but they'll say it originates in the brain so that's like you and I are having a dream and I hold up a ring box and I go this dream is coming from this box like why would a part of the dream be a reliable source of the dream what the fuck do we know about the mind you know what i'm saying so we're going it originates in the amygdala of the blah blah that's also you can't remove the observer it's it's influencing and part of and drenched in the observed you are the observed right the idea that there is a self right that is observing right is is a further illusion.

1:40:47Right. And that that self resides somewhere inside your head. Right. And that's hard. Like it takes practice to disabuse yourself because it's so entrenched in our deep rooted attachment to what is real.

1:41:06As a lifelong Star Trek fan, hosting Sir Patrick Stewart was a dream that did not disappoint in episode 785 when the beloved icon of stage and screen graced the podcast for a vulnerable exchange covering his extraordinary life as well as his new memoir, Making It So. You've lived just an absolutely extraordinary life and you did a wonderful job with the book. It's wildly entertaining. It's a very difficult book to put down. The stories are just absolutely legendary. So well done in that regard. I love it. And I know you're about to embark on quite the book tour. So you're gonna be doing a lot of media stuff.

1:41:49I guess, I'm curious about what it is that you want people to take from the book, but also just your life. Like what is instructive about the experiences that you had and the lessons that you've learned as you reflect back as an 83 year old man on what's important, what's not. And maybe even a guiding principle or two. that we could incorporate into our own lives? Well, they come down to things that I am still working on. And it's awkward being a leading actor on television and film. But being brave, being open, being sensitive to other people, tuning into them becomes more and more and more important to me.

1:42:45And I find that in the close friends that I have, that is their relationship with me too, and it's a wonderful, wonderful experience.

1:42:59I wish I could go back. There are things I would like to say to my parents and my brothers, both of them, that I never said. And that makes me very, very sad that I never told them what they gave me. But this gives you an opportunity to at least say it publicly. It kind of does, yes. I mean, my first draft of this book was over 700 pages. and it's now about 440. So people are saying, so what are you gonna write next? And I say, no, no, no, no, no. There's no next. This is it. And then the other day I thought, hmm, well, maybe I could find that draft that's got 350 words in it that are not in my book.

1:43:58The director's cut. The director's cut, yeah, yeah. To your point, that was beautifully shared. Thank you. There's a section in the book that I found quite moving, which was about your relationship with vulnerability as an actor and how that's a tool and a vehicle for unlocking truth, but also as a way of being in the world, right? The power that comes with allowing yourself to be vulnerable on stage, but also with the people that you care about. Yes, yes, yes. That's perhaps the primary objective in my life now. To be vulnerable with those you care about. Yes, yes. There are many, for me, great resonances about being an actor.

1:44:58and one of the strongest is the people I encounter, finding that there were in the world other young people and some of them significantly older

1:45:13who felt the same kind of isolation that I felt and yet in the company of actors there was an almost intuitive connection that was made between us. And I was 12 years old when I first was dumped into a large group of actors on a course that was run. It was a brand new course run by the West Riding County Council in Yorkshire. And the minimum age was 14. And it was in my headmaster's office that I met a man called Gerald Tyler. He's in the book. and he had come to say that the county council were going to run an eight-day theater course, a residential theater course. By that, it meant we had camp beds to lie on in school classrooms.

1:46:11But nevertheless, from the moment that I arrived there, I was in the company of people like me. now some of them were highly educated i mean i got a big crush on a girl who was at grammar school but it didn't work out i was a secondary modern school with you no no um and and yet it was our love of acting performing of plays scripts texts um uh being in front of an audience which never scared me ever at all. And there was a reason for this. One of my first attractions to acting was that I could forget about Patrick Stewart. Right, that was my next question. How much of this, aside from finding like-minded people in this tribe of young artists, how much of it was an escape from your own life or the opportunity to step outside who you were and just become somebody altogether different as a defense mechanism and not having to deal with whatever pain is kind of lingering in your subconscious.

1:47:29You explain it perfectly. Yeah. That's exactly how it was. To not be Patrick Stewart, if only for a few hours a week was such a relief to explore being someone other than myself with a different background. I mean, the first role that I played, other than this thing that we'd done about the history of Yorkshire and Murfield, where I grew up, was a comedy called The Happiest Days of Your Life. You may have encountered it very occasionally. It crops up in theatre very occasionally. and it was all set in a private boys school, a rather exclusive private boys school and it was wartime and a private girls school had been found places in the school.

1:48:26So there were now boys and girls playing there and I played a character, you see I remember his name, called Hopcroft Minor. He had an older brother who is Hopcroft. And it was such a joy to be playing an upper class child. Even though I struggled with the accent, I didn't really have a proper received pronunciation accent until I was 15 or 16. But I was learning. And sometimes it made people laugh when they heard me speak, because it sounded so portentous and, you know. So, becoming someone else, that was the main attraction. Yeah. And I could forget who Patrick Stewart was.

1:49:22Maintaining mobility and finding meaningful movement practices were hot topics in 2023, ones that I explored not only in a movement masterclass, but also with movement experts and built to move authors, Kelly and Juliette Starrett. They joined me in episode 764 to give us easy ways to change sedentary habits and integrate more movement into your daily life. There's a lot of confusion around what you mean when you talk about mobility. So let's just clarify that. And I kind of wanna build on that to get into the various, you know, principles that form the framework of this book and your philosophy?

1:50:08Well, I mean, I'll start and maybe take a swing at this. I think, I mean, at this point you ought to be able to define it, right? Yes. To us, you know, mobility is, is really the ability to be able to move freely through your environment and do the things you want to be able to do with your body, whatever those things may be. Now we offer a lot of tools, which we call mobilizations, which are things you can do to help improve your mobility and range of motion. But to us at the highest level, it's the ability to move freely, ideally without pain, or at least minimizing pain and feel to do the things you love to do.

1:50:44And if I added it. How did I do? Pretty good for an attorney. You've been in the game for a minute, I can tell. I would add your body, everyone agrees that your shoulder should be able to do certain things and that your spine should be able to do certain things and your hips should build certain things. Every physician, every orthopedic surgeon, every physical therapist, we all agree how much shoulder is normal, how much your ankle should be able to move. The problem is that we don't give people benchmarks for what is normative or what you should be able to do. And our lives sometimes don't ask us of that.

1:51:21And so suddenly when we have pain or a problem, that range of motion is never part of the conversation about, hey, I see that your steering wheel doesn't go all the way to the left. Let's just make sure that you can, you know, the pilots where they take off, you know, they check to make sure everything's working right. So we could also define mobility as, do you have your native range of motion and can you control that native range of motion? so are you a skilled person and what Juliet said is all of that is important but really what is it you want to do in your world and environment and how do you want to express this body that's the most important thing and I think that's where we got in the weeds you know yeah hip range of motion is important yeah yeah yeah but if it prevents you from doing something or you're having pain and that's also conjoined with the fact that you don't have access to that range maybe that's the reason you should care well and like let me just give you one example like if you just asked anyone on the street, like, do you care about your hip range of motion?

1:52:16They're going to be like, no, why would I care about that? But as an example, we were recently talking to a friend of ours who has a four-month-old baby and has both sets of parents visiting. And his parents are like in their mid-60s. So, you know, not that much older than us. And his mother is able to get up and down off the ground and sit with the baby, but his mother-in-law can't get down onto the ground or up off of the ground. And so can't sit on the floor and play with the grandchild. And that's one of those things that you don't think about until it's like a use it or lose it kind of thing.

1:52:52But like that right there is hip range of motion. So you may not care athletically about hip range of motion because you're not trying to run faster or lift more weights or, you know, whatever an athlete might need to care about hip range of motion for. But, you know, most people would say, man, do you want to be able to sit on the floor and play with your grandchild when you have one? And they'd be like, yes, I do. And so, you know, that's one of the reasons why people should care about their hip range of motion. Right. I feel that humans are not very good at casting their gaze that far into the future though.

1:53:22So true. Especially like it's not until - Yeah, if you're 25. You're just like, I'll deal with that when I can. Do you remember these? Or that's not gonna happen to me. Yes. Especially with an elite athlete, like forget about it, right? So the barrier to being able to, you know, convince somebody that these things are important has to be, it's like a high bar for you, right? To like communicate with people like, hey, we can talk about longevity. How long do you wanna live? What is it that you wanna be able to do when you're 80 and 90, et cetera? But when you're 30, even in your 40s and you're essentially pain-free or you don't have some kind of injury, that's a challenge.

1:54:02Yeah, it is. But it is true that like, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, you know, any kind of brain degeneration, similarly with our physical bodies, like these things are progressive. And if you're not working on this stuff far in advance of those aging years, you're going to have a problem. But if you do undergo, you know, sort of shoulder the responsibility of doing these things that you guys talk about so much, you're taking out this insurance policy to be able to do all those things in your later years. But it's just that humans are not good at like, you know, evaluating the cost benefit analysis of these sorts of things.

1:54:38And our environment gives us a lot of cues or guides us into poor decisions. I just, I think New York Times had an article just recently about how some of our foods hijack our brain chemistry, right? Our modern foods is umamis. We just think, oh, they're so good. So here's a story. I was a young physio student watching the cardiac catheter lab, and I'm watching a really wealthy kid, a wealthy man in San Francisco and his whole family's outside and he has three beautiful daughters, which I can start to like put myself in his shoes. He has this amazing wife, killer law practice. He's rich in every definition of the term.

1:55:15He's one life and he's in there having three stints put in his heart and he's overweight. And what I thought in that moment was, if this guy has every resource and every reason to live and it's still that hard to change, and to make these things to keep himself alive with his family. What recourse does an average person, mortal person without his resources have? And really that was a kind of a shocker. And I think if I'd video the two women, you know, putting in the catheter, like chain smoking, you know, like as a matter of fact, that may have showed him that video, maybe that would have changed his behavior, but no, it's really difficult to sort of untangle what seems like the biggest Gordian knot in your life.

1:55:56Where do I go? Especially since sometimes we don't see the results right away. Yeah. So, when talking about mobility and movement, how do you diagnose somebody's mobility? You guys have this superpower. You could look at somebody just sitting or standing or walking and be like, oh, I see 10 things wrong with what's happening there. Most people don't have that ability and don't think about that kind of stuff. You know, the average person, if they're pain-free is gonna say, well, this is not, I can walk and I can get up and sit down and all that kind of stuff. So where does one begin to try to self-diagnose and understand their own mobility, capacity, limitations and what they should be focused on working on?

1:56:43Well, in this book, we literally identify five areas where we think that if people just kept an eye on it, like just kept an eye on it. A vital sign. Just, yeah, we call them vital signs because we - Right, you have these 10 things. Yeah, we have these 10 vital signs, but we specifically chose the word vital sign because it started coming up more and more in the pandemic. Actually, everyone was like tracking all these vital signs, like their SEO too. And, you know, obviously everybody knows that 120 over 80 is like, okay, blood pressure. And if you go over that, it's something you should keep an eye on.

1:57:11And so that's why we thought, well, if regular people can keep an eye on a vital sign like blood pressure, then why can't there be some movement specific or health specific vital signs? And so, you know, obviously the human body is the most complicated thing in the known universe. But we really tried to boil it down to a few areas of range of motion we thought people should keep an eye on or that we consider to be vital signs. And we do have these simple tests in the book that people can just do once and sort of say, OK, this is where I'm at. You know, this is something I need to keep an eye on.

1:57:43This is something I'm doing great at. and then the things we suggest for people to work on them, we think we've suggested things that they can literally do like while they're watching Netflix at night or while they're still sitting at their office. We've really tried to make it so that you don't have to go to the one-hour mobility balance class and journal in the morning in order to get these things done. One of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation, the great Judd Apatow graced the podcast to discuss his fascinating perspective on filmmaking, on storytelling, on creativity, and just tons more.

1:58:20So here is a slice of that exchange. The other person that was an important mentor to me was David Milch, who created Deadwood and co-created NYPD Blue with Stephen Bochco. And he was another one that, you know... Everybody talks, I mean, reveres him as a genius. You know, he taught at Yale, but he also, you know, had a lot of issues with addiction and gambling. And, you know, he was one of those people that would, he would lay on the ground, there'd be a microphone on the ground, and he would dictate the show. People would wait around while he channeled the show. And he believed, he used to say, inspiration comes to prepared souls.

1:59:11And his whole thing was about that connection. Can you open yourself up and be so present and available that the creativity comes? And to trust that. And I learned so much from him about that. Or, you know, one of the David Milch things is to, you know, to just start writing. You know, he always says, saucot you can't think yourself into writing, but you can write yourself into thinking. So just start and it'll just come. And so that was a real lesson for me. There are ways I could be better at this. That's why when you get back to self-help, I'm always looking for something that will make me open up in some way, heal in some way, learn something that will make me more efficient.

2:00:05and sometimes I'm drowning in self-help because I just read and listen to too much of it. Yeah, that creates its own paralysis. Yes, yeah, because I'm a hoarder a bit. So I'll listen to too much. But with this, I just said, okay, this is really simple. Just get your ass in the chair. And then amazement at it actually working. Yeah, because you're going, how creative am I? Do I have any jokes left in this brain? and to see it happen was really rewarding and made me think, oh, maybe I could do that three more times this year. How do you balance the collaborative aspect of the creation and writing process versus that like ass in a chair alone at home?

2:00:49But once I'm done - What is the journey, you know, what is the daily, you know, do you set it up with a schedule? Well, once the script is done, then I just send it to everybody and just go, what do you think? What do you think? And then at some point I'll sit alone and, you know, or with a writer's assistant and just rewrite it. And then I try to read it out loud. And then I can watch it like a movie and see if it works for me as a movie and then rewrite it and read it out loud again. And then at some point, if someone will let me make it, we go into rehearsals. And then it changes a lot once the actors bring their stuff into it.

2:01:24How do you know when you have an idea? I think I asked you this earlier, but like that, that, you know, it's like once you commit to an idea, there's a long road ahead. Right. Is there like something, does something light up in your brain where you're like, this is it? Or this is the thing I like it? Or is that an instinct or? You have an instinct, but then you just keep like telling it to people. And so you're like, they like it. It seems funny. Yeah. It seemed funny. and it's just like a movie about like a guy gets a girl pregnant and he hangs out with those stone friends and he's a nightmare, but he wants to see if maybe he could be a good boyfriend.

2:02:03And, you know, and then you start showing the outline to some friends and you're looking for some reinforcement that you're not in a crazy place. And then at some point you think, am I really going to do this? Okay, maybe I'll write five pages. Let me just see if it comes to life. and then usually you go, oh, yeah, this seems funny. Does it start generally with a conceit for you or with a person, like a character? Like, oh, this person, what would this person, what adventure would this guy go on? I mean, each time is different, but I like working from some very passionate idea or truthful idea.

2:02:44You know, when Leslie and I, we're at the hospital having our second, child, just everything went wrong other than she's beautiful and healthy. The doctor was mean. The other doctor just didn't show up, just left town to go to a bar mitzvah. I just took notes that night. I was like, this is so crazy how weird this night is. In the back of my head, I'm like, there's probably a way to tell this story. Then you back into it. Eventually, with Pete Davidson, with the King of Staten Island. We had worked on a different idea for a while. And then usually you just say, what should we really be writing about?

2:03:28And then it just comes out. Like, are you willing to explore what we probably should explore? And Pete was, and so then we started writing that version. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The, like, knowing when, you know, it's time to pull the thread a little bit further versus moving on. and it's really hard to start a script for me because I think one of the things I always have to get over is by writing, I'm finding out if I'm terrible. So it's very easy to not write because if I don't write, I won't find out if I'm bad. Do you still go to war with yourself in that way though? I think so. I think it's subtle, but it's just because there's a critical voice that you are always wrestling with that basically says, just don't do it.

2:04:18just go watch TV. You don't have to suffer through this. And to try to turn it into a pleasurable experience, I'm still almost in hyperventilation or anxiety. Most of the time I'm actually writing. I'm just... My breath gets short. I'm so nervous and I'm trying to open a spigot and I have to relax to let it come out. But there's just a weird part of me that's just scared. Scared it's going to be bad. Scared I'm going to... That like Stephen Pressfield resistance. Exactly. More of art kind of thing. It's totally that. And that's what the flow thing helped me with, which is, you know, I can toss it all.

2:05:00I don't have to, I can throw out all the work today. Just trust it might be, there might be something good. Like if you, I wrote this script kind of fast and I just said, I'm going to write straight through to the end. I'm not even going to reread yesterday's pages until I get to the end. And then I got to the end and then I started reading it and I was like, I don't even remember writing almost anything. Like I remember the story but the language and the jokes and I was really pleasantly surprised by it but I just forced myself to just go to, you know, that part of my imagination and just followed wherever it led me and that's not how I always wrote.

2:05:38I think I was more methodical and I just thought, maybe I'll just kind of, you know, go into the trance and see what bubbles up. It's sort of like morning pages, no stakes. Exactly. And I did those, I mean, the Julie Cameron artist way, you know, I did that in the early 90s. Yeah, I think I started that in 90, when did that book come out? 97, 98? I mean, I could have done that in the... No, it was early. No, no, because I did it early 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, yeah. I could have even done it late 80s. But, you know, so that idea of morning pages to just write, don't judge, just whatever comes out, it doesn't matter.

2:06:20Which was also a David Milch exercise where he said to get your creative juices going for two weeks, right? For 20 minutes a day, print it and then tear it up. Just to get used to your brain being creative. And like the Zen Buddhist sand mandala. Exactly. But he said, you'll open up that part of your brain and it'll fire up. And I'd never done that, but I understand what he's talking about. Just not being precious, not being too attached. It's like having a baby. Like suddenly your body knows how to make a baby. You guys, like your whole life is not making a baby. Then one day, like this machine builds itself and you have a baby.

2:07:05Well, there's a part of your brain or your mind that you could turn on and it builds itself to be creative. Yeah. There might not be anyone better to close out 2023 than Olympic runner, award-winning writer, poet, filmmaker, and friend, Alexi Pappas, who joined me to discuss evolution, self-belief, how to find the courage required to blaze your own path, and the power of finding joy in the journey. Here is a powerful clip from our conversation. Oh, glop. Can you talk about glop? Yeah. So GLOP is my favorite chapter in the book, and it represents knowledge that I gained since writing Bravey, which was a fun thing to like update what I knew in the world.

2:07:57And glop is just the idea that scientifically, when caterpillars become butterflies, they go into a chrysalis and they don't just sprout wings, but they are actually reduced down to a liquid form, complete and total liquid, called unscientifically glop. And then they become a butterfly. And what I identified with so strongly is that when I'm going through change, when any of us are going through change, we might be reduced down to our lowest glop state. We might not feel great. And that's not a bad thing. And anytime I've felt like I was glop, I usually try to revert back and become a caterpillar again and put myself back together.

2:08:43But to look at science as inspiration, I think, is really empowering because you can celebrate glop and decide to move forward and become a butterfly. And humans are unlike caterpillars in that we can choose to stay caterpillar forever. And we do feel the pain of glophood. So caterpillars are unconscious in their chrysalis, but we are not. So I think the metaphor and the chapter is important to me because we should feel that glop is good. And if you're feeling like glop, you can celebrate it as a non-negotiable stage that you have to go through to become something else. Yeah, yeah. And you can print it on a shirt and say, I'm glop and wear it around like a prideful label.

2:09:33Which, if you haven't done already, you probably are doing. I put it on a sweatshirt when I was gloved. But, no, it's fun because kids, people should tell kids you can't predict your life. It will always surprise you. And that change is hard in a way that is actually, like, normal. Yeah, that's really important. I mean, and that goes to your reflex towards like actionable tools to use as opposed to feel better or it'll be fine. But like, no, what can I actually do? I can shake my arms out or I can like, what is behavioral? Well, and also there's so much dialogue now that says like, it's okay if you don't feel great today if you do nothing.

2:10:16And like, I understand that. I think it's important to allow people their like recovery days and mental health days. But like when you are feeling like glop, the thing that will move you forward is not just patience and time, but also action to become a butterfly. Yeah. Not just wallowing in the glop. Yeah, exactly. Trying to usher the glop into the butterfly. Right. Yeah, yeah. I think, first of all, all change happens a lot slower than we think. And that's why when people see people they admire or they read books about transformation, I think they can often be misleading and make people think that change is like a right turn when like the right turn is usually happening in a series of very, very, very, very tiny steps.

2:11:10and I think big changes happen very, very slowly. And accepting that is super important because when I see people whip their life around when they think they want a big change, it usually either spirals them into depression or it's not an effective way to actually make the change or it leaves them with like a tangible change but not the time to like emotionally change with it, to evolve as a person. So that I think is the first thing. Then as far as what are you doing? So let's just say you feel like you need to change. Then it's like, what is the change? Where am I headed? What do I do? Or what is the identity I want to shift or whatever it is?

2:11:52There's been two things that have been helpful to me that I'll share. One was an exercise that Deepak Chopra took me through in like this small seminar that I did. And I'm sure he's shared it elsewhere. But basically, we were in this room and he was asking us to ask ourselves questions without reaching for the answer. So in order to figure out answers, basically, you simply keep asking the question without reaching for the answer. So the question might be, what is my purpose? Right. And the goal was just to simply keep saying, what is my purpose? What is my purpose? What is my purpose? without trying to reach for the purpose.

2:12:34Because when we reach, we're often reaching for something like an occupation or something in the tangible world. And it's too contextualized in the world. But when we just ask and wait, it was so cool. Because for me, what came to mind was hugging 21-year-old girls and saying, this is going to sound weird, and saying, everything's going to be okay. And everything's going to be okay. And everything's going to be okay. And like, that's not a job, but it felt like a purpose to help people feel okay. And it did feel accurate. And that felt like the first step was to pull our evolution out of the material world or the world as we know it and to make it more of an idea first.

2:13:18And I think that the next step is to figure out what you actually do. That is something that I've drastically shifted how I approach since being an Olympian. Because leading up to the Olympics, the steps there were very clear and they were outlined by coaches, right, as you said. And they were tiered based on what was most productive toward that goal. and now that the goal is less of a tangible, like I don't want to be an Olympian anymore. I want to have those certain feelings that I shared with you or I want to share with the world and they're not as rooted in a job or tangible results. So how do I pick my actions now and how do I evolve that?

2:14:08And I think the way I do it now is really different. Monica, who is our shared physio, she was like, Alexi, every cell in our body, when it's happy or safe, it expands and moves toward. And that's like the feeling of having a crush on someone. Or when someone's like, let's go out to sushi. And you're like, yes. Like that's a really, it's a known feeling that we have. And she said it's cellular. And it was the feeling I was having roller skating. And she said every cell when it's unsafe, it contracts and moves away. And that's what you feel when somebody puts food in front of you that you're allergic to or have had food poisoning or something.

2:14:52You know that feeling of like, I just won't eat that. And she said, I want you to start thinking about your life in terms of, are these decisions expansive or contractive to me? Or now I think about it as, do I have a crush on this decision? And once I started doing that, it made decisions a lot easier for me and I started to actually evolve without overthinking the decisions I was making and doing things that like were surprising to me, which has been very, very useful. I hope you enjoyed this reflection in the rear view and found these two episodes both uplifting and inspiring. I want to thank you again for the love and all the support.

2:15:35This podcast truly has been just an amazing journey, and I'm beyond grateful that you're on this journey with me. I look forward to growing and learning together in the new year and many years ahead. Links, as always, to all the full episodes and the social media accounts for all the guests excerpted today can be found in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing that you can do is simply subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media is, of course, always appreciated.

2:16:18And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Dan Drake and Blake Curtis. Portraits by Davey Greenberg and Giselle Peters. Graphic elements courtesy of Daniel Solis. And our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Appreciate the love and support. See you next year. Peace. Plants. Namaste.