Biodiversity. Regenerative agriculture. Ecological sustainability. Carbon drawdown. Climate change reversal. These are popular themes that recur regularly on this show. But in practical terms, what do they actually mean? I wanted to better understand these subjects. Not from the perspective of an academic, scientific researcher or political pundit but rather from the direct experience of actual practitioners — people who live and practice it every single day — farmers. Nine years ago, personal c...
Nov 25, 2019•2 hr 29 min•Ep 482•Transcript available on Metacast Making his 9th appearance on the podcast, today marks another mind-bending deep dive into the multiverse with Guru Singh, my treasured friend and favorite wizard of all things mystical. For those newer to the show, imagine a modern-day Gandalf who rocks like Hendrix while dropping pearls of wisdom that beautifully fuse Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism. A celebrated third-generation Sikh yogi, master spiritual teacher, author, and family man, for the past 40 years Guru Singh has been stu...
Nov 21, 2019•1 hr 29 min•Ep 481•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine running an ultramarathon. It’s a huge undertaking for anyone. And a bucket list dream for many. Now imagine running an ultramarathon every day. A minimum of 40 miles, 75 days in a row. Starting in Los Angeles. Finishing in New York. A 3,200 mile transcontinental run. This is the story of Robbie Balenger. Just 6 years ago, Robbie laced up his first pair of running shoes to alleviate the stress he was experiencing managing a restaurant. A small act, that first run set in motion a chain of ...
Nov 18, 2019•2 hr 8 min•Ep 480•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, today Edward Norton graces the podcast to discuss his fascinating life and perspective on filmmaking, culture, politics and the nature of power. Over the course of his extraordinary career, Edward has reaped 3 Academy Award nominations starring in some of the greatest films of our era — Primal Fear, American History X, Fight Club, Birdman, and 25th Hour among them. The occasion for this conversation is Motherless Brooklyn — a long-gestating pas...
Nov 11, 2019•2 hr 50 min•Ep 479•Transcript available on Metacast Gracing us with his beautiful presence for a third appearance on the show, my guest today is none other than the legendary ultra-marathon man himself. For those who missed RRP 115 and/or RRP 259, Dean Karnazes is an internationally recognized endurance athlete, New York Times bestselling author, and philanthropist globally lauded for his preternatural ability to push his body and mind to limits inconceivable to mere mortals. Among his many palmerès, Dean has: * Run 135 miles across Death Valley ...
Nov 07, 2019•2 hr 50 min•Ep 478•Transcript available on Metacast It’s one thing to be an artist. But to become a successful creative — revered for your art — is quite another thing altogether. Even more rare are the few who deftly navigate the vicissitudes of an acclaimed artistic career (or any career for that matter), with a highly conscious, devotional approach. Musicians Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero – popularly known as the Mexican acoustic rock guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela — are not only incredible masters of their craft, they fully embody this...
Nov 04, 2019•2 hr 36 min•Ep 477•Transcript available on Metacast One day not long ago, I awoke to a bright orange book ubiquitously displayed everywhere I looked. Provocatively titled The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, today's guest birthed a publishing sensation, custom tailored for click-bait embrace. The title also made the book easy to dismiss. In fact, freely admit to downright refusing to read it. But it just would not go away. Not only did it top the New York Times bestseller list, the book stayed there. 6 million plus copies later, it still rests at...
Oct 28, 2019•2 hr•Ep 476•Transcript available on Metacast Today's guest is lauded for her grit. And a preternatural ability to suffer. Her name is Amelia Boone. And she is the most dominant & decorated female in the history of OCR (obstacle course racing). Over the course of her storied athletic career, Amelia has amassed over 50 podiums and 30 victories. She is a Spartan Race World Champion and 3-time World's Toughest Mudder Champion. The ultimate weekend warrior, she’s done all of this while balancing a full time career as a corporate attorney — firs...
Oct 24, 2019•2 hr 22 min•Ep 475•Transcript available on Metacast By now, most of you have heard about the Impossible Burger. I imagine many of you have tried it. Arguably the ‘beefiest' plant-based patty, even the most attuned palate has trouble believing it isn't real meat. Now ubiquitous at fine dining establishments and fast food franchises alike, it's a global phenomenon. Today we explore the mission behind the burger with Impossible Foods founder & CEO Pat Brown, the man responsible for upending everything you thought you knew about plant-based meat, on ...
Oct 21, 2019•2 hr 23 min•Ep 474•Transcript available on Metacast I'm ecstatic to share my first live podcast event, recorded at the Los Angeles Wilshire Ebell Theatre on September 27, 2019. For all of us, this podcast is an abstraction. The motivation behind the event was to create a tactile, analog experience for 1,100 people to gather around shared purpose and passion. An opportunity to cultivate community. Raise consciousness. Elevate intimacy. Deepen personal connectivity around our collective humanity — and the important ideas of our time. An unforgettab...
Oct 14, 2019•2 hr 7 min•Ep 473•Transcript available on Metacast Conventional wisdom frames creativity as the purview of a certain select few — a rare gift that eludes us mere mortals. This is a lie. We are all born creative. More birthright than blessing, creativity is a practice. A habit not unlike any other skill or discipline. A muscle that can be built and flexed. This week's guest takes the notion one step further, asserting creativity as a biological necessity — a transformative force that resides within us all that when unleashed delivers vitality to ...
Oct 10, 2019•2 hr 19 min•Ep 472•Transcript available on Metacast Addiction is tenacious. We're all craven animals, vulnerable to habits that don't serve us. Whether it’s a constantly checking social media, binge eating, smoking, excessive drinking, most of us fall prey to compulsions we feel powerless to arrest. Why is this? And what can neuroscience teach us about the nature of cravings and how to overcome them? Dr. Jud Brewer has devoted his career to answering these questions. His discoveries just might change your life. A psychiatrist, neuroscientist, tho...
Oct 07, 2019•2 hr 12 min•Ep 471•Transcript available on Metacast He's best known for popularizing Stoicism — an ancient philosophical yet highly practical operating system he pioneered to mainstream, modern adoption. In his latest turn, Ryan Holiday expands his lens East. In pursuit of shared wisdom across ancient Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Hebrew, Greek, Christian and Epicurean traditions, he discovered one essential truth — that inner peace is essential to a life of purpose, meaning and fulfillment. Ryan calls it stillness — to be steady while the world spins...
Sep 30, 2019•3 hr 32 min•Ep 470•Transcript available on Metacast How do you find your path in the vast shadow cast by one of history's most accomplished and beloved humans? For Laila Ali, the daughter of late global icon and humanitarian Muhammad Ali (the 8th of his 9 children), it wasn't easy. It wasn't always pretty. But over time, she found her voice. Staked her claim in very the ring that propelled her father to god-like status. And transcended that shadow as a multi-faceted talent that honors her father and yet is hers alone. Although she was never an at...
Sep 23, 2019•2 hr 50 min•Ep 469•Transcript available on Metacast Newly rebranded from Guru Corner to Guru Multiverse — because after all the infinite has no sharp edges — today marks yet another deep dive with Guru Singh, my treasured friend and favorite wizard of all things mystical. For those newer to the show, imagine a modern-day Gandalf who rocks like Hendrix while dropping pearls of wisdom that beautifully fuse Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism. A celebrated third-generation Sikh yogi, master spiritual teacher, author, and family man, for the pa...
Sep 19, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep 468•Transcript available on Metacast Love. Connection. Pain. Finding the universal in the specific. And beauty in the mundane. This is but a few of the themes explored today with the woman dubbed ‘the voice of her generation' by Oprah magazine and ‘the poet laureate of the ordinary' by HuffPost. Meet Kelly Corrigan. Best known for her insightful, candid takes on the too-often overlooked moments that define our lives, Kelly's writing spills over with warmth, courage, vulnerability and humor — rendering her many books beloved by mill...
Sep 16, 2019•2 hr 16 min•Ep 467•Transcript available on Metacast Conventional wisdom dictates that mastery demands an early start. Relentless focus at the exclusion of other pursuits. And as many hours of deliberate practice as humanly possible. Be it violin, painting, basketball or boat building, there’s simply no substitute for a life wholly devoted to developing that narrowly defined skill. Hence the “10,000 hour rule” zeitgeist embrace — an edict divined by psychologist Anders Ericcson and made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. But is this actually true? Today’...
Sep 09, 2019•2 hr 20 min•Ep 466•Transcript available on Metacast Has it really been a full year since Julie appeared on the podcast? Well that's just not right. So today marks the latest installment in my ongoing series of ponderous mind melds with my wife and in-house spiritual guru, the wise and ethereal Julie Piatt, aka SriMati. Longtime listeners are well acquainted with my better half. For those newer to the show, Julie is many things — the bestselling author of three vegan cookbooks. An accomplished yogi, healer, musician, and mom to four children. The ...
Sep 05, 2019•2 hr 40 min•Ep 465•Transcript available on Metacast Let's talk about talking to someone. Personally, I've been in and out of therapy for more than two decades. Over the last couple years, I've been deeply immersed in a weekly therapist-led men's group — intimate game-changing sessions that have helped me work through deep-seated stuff that lives and breathes beyond 12-step. We're only as sick as our secrets. The path to healing and personal growth requires openly sharing our hidden struggles. Bearing our vulnerabilities. And allowing others to id...
Sep 02, 2019•2 hr 49 min•Ep 464•Transcript available on Metacast Screens and cubicles. Shoes and chairs. Fluorescent lights and air conditioned offices. Processed foods. Netflix and chill. Disconnecting us from our essential human nature, modern living isn't making us happier. Ironically, it's driving an existential crisis of unprecedented proportions — rendering us more sick, immobile, lonely, depressed, and unfulfilled than ever. It's time to stop. It's time we reconnect with that which is most essential. Nature. Movement. Community. Love. To do that, we mu...
Aug 26, 2019•3 hr 49 min•Ep 463•Transcript available on Metacast How does a relatively conservative, risk averse person evolve into an unbreakable champion? Someone confident enough to put everything on the line for an audacious dream? This is the story of Gwen Jorgensen — an accountant turned ‘Queen of Triathlon' who walked away from swim-bike-run at the peak of her powers to ply her skills in an entirely new discipline: the marathon. Gwen’s athletic career began as a swimmer, competing at the University of Wisconsin as a walk on before making the switch to ...
Aug 22, 2019•2 hr 33 min•Ep 462•Transcript available on Metacast We craft our identity around story. And that story is comprised of beliefs. But you are not your beliefs. And that story isn't just incomplete, it's generally wrong. The path to self-actualization requires deconstructing that story. And disentangling your beliefs from the truth of your highest self. To do this we must unlearn much of what we reflexively accept as truth. And open ourselves to a more expansive perspective. My guest for this exploration is the Toronto-based, rapper, author and spok...
Aug 19, 2019•3 hr 51 min•Ep 461•Transcript available on Metacast What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take ‘experience' for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? Our guide for today's philosophic and scientific exploration of these mysteries is Annaka Harris. An editor and consultant for science writers specializing in neuroscience and physics, Annaka is the author of the ...
Aug 12, 2019•2 hr 39 min•Ep 460•Transcript available on Metacast Today's guest is many things. A fiercely independent singer, songwriter and musician. A bestselling author and blogger. A playwright and director. A riveting speaker and a viral TED Talk-er. A crowdfunding mom. An ardent feminist. And a fearless activist. Living and breathing at the cutting edge of expression in all forms, Amanda Palmer is an iconic, bold and sui generis performer constantly innovating what it means to be an artist in the modern age. Getting her start as a busking eight-foot bri...
Aug 08, 2019•1 hr 24 min•Ep 459•Transcript available on Metacast Tattoos. High intensity sound. Stage diving. For the unfamiliar, it's chaos. Scary. Violent, even. But to today's guest, being hardcore straight edge is magical — a grassroots community dedicated to art, not anarchy. Celebrating life. And making the world a better place. Best known around the world as the charismatic, energetic and always smiling front man for hardcore punk band H2O, Toby Morse was raised by a single mom in Massachusetts before moving to New York City in 1988 with a dream of bec...
Aug 05, 2019•2 hr 40 min•Ep 458•Transcript available on Metacast Hey it's that guy. You know the guy, right? The guy with the crazy moustache in that Ben Affleck movie? The Man In Black from Lost? The Irish gangster in Sons of Anarchy? Oh, right. THAT GUY. Titus Welliver has one of the longest lists of working actor credits in Hollywood. Nonetheless, this über-talented veteran of stage and screen spent most of his storied career slightly outside Tinsletown's white hot spotlight. But that changed with the 2014 premier of Amazon's Original Series Bosch. A hardb...
Jul 29, 2019•3 hr 55 min•Ep 457•Transcript available on Metacast He’s back! One of the most fascinating and popular guests to grace this platform, Today Zach Bush, MD returns for a third mind-altering bend around the multiverse. For the uninitiated, Zach's varied interests belie attempts to properly define him — but I'll give it a try. One of the few triple board certified physicians in America with expertise in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Hospice/Palliative care, he is the founder and director of M Clinic integrative health center in...
Jul 25, 2019•2 hr 53 min•Ep 456•Transcript available on Metacast What is the secret to running impossibly fast? Or distances longer than previously imagined? Beginning in the 1960's, an unknown farm boy turned coach named Bob Larsen launched a decades-long quest to find the ‘secret sauce' of speed and endurance that would eventually revolutionize the sport and catapult American running onto the national stage. This is the story of how Larsen took turned a rag-tag group of also-ran junior college athletes called the Jamul Toads into cult-favorite national cham...
Jul 22, 2019•2 hr 13 min•Ep 455•Transcript available on Metacast To be totally honest, I don't follow the pugilistic arts all that closely. But professional boxer barely describes this week's guest — a man who has faced stacked odds and overcome career-ending setbacks to meet the biggest moment of his life. Ask him how he did it, and Mike Lee answers with conviction: it's all about mindset. A professional light heavyweight boxer currently 21 – 0 with 11 knockouts, this Saturday, July 20th Mike will be fighting for his first world title against Caleb Plant — t...
Jul 15, 2019•2 hr 53 min•Ep 454•Transcript available on Metacast Why is great food important? How and why did restaurants become culturally significant? And what life lessons can be gleaned from the world's greatest chef? There is no more enthusiastic ringmaster for this exploration than the merry man of food himself, Jeff Gordinier. A writer, journalist and author who sits at the converging junction of food and culture, Jeff is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and currently serves as the Food and Drinks editor at Esquire Magazine. A graduate of P...
Jul 11, 2019•3 hr 36 min•Ep 453•Transcript available on Metacast