Grow Big Always

It’s so easy to cast judgement on other people and their relationships. I know I’ve been guilty. It’s so easy to do. I’m also guilty of feeling like our culture is finally getting more open-minded with recent advancements in LGBT rights and our long war on civil rights. But then I look around the media alone and realize just how divided an polarized everyone still is. To bridge that gap— truly go to the other side and understand what it’s like for people who don’t fit into your perspective of what love should look like— takes a lot. I might not be easy. The reality is, there are tremendously huge varieties of different kinds of loving relationships besides just married people raising a family. There’s a reason why shows like Modern Family are popular. That platonic, puritanical construct of what marriage and child raising looks like does not map to how the mass population really lives. Not just in the Western culture but around the world. As you might guess, the legal protection for non-traditional relationships and non-nuclear families is insanely slow to progress. That’s why people like Diana Adams are so important. They dedicate themselves to fight for the rights of folks that may live outside your view. Diane founded her own law firm that’s focused on same-sex couples, non-nuclear relationships and families. She is very, passionately dedicated to helping form healthy, stable families no matter the love construct. Whether that’s co-parenting, polyamorous families, different same sex configurations— there’s all kinds of ways that love and families come together. In this episode, you’ll hear her talk about some very poignant and personal examples. Hopefully, you get to the same place I did. That love is love and these families deserve the same level of protection the rest of us have.

I guess I hadn’t stopped to think that one reason why government seems so insane right now is that the “governing” they’re trying to manage across wealthy, huge institutionalized structures like music, media, money, pharma, education, transportation— are fast becoming super-decentralized. All of them are fast evolving due to a tectonic shift in control. In this way, Governments themselves are just another “Woolley Mammoth System” like them. Like it or not, their Ice Age is ending. We’ve all watched various forms of power-decay impact these systems. Have you stepped back and wondered where all this is headed? That’s not what I anticipated talking about with this week’s guest, Jordan Greenhall. I thought we were going to talk about Nootropics. That’s where we started but Jordan quickly aimed the conversation at the dead center of these trends. I was first made aware of Jordan and the Neurohacker Collective because some of his folks attended a podcast and dinner party for a show I did with “The Iceman” Wim Hof (co-hosted by author Chris Ryan). Jordan was one of the cofounders of DivX, was at mp3.com and the guy has been dabbling with a massive spectrum of things from philosophy to role-playing games. Most of his interests have come back to the co-evolution of human civilization and technology. Jordan has come to the conclusion that humanity is in the midst of a world historical transition. As he puts it, it’s likely to kill us all (Mad Max) or see us in an amazing future (Star Trek). Either way, humans are going to need a significant upgrade. That’s what the Neurohacker Collective is focused on. They have a Nootropic called Qualia that’s gotten a lot of buzz (so to speak). I know for sure it felt like my brain got an upgrade and yours will too by the end of this awesome episode.

Experiencing time pass has to be one of the weirdest things. It surrounds everything around us yet is incredibly inconsistent. One moment it’s molasses slow, the next it was like it was never there. Scientists and philosophers have tried to explain time, how our brain makes it possible, for ions. Did we invent it? How do we all have such a unified experience with time? Is time passing or are we passing time? “Now” is a squirmy thing, the closer you get to it the harder it is to pin down. Time seems to be a sort of creepy mystery quietly packed with discovery and at least for me, it’s something I work hard at slowing way down. I dared to talk about time with the New Yorker’s Alan Burdick. His book “Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation,” digs into all these things. It’s a beautifully written book that will change the way you think about the past and present. Alan is a staff writer and former senior editor at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to Elements, the magazine’s science-and-tech blog. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, Discover, Best American Science and Nature Writing. Alan and I talk about all things time from some brain-blowing points of view, so be sure to make room for this episode. No doubt, it will fly by. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/alan-burdick

Before a lot of expensive orthodontic work, my mouth was an accordion of crowded teeth in the front and impacted teeth in the back. I remember being a kid thinking about having my wisdom teeth extracted and thinking how unnatural it seemed. Honestly, it’s not a topic I spent too much time thinking about after I had all my work done. In fact the entire dental marketplace of corrections, straightening, flossing, brushing, invisaligning, headgearing— really the whole category— is something I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid. That’s why Peter Ungar’s book, really caught my attention. He’s a professor at the University of Arkansas and he studies the environmental dynamics and anthropological view of teeth over vast stretches of time. The book is, “Evolution’s Bite: The True Story of Teeth, Diet and Human Origins.” It digs into what our ancestors ate, and what their their fossil remains can tell us about their diet and evolution. Not to mention what teeth are like for modern hunter-gatherers compared to ours. Why are they so straight? Why don’t they have the same wisdom teeth problems that we do? In fact when you look inside the mouths of modern hunter-gatherers and compare it to the inside of our mouths, ours teeth look like pillows compared to a very different landscape inside of theirs. It could just mean that the assumptions about our teeth, their purpose, the way they’re supposed to mature over time is very different then the way we think of them in industrialized society. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/Peter-Ungar

When you boil it all down, all of us want super intimate relationships. But how do we get there? Especially with our loved ones. There’s not much to model from. Hard to learn from your parents. It’s not like there’s a class in school on how to have intimate relationships or even what to look for. Really, there’s not any kind of guidance. We’re all grasping at straws, feeling our way without much of a map. And when you live in our culture, there’s some pretty strict rules about what relationships look like. We’re either watching movies like “Love Actually,” where a guy shows up holding poster-board that says “to me, you’re perfect” or we’re watching hardcore porn of people’s junk. When it comes to intimacy, there’s two types of trained professionals that people pay to get help. Either you’re droning on to a shrink about your problems or you might have some specific sexualized fantasies that you need to exercise. For that, you might turn to a Dominatrix. I wanted to have a conversation about intimacy and the different creative frameworks we can use to get there with Jenny Nordbak. The has a new book out called, “The Scarlet Letters: My Secret Year of Men in an LA Dungeon.” Jenny had an alter-ego while she worked in Healthcare Construction. At night she was “Scarlett,” a Dominatrix. She was living a double-life, exploring all the different edges and tools meant to help unlock various gates on the way to deeper and deeper intimacy. She did this across age ranges, genders and celebrity-statuses (her book mentions some very high-profile people came to see her in L.A.). It all took a serious turn one day when she found her Boyfriend’s phone, but I’ll let her tell you that story. So what does intimacy look like from someone who has tried every flavor out there? What chapter comes next? And what can we learn as we engage with our spouse? Hopefully, we all end up with what Jenny did: The kind of addictive intimacy that only available to people willing to risk it all. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/jenny-nordbak

For those of you following this is my second time raising a family. I have two sons in or near college and a two year old. Every since my two year old was born, I’ve watched my wife continually blown away at how critical, cookie-cutter and unnatural our society is in contrast with our perfect little boy. The good news is, I’m married to someone willing to do things "our way" vs following society's convention. One day, April pointed out "Unschooling" as a topic and Dayna Martin as a guest. Obviously, I had heard of schooling and home-schooling, but what was unschooling? Once I learned more, it mapped to a convo April and I had on a road trip: We chatted about how our standardized education system resulted in standardized ideas and people. How that standardization creates followers that mindlessly take their place in a broken operating system. We wondered what someone would be like who was never squeezed through that Play-dough "education" template.  Dayna Martin has four children ranging in age from 9yrs -18yrs old and all of them have been unschooled. They’ve never attended ANY school or institutionalized education program. Dayna has become an activist for the unschooling movement, in fact her book, “Radical Unschooling: A Revolution Has Begun,” was a launching pad that landed her on Dr. Phil, CNN, Nightline, 60 Minutes, The Jeff Probst Show, Wife Swap and yes, even Oprah.    It’s hard to imagine the bravery of deciding not to do what everybody else is doing. Can you imagine not sending your kids to school? The commitment? Having people at the grocery store ask you what grade they’re in? You’d have to constantly have to explain to everyone while they all talked behind your back. Those are the topics perfect for this show. When I told April I was super excited, she smartly pointed out that I started this podcast exactly for the same unschooling reason: I “received” an eduction, “climbed” a corporate ladder and in the end felt like I had been through the cookie cutter and wanted to learn on my own. Now, I am unschooling myself. :) This is a critical podcast. It will completely change the way you think about parenting, the education system, about what result can happen when you raise a child based on their own interests and facilitate their own natural curiosity as they grow. As you’ll hear in this show, the results extend beyond your kids and dramatically affect your own growth as a person.  Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/dayna-martin

The image we all have when it comes to negotiation are combative lawyers, confrontational car salesman or maybe the pit-sweats we’ve all had when asking our boss for a raise. While it’s true those things are negotiations, all of life is a negotiation. Those people who are closest to us— our spouse, parents, kids or friends— you’re negotiating with them all the time.  Given how prevalent negotiation is, you’d think we’d all be pretty good at it but let’s face it, we suck. Ask most people and just the word “negotiation” sends up their defenses. It would seem mastering negotiation with the people you love the most could really change your life.  Who better to talk to about negotiation than Christopher Voss. For over 24 years he was an FBI Hostage Negotiator. He investigated the first bombing of the World Trade Center and has been a primary negotiator on some of the highest profile situations around the world.  After working on over 150 international hostage cases, Chris retired and then founded The Black Swan Group and authored the hugely popular book, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.  In this episode you’ll learn all kinds of incredibly helpful tools to help you navigate the next time you negotiate with a loved one. Oh, and stay tuned until the end of the show to get a special code to receive free weekly tips from Chris.  In the meantime, be on the listen for the next time your spouse says, “you’re right.” It might just mean “negotiation over.”   

Everyday in the media is an article about jobs— how they’re disappearing for the middle class, how robots and artificial intelligence are stealing them, how the Gig-Economy is forcing people to do mundane tasks for less money. How true is it that our jobs are disappearing and how much is technology to blame? Just in my lifetime how I do my tasks has changed quite a bit—- the tools I use to do them, where I do my job, how I find work, and the skills I need to do it. Even how movies depict technology has radically changed— from the slapstick robots in 1986’s “Short Circuit” to scary-as-shit “Ex Machina” artificial intelligence. It seems that our fear that the singularity or technology is going to somehow make us extinct is at a fevered pitch. What is the inevitability of the future of jobs and why can’t we imagine what that looks like? It’s hard to imagine talking to anyone better about this, than Kevin Kelly. He’s the co-founder of Wired Magazine (as he calls it the “Senior Maverick”) and he has a recent book called, “The Inevitable” (which has recently been released in paperback). It’s a New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best Seller. What Kevin has done is mapped the 12 major trends that have already made themselves apparent and will definitely shape our future. Kevin is amazing at packaging all those ideas that live within those trends and making those things digestible. As you’ll hear, us humans are pretty horrible at figuring out what’s coming next. In this conversation, we zeroed-in on one of the major changes that’s happening all around us— it really is a megatrend— and that’s the future of jobs, how work is going to change and why. So, if you’re entering the workforce, you’re in a job that feels like it may be made redundant, or you’re just wondering where you should lean in, make sure you give this episode a listen and be sure you’ve got the leg up on what the future looks like for your and your children’s jobs. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/kevin-kelly

It’s a fact that god created the universe, reality is in three dimensions, India is a developing country, you need to drink 6-8 glasses of water a day, that when you meet the right person it will be true love, and if you eat fat you’re going to get fat. These are indisputable facts. There’s no place for opinion, or feelings in any of this, right? If you opened your brain and added up all the time you’ve spent fact-gathering, how much time do you think that would add up to? How much of what’s in your head are anecdotes that you repeat and how much are simply true? Even if they’re not, who’s got time to figure out what the truth is, where to start, and how to see it? Certainly, Science is true. That’s the bedrock of our culture. It’s always been true and it always will be true. That is, until you look to the past and realize it’s a modern invention not at all shared around the world. It blows up the closer and closer we get to it. That’s not anti-science sentiment just that we do need to take a closer look at ourselves, our minds and how we perceive reality. The closer we look, the more we realize there’s some pretty big gaps. There’s a certain set of folks who put a lot of effort putting a flashlight on the fact that we’re all trading the same ideas. We’re reaching for the same pre-conceived answers. That may not help us grow. It won’t change our cultural trajectory. In fact, by readdressing and letting go of those things, it may help us frame something completely different. Something a lot more exciting and helpful for our connection and belonging with each other. One of those people is Hunter Maats. His book, “The Straight A Conspiracy,” blew up the templated idea of what it means to be a student. He’s taken a lot of that same questioning and is applying it to bigger and broader issues. Whether as a guest on Joe Rogan Experience or Tangentially Speaking or his own, Mixed Mental Arts podcast, Hunter Maats is challenging us to look between the lines and let go of the categories that we’ve conveniently been handed. To start using a different box of crayons that we can use to start coloring a reality that unites the human experience back to the connection we so desperately seek. In this show, we talk about our category instinct, our pattern-matching machine, our convenient reality that has been so carefully and tightly mapped for us— then turn that orange inside out.

Love is life’s biggest virus of the mind. We live and die for it. Make major decisions because of it. And completely don’t understand it. “It’s complicated” is an understatement. We’re handed a script about what love really means and should be from the time we’re children. Our fairytales are pretty clear: you’ll meet someone and be swept off your feet, have babies and live happily ever after. But by the time you’re in y our 30s if this hasn’t happened for you, people think you’re misdirected or in the closet. Then by your 40s, the jury is out and clearly something’s wrong with you. Even if you did get married, where the hell are the kids? Let’s face it, we’re all following the same recipe for love— even if it doesn’t fit. For some reason, our society can scrutinize all sorts of once-sacred things, like monarchies, the laws of the universe, human rights, god— once we objectively analyzed and understood these things, it allowed us to control our own decisions and today we have room for a spectrum of different practices. But when it comes to romantic love, that’s an unquestionable magic that should never be put under a microscope. Or should it? This week’s guest thinks so. Carrie Jenkins is a Professor of Philosophy and author of “What Love Is: And What It Could Be” which unpicks the conceptual, ideological, and metaphysical tangles that get in the way of understanding what love is. We talk about how dangerous the single, normalized view of romantic love really is as well as how we may be in the brink of a social movement around new, less traditional relationships like polyamory. Could it be the next great social movement? Either way, I know you’ll have a different point of view about the big L word, after listening to this episode. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/carrie-jenkins

If you’re a regular listener to this podcast you’ve probably heard me bash capitalism a lot. The reality is there’s no escaping it, it’s taken over nearly every corner of the world. That certainly hasn’t stopped me from wincing whenever I travel to a far-away lands and am met with local trinket shops and people peddling their wares. But who am I to judge whether this is good or bad for a society. Oftentimes these are poor, macho communities with substantial pressures on them. They see the money come in and out of their world without them able to touch it. Often these countries also have remote destinations that house incredible archeological sites, but have a community that remains poor and helpless to take advantage of its history. And then there’s the question: should they? And if they do, what would that do to their culture? Would it be a positive or negative thing to suddenly take capitalism and mix it with something like archeology? Well, I learned a lot about that from this week’s guest, Larry Coben. He started his career as a Venture Capitalist focused on energy companies until he decided to make a huge career change and pursue Archeology. He’s since figured out away through his non-profit, The Sustainable Preservation Initiative, to combine both his backgrounds. He’s incredibly focused on preserving the world’s cultural heritage through sustainable economic opportunities for poor communities where a lot of women and cultures are struggling. How he has decided to approach this— to empower these poor communities all over Central America— is truly thought provoking, a bit controversial and, in the end, an incredibly cool solution for how to bridge the past with the present. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/larry-coben

Food is #1. If you’re an American, there’s no dodging it— from turning on the tv and seeing that juicy hamburger, to reading article after article about how to lose weight, to gym memberships, to following crazy diets or eating philosophies, or hell just look at the most popular things on the internet. It's food and there’s a million points of view on it. In fact, if you haven’t had a conversation with a friend about how your pants are fitting or whose fat and how they look— you’re probably not living in our society.  I wanted to take a step out of that whole crazy zoo and look at things from more of an objective “zookeeper’s” perspective when it comes to what we eat, why we’re compelled to eat it, and what we can do if we want to outsmart our brains in this insane, food-focused environment. I wanted to learn how our brain is naturally wired, how we ate for millions of years, how our eating patterns might be different from the rest of the world, why we crave the things we do, and why there’s so much tension about all this in our day-to-day societies. Ultimately, can we do anything about it?   To do that I reached out to Neurobiologist, Dr. Stephan Guyenet. He wrote a book on this very thing called, “The Hungry Brain.” It’s freaking awesome and frames things exactly in the way I was looking for. It helps you understand why we’re eating the way we are and what we can do, specifically, to get around all this and not fall trap to the marketplaces vying for our money or shove those greasy pork rinds in our mouth. In this episode, you’ll take away those specific things you can do and hopefully dodge those extremely unhealthy bullets.  Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/stephen-guyenet

If you’re reading this and are middle aged (especially a man) you’re depressed and don’t have any friends. That’s right, I’m talking to you and so are big industries who capitalize on your sad state like pharma, shrinks, and the tornado of advertisers who prey on your pleas for help.  Us middle-aged people are crying out for help, just like our babies who we put in nursery rooms by themselves. By now, our kids have left, our marriage may have left, and all the friends we used to have are on their own little islands, suffering just like us. We’ve all over-declared our independence, our society has built a super complex, reinforcing system around it.  I’m one of these poor souls, too: a middle aged guy with my wife as my best friend, whose put everything I have into my family and most of those kids are now adults who have moved on and left poor, old me feeling really isolated and lonely.  To learn more about that, I reached out to Harvard’s Jacqueline Olds, author (along with her husband) of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century. In our Skype conversation we talk about not only how our society got here, but what we can do about it and where we might be headed. So, if you’re looking to course correct and get yourself out of Funkville, take a listen to Professor Olds and hopefully you find yourself no longer alone in the room, listening to the Titanic soundtrack.   Music credit: Celine Dion, My Heart Will Go On Image credit: Lyst

It’s always interesting to me to see which drugs get thrown under the bus. Most of them are the ones that are illegal but the reality is, as you’ve heard on this show, that drugs are used for all kinds of reasons. Some of which are “pharmaceutical” and have to do with capitalistic interest and some are “recreational” and have to do with spiritual or social interest. The use of all those drugs has everything to do with the intent of the person or company behind it. That’s why I wanted an episode dedicated to GHB, often labeled the date-rape drug. As you’ll hear, there have been many date-rape drugs. GHB has some amazing benefits to it that has nothing to do with it’s date-rape branding. I wasn’t sure, at first, who to reach out to to have this conversation and then I remembered Dan Pardi, a personal friend and one of the smartest people I know. His work is focused on health from very different but interconnected points-of-view, given his research background in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences department at Stanford as well as the Departments of Neurology and Endocrinology at Leiden University in the Netherlands (where he investigates how lifestyle factors, like sleep, influence decision making, cognitive performance, and metabolism) he’s the perfect person to lean into this topic. He’s done a number of studies on diet and all dimensions of health that don’t fall into your typical buckets. I love the way he brings those things together in a lot less industry-specific ways. He’s had to dig into things like GHB as he’s looked into the research informing everything from elite fighters in the Naval Special Warfare divisions, to aging, sleep, and overall health performance. It’s this holistic perspective that I thought would be really cool to bring to the conversation and really identify just how hard it is to pull these things into separated, illuminated little buckets and try to analyze them as if they stand alone in the world. I hope this episode on GHB demystifies some of it for you and opens your brain to all the different kinds of applications that this drug could have. If anythig else, you’ll definitely think about GHB differently. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/dan-pardi

There’s an incredible separation between the stuff we consume— like food or products— and the people who are making that stuff for us. Certainly in the States we walk through stores and everything is plastic wrapped— none of us can imagine that all the pieces came from an animal let alone the work environment that people who created the product for us had to endure. Our products are created for us in the same way— we have no idea how they’re made or how it’s affecting other people’s lives on the other side of that chain. The reality is there’s huge industries obsessed with obfuscating the scary truth because when you strip it back, people are having incredible life-threatening situations and we have no idea. The reason we have no idea is because there’s effort made to constantly pivot or rename bad things so that we think the products that we’re buying are “green” or otherwise humanely created. This isn’t about being a tree-hugger, there’s just some basic human rights that people should have that make things for us. Certainly, their lives shouldn’t be destroyed making products for us. It might not be the sexiest topic to stop and think about, but this week’s guest, Dr. Paul Blanc, is fighting the good fight. He’s a professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco and has a background in Pulmonology and has written a couple of amazing books. The most recent one, Fake Silk: The lethal history of Viscose Rayon and the preceding, How Everyday Products Make People Sick, both shine a light on the other side of the what-we’re-purchasing equation that really needs it. I know you’ll like our conversation and at least stay away from things like skinless weenies.

We crave belonging. As crazy-distracting and divisive as the world is, it’s easy to forget the simple fact that deep down we want to be accepted and feel part of a tribe. Given how the world has developed, for most of us, this is very hard. I had an amazing opportunity to dig into what it takes to connect to very different groups by talking to someone who has done extreme versions of this. Bruce Parry has travelled to some of the most remote places on planet Earth and inserted himself into wildly foreign cultures and people. For some of these tribes, meeting him was “first contact” of any outsider. Imagine making connection with groups of people where you don’t speak their language, look wildly different, don’t eat their food or wear their clothes. How would you do it? What could you learn about yourself by making those connections? Especially after doing it 20-30 times? Bruce Parry is an award-winning documentarian, author and a famous BBC host of such documentary shows as Tribe, Amazon and Arctic. He has travelled to extreme environments spending significant time with indigenous people. While these people have very different rituals, such as cannibalism or smoking ayahuasca, Bruce has been welcomed as a member and has had the chance to connect and understand people at a human level that most of us never get the opportunity to encounter. So, at a time when separation has never been more forced upon us, knowing what it takes to belong are a set of keys we can all use everyday. This is a special chance to hear someone who has developed an amazing ability to connect and belong at every level and in every corner of life. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/bruce-parry

When you live in the Bay Area you pass tons of folks who appear to be mad. Most of us don’t spend enough time focusing on how our culture handles folks on the spectrum of some level of mental illness. When you think about it— the range of “madness” ranges from people with very serious mental illness to people who don’t socially fit in. As you look back across history, you can see just how we’ve dealt with it, who we’ve blamed for it, and what crazy treatments we’ve put in place. Who better to talk about that than someone who studies it for a living. Andrew Scull, this week’s guest, is exactly that person. As a professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego, he’s written a ton of books on this subject over decades.  We talked about his most recent one, “Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud” when he stopped by for this week’s recording among his other works. And it’s a refreshing perspective on exactly how we’ve looked at madness and and maybe how we might look at it in the future. 

Clearly throughout recorded history we’ve been fascinated by things like the Fountain of Youth and anything that would reverse the aging process. Let’s face it, if you’re over 40, you feel it physically. Your systems just start to break down. In modern medicine, this process has been seen as disease but this week’s guest, Aubrey de Grey, sees it more like an engineering challenge. Aubrey is a very controversial biomedical gerontologist and crusader against aging. He has a very specific plan that identifies the various components that cause human tissue to age, and he has very specific remedies for each of them. That’s what his non-profit, The SENS Research Foundation (a 501C-3) focuses on and it’s got some interesting people behind it, like Peter Thiel (one of the founders of PayPal) and Aubrey himself who has invested a large part of his inheritance to the cause.  Grow Big Always often has conversations with rebels that help us reshape the points of view that we take for granted, so Aubrey de Gray is a perfect guest. I hope you enjoy this conversation we had via Skype. Maybe you’ll end up agreeing with him— that the person that ends up living to 1,000 years old has already been born today. 

Way outside our cities and towns are societies of disappearing and endangered indigenous people . Some of us may think that’s natural— it’s been happening forever. Others fight to protect those cultures and have very strong opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong for those people. One of those opinions is whether there’s a “right way” to depict people who are different than us— who are not living in urbanized or Western societies. I was surprised by just how controversial this subject really was. I guess it’s ok that we’re surrounded by spectacular images that romanticize cars, sports, and marriage. Really anything commercial— but to apply a similar heroic lens to people who are different than us, well, that could be sacrilege. It seems there are people out there who believe that the only way to photograph those folks needs to be as an anthropological documentarian— capturing people only how they’re actually living vs in their Sunday best— proud, celebrated, glamorized. I mean, isn’t that what we do when we take pictures of ourselves? We're not posting pictures of ourselves hanging in sweatpants and stuffing our face with Fritos. It’s ok that we’re beautiful but god forbid that we make that commentary about those poor, exotic people living on the edge of the world. There are no edges to this world. There are people who live far away from our dense, standardized populations but our cultures are the edge from their point of view. This week it was my pleasure to talk to photographer Jimmy Nelson from his place in Amsterdam on his way out to another remote destination. Jimmy has been a photographer for over 30 years and his book “Before they Pass Away,” showcases 35 disappearing tribal cultural around the world. He captures them with stunning images. They’re truly incredible portraits of vanishing people. Be sure to visit growbigalways.com to check out a portfolio of his images as well as a video that will give you an up close look at what it’s like traveling and capturing remote and spectacularly loving societies. As Jimmy puts it, photographing these people are as much about discovering them as it is about discovering himself and how he belongs in the world. Really isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? We’re all on that same journey. I hope you enjoy listening to Jimmy’s and it inspires you to engage in his important work, which I guarantee will have a huge impact on you.

If you’re like me you might ask, where has imagination gone? We seem to have forgotten that muscle. How to even tap what’s really inside us. It’s sort of amazing when you think about it, we’re born into a world where there are tuning forks on any topic that pump out a story about what that topic should be— how we should think, feel, and behave when it comes to marriage, love, money, work, religion— or really any topic. So we find ourselves trying to adjust our harmony to those other tuning forks. We’re reacting to them. We’re trying to make them happy. We’re trying to satisfy all of the demands that those containers and shapes are asking us to conform to. It’s almost impossible to get in tune with reality. There’s a lot of guests on this show that have talked about how fake everything we’ve created really is and certainly that is true when it comes to one of the most fundamental topics: our sexuality. How we encounter and express intimacy— physically, emotionally, spiritually, and cosmically— with someone else. How we share it and what it should look like. When you look around at other people’s definitions, we see porn, we see sex in advertising and movies. Things other people are tell us are erotic. We feel what’s supposed to be ok or not ok and it’s all categorized for us on Pornhub. It’s spelled out in our religion or culture. Everything is there for us to follow what other people have imagined for us. Well one of the most powerful things that you can do as someone who wants to break out of that mould, it to put those things at bay and put your energy into finding the original harmony inside of you. To find a way to give it voice. That’s what this week’s guest, Alphachanneling, does with art. Each image that’s conjures is a sort of poem, prayer or meditation on a cosmic part of the way we connect with each other and with ourselves. Clearly the work has caught on, Alphachanneling has almost 500,000 followers on Instagram, has been featured in magazines like Juxtapoz, reviewed by top art critics, and had a solo show. Alphachanneling was nice enough to come over to my house to sit and chat. Which we did. You’ll hear some of that, though we actually chatted about as long after the recording. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Alphachanneling and it wakes up some cosmic expression inside you. That you find new ways to relate to your own body, to your own magic and incredibly psychedelic opportunity to reach intimacy in completely new ways.

If you listen to this podcast it’s not a surprise that I love bizarre. What better way to extend that lens then to look beyond people? So when author Matt Simon was recommended by a listener as a guest for Grow Big Always, I thought it was a great idea because he’s a science writer at Wired and specializes on Zoology, specifically some crazy fucking creatures. It’s hard to describe his book, The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar, because it’s a fusion of the insane things creatures do and also incredibly funny. Where else can you glance at a title of a section that says, “Adventures in having a six inch long clitoris.” Actually, don’t answer that. The book is an incredible collection of super bizarre creatures, packed with interesting facts that both impress you and creep you out. I know I did a few spit takes while reading it. So if you want to be “that person” at the next party that whips out some crazy facts that blow other people away, be sure to listen to this conversation with Matt Simon. That said, if you’re in the middle of eating some Panang curry or some Turkish-style poached eggs, you may want to take a break from that until after the show. That is, unless the stranger side of evolution is an appetite stimulant. And if so, breakfast is served.

This episode couldn’t be more timely as we recover from the national fear-mongering that drove our unprecedented 2016 presidential election. It’s amazing when you stop and think about how much we’re told about what shouldn’t be lovable. So much is vilified. It could be our own feelings, other groups of people, different faiths, or distant countries. There’s so much that falls into this unlovable category— so many stories where, “those people are the bad ones.” Now imagine you’re someone who decides to unravel those narrative containers. To build bridges to them and shine lights on the kinds of families, emotions, places in the world that keep us apart and keep us from understanding them. That’s exactly what this week’s guest, author Andrew Solomon, has done with his life. He’s a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and psychology as well as a very important activist and philanthropist and behalf of LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts. He’s won The National Book Award, he’s a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and he was included in The New York Times list of 100 best books of the decade. In our chat we cover lots of his different work from "Far and Away," his latest book dedicated to helping us understand the world better. To “Far from the Tree,” which is a compassionate book about raising difficult children and ends up as an affirmation about what it is to be human. In fact that might be the most important thread through all of Andrew’s efforts and work. Just how much love there is in the things we might initially think are unlovable. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/andrew-solomon

As we begin to heal on the other side of a painful presidential election, we're left with deep cultural divides that frankly have been growing there for a while. So it's worth taking a giant step back and examining ourselves and the insulated bubbles we've put ourselves in. As comfortable as this social insulation is, it--along with a culture of intense sensitivity that lobotomizes what we say for fear of offending others-- keeps us from the free exchange of ideas. Instead we perceive someone with even the smallest deviation from our point of view as "one of them.” While those with extreme liberal views fight for a unrealistic level of absolute inclusion which flies in face of our objective differences, extreme conservatives feel their side of the coin is just as right and they passionately defending their own strict point of view and seek inclusion as well. Both sides arm themselves with friends and Facebook feeds which reinforce and fuel what they already believe. It’s worth taking a step out of that fray and examining ourselves and yes— fearlessly climbing out of our safe and comfy pods to try to understand and accept people who are different.  This week’s guest, professor Gad Saad (affectionately called “The Gadfather”) is a popular evolutionary psychologist who applies science to how we consume ideas, products and perspectives. He has two books, “The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption” and “The Consuming Instinct” and hosts a Youtube channel called “The Saad Truth,” which critiques political correctness, the ideology of multiculturalism, and goes against the grain of incredibly homogeneous and overly sensitive academic environments. Besides the election, Gad and I take on how our culture has grown to be so divided, how it’s  continually censored in how we listen, share and debate ideas.  Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/gad-saad

Way back before capitalism, it used to be that self-welfare was the key part of our lives. We would face formidable physical and situational challenges and have to endure them, alone and with our tribe. It was likely those trials were the most meaningful experiences for our prior relatives— the very thing they could depend on and take comfort in.  Today we’ve lost that ability. Comfort is handed to industries that insulate us for a fee. We spend money and depend on hermetically sealed homes, cars, drugs, food and clothing. If things get rough we rely on doctors, pills, and booze. But recently, there’s a rising voice that we’ve come to the end of the Western Medical Model. An awareness that those things don’t make life better anymore. That there are other roads. Some, like this week’s guest Wim Hof, believe it’s time to tap back into our natural abilities. That they’ve been forgotten. If there’s anyone that knows about getting out of their comfort zone, it’s him. His journey started when--with four children at home--his wife took her life by jumping out an eight story window. To deal with his grief, he went out into the extreme cold. Since then, he’s shown through examples of enduring extreme cold like being submerged in ice for nearly two hours or using his mind to ward off disease, that anyone has amazing power to face anything and literally self-regulate. He’s now using the best scientists in the world to back up what he’s learned and therefore challenge science, culture and the very industries we’ve come to assume are the answer.  This week is a change up from the normal show format. I guess it’s the best show for it, as it’s show about how extreme challenge can change what you think is possible. This weeks show started from an email from Chris Ryan. You might remember him from the episode “Why everything feels so fake” or know him from his book Sex at Dawn or his podcast “Tangentially Speaking.” We’ve continued our relationship, he’s the one who recommended his ex-professor and friend, Stanley Krippner as a guest. Anyway, Chris dropped me a line and asked me if I knew, “The Iceman," Wim Hof. He said he had become friends with Wim and that Wim was coming to Stanford so that Stanford neuroscientists could further study him and recommended that we co-host an episode not only with Wim but with Stanley. How could I say no to that? So, much like we did for Chris, April and I hosted a cocktail party and BBQ reception for Wim following the show.  But unlike when I met Chris, I wasn’t at all prepared for the insanity that showed up at my door. When I opened it, Wim was standing there in flip flops with his adult his son and daughter and bust inside immediately chasing our toddler in circles around the house until finally stopping to ask our teenager if he had dumbbells he could use, which he did. Then he immediately started vigorously using them on our deck while more and more people showed up. The next time I turned around he was balancing himself on the floor in an unrecognizable way. All this while more and more friends of ours, of Chris’ and neuroscientists filled the house.  Imagine that crazy picture—the packed house while the Iceman, Stanley, Chris and I ducked into my studio and had the following amazing, chaotic and inspiring conversation. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/wim-hof

I don’t know about you when I was growing up, I had a super-skewed perspective on what business and working was all about. Everywhere I looked were articles about entrepreneurs raising tons of money or celebrities in the business world reinventing everything. Or it was my parents that pushed specific occupations— be a doctor, a lawyer, get to work and sit in an office— but that’s a super limited and incredibly unrealistic view of the working world. The professional options that you’re exposed to are incredibly limited. So many of us end up finding a safe place pretty early and staying there because it’s safe. Imagine if you actually had the power of seeing a spectrum of choices in front of you. That power of visibility would be incredible. You’d have the ability to see what other people were doing, what options you were attracted to and various paths you could go. It would totally open the world up to you. Especially if you had the deck stacked against you as a woman.  I talk about that very thing, along with  the importance of being “antifragile,” with this week’s guest, Design Sponge CEO Grace Bonney. She started Design Sponge as a blog and it turned into a new media brand with over a million readers a day. It’s even been called a “Martha Stewart Living for the Millennials” by the New York Times. While building Design Sponge, Grace has dedicated herself to helping creative female entrepreneurs with national meet-ups, a column and now her new book (which she created in just two months), called “In the Company of Women.” It tops the NY Times Best Seller list already and features 1x1s with a hundred women small business owners, especially in creative fields. Grace was nice enough to stop by during her book tour and we had a super fun, content packed conversation covering everything from whether softness is a weakness, the power of seeing the spectrum of options in front of you and how to use life’s challenges as an advantage. 

I guess I’m naive because I watch heist movies like Ocean’s Eleven and think nothing that elaborate happens in real life, but after my conversation with this week’s guest, architectural writer Geoff Manaugh, I have a dramatically different point of view. There’s sort of x-ray glasses that burglars use when they look at where we live or where we work, that the rest of us never see. Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and break-ins, A Burglar’s Guide to the City, draws on the expertise of reformed bank robbers, FBI Special Agents, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present. Whether picking locks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum’s surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, the book ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway. After listening to this episode with Geoff, I know I saw my house differently and it would be impossible for the same thing not to happen to you. Link: http://www.growbigalways.com/episodes/geoff-manaugh

I’m not sure how manytimes I’ve given up or almost given up but it’s got to be way more then the times I’ve gone for it. Especially, when life has thrown me a curve ball or fifty. I went to grad school to be a poet and gave up to make money. I wanted to work creating animation features but it was easier to sell out and get an office job. Then there are the people who stick with it, the people who have even more grit and likely a bigger chip on their shoulder—but the sad news is that road is littered with them, too. Folks who sacrifice everything and still don’t make it. Then there’s those who do. Who, against all odds, somehow catch a break and find an irregular path to success. I have a wildly candid conversation about that with this week’s guest, In the Valley Below. Jeff and Angela share deeply personal stories they’ve never shared in any interview before for fear their big label or even fans wouldn’t understand. After a trip to SXSW in Austin, Texas, they fell in love, Angela left her girlfriend and they decided they needed to write music together. The band started as a studio project, and as you’ll hear, nearly walked away from music. Then, after a crazy turn of events, they made their television debut on The Late Show With David Letterman and have since appeared on Conan and tons of music festivals. LA Weekly listed their debut album among the 10 Best Albums of 2014 and The Huffington Post named “Peaches,” the song you just heard, the #5 song of that same year. Sometimes listening to other people’s rollercoaster can inspire us just how important it is to hold on. Even when the world tells you to let go.

The stories we told around campfires have been replaced by animated fairytales that frame our cultural values to kids and adults. Those stories live inside us well beyond childhood. Not too long ago, they used to represent a misogynistic, racist culture and told us that, for example, if you’re a good girl, you’ll get married and live happily ever after. Today, they approach more authentic and meatier issues like depression, loss, and warnings on what could happen if we rely too much on technology. There are people, like this week’s guest, the first academy-award winning director for an animated feature, Brenda Chapman, who fought tooth and nail to stop telling silly princess stories and finally show women who wanted something beyond true love. That movie was Brave, and it was a movie she conceived of, wrote, directed and then, at the last minute was forcibly removed from the project. Brenda has led a new generation of creators who understand the gravity of these stories and aren’t afraid to tackle tough subjects that feel relevant and meaningful instead of idyllic fantasies. She's has worked on legendary movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Prince of Egypt, Cars, and of course her baby, Brave. She remains the only woman to have directed a feature length animated film. In our very candid conversation Brenda offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s taken to turn the tide on how women are portrayed and the dreams we tell our children. We talk about how these stories can create social change and how to use the rules of character development for your own life and personal fairytale. It takes real bravery to go up against the establishment and Brenda had the character to do it. I’m sure that when you listen to her talk about how she develops other characters, it will help you build your own.

I have to say, after this week’s guest, I’m pretty embarrassed. And if you live in America, y ou should be, too. While America has pointed the finger with disgust at the genocides conducted by ISIL, German, and Bosnian powers— for example— we have yet to come to grips with our own Holocaust: The several millions of Native American families we slaughtered, enslaved and tortured in order to occupy and control their land and resources. This invasion and genocide doesn’t even show up in our culture— from classrooms, to memorials to even Wikipedia— we don’t even recognize it as a genocide, even though it meets every criteria. We have isolated ourselves from this narrative, responsibility and even the remaining Indian populations themselves, who we’ve cast off into camps far from us. Even our national conversation on racism, doesn’t include Native Americans. While the people of Germany, have their “Nazi past” front and center in classrooms, socially, with memorials and with political support we, as a nation, have continued to somehow escape the same atonement. Isn’t it time? Much like the importance of facing your demons as an individual, this country needs a big revision to our national story and the blind levels of patriotism we smack the world with. A humble country would be a stronger one. We’ve seen when the opposite happens and only a social movement can turn the tide. This week’s guest, UCLA Professor Benjamin Madley, documents the state-sectioned genocide of the California Native American population like no one else has. In this week’s very emotional conversation, we approach a subject far too neglected: Our own government-sponsored ethnic cleans

Want a drug-free consciousness-shifting experience that only takes a minute and has good side-effects? There’s good reason our brains love poetry, people have spoken it for generations way before we wrote stuff down. Poetry is that thing that lifts your brain outside of everyday life and instantly transports your consciousness. I think of Poems like little mental Altoids you can pop in your mind and let slowly unravel, stimulating and guiding your memories to reconfigure in heart-opening ways. Today, our culture puts all its value on science. Those are the classes and jobs that pay. But it’s our poetry that for hundreds of years, has upset the establishment’s apple cart, that has brought us close together and created a sense of community and experience of being alive that nothing else can in the same way. It’s Poets that have challenged us to think differently. Recently, our National attention gets inspired by the poetry shared at revolutions in Washington whether it’s MLK’s “I have a dream,” during the Human Rights March of 1963, Maya Angelou’s, “On the Pulse of Morning,” who followed Robert Frost as the second poet ever to read at a president’s inauguration or this week’s guest, Elizabeth Alexander, the only other poet to read following Bill Clinton’s presidency when she read “Praise Song for the Day” at our country’s first black President, Barak Obama’s inauguration. In this conversation with Yale Professor and Pulitzer Prize nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander, we talk about the importance of Poetry as well as her recent profound and excruciating loss, which she writes about in “The Light of the World.”

Have you ever looked at a super old picture and laughed at how mistaken all those people were about what they thought the we’d spend our time doing today? I know I look at pictures of myself as a kid and can’t believe I spent my time outside vs on a phone. Doesn’t sound like you? Well then maybe you were positive that the world would always adore Milli Vanilli. Regardless, it’s hard to argue that we’re incredibly blinded by the road we’re on, what’s coming and what we— as a culture— will value beyond today. Why is that? I had an interesting and hilarious conversation about that very thing with this week’s guest, famed pop-culture author Chuck Klosterman, who recently released the book “But What If We’re Wrong?” You might know Chuck, he’s got a pretty huge cult-following which started when he was a journalist for Spin, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Esquire. Or maybe you’ve read his diverse, hilarious and insightful page-turning books ranging from Rock-n-Roll to Redskins, from Cereal to Serial Killers many of which have topped the New York Times Bestseller list. He's been interviewed by everyone from Seth Meyers, to the Daily Show, to Marc Maron, so I really wondered why the hell he agreed to talk to me and what fresh ground we could cover. I couldn’t have predicted he’d say yes or, in fact, that we’d talk about the things we did but maybe that’s the point of Chuck’s new book, too. While Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's in the book, may have criticized it, that may just fall squarely in Chuck’s argument that the very things we look at today as safe or nuts, can be vastly different tomorrow.

Believe it or not, MDMA is about to be legal thanks to the efforts of this week’s guest, Rick Doblin. Soon MDMA will be able to help the tens of millions of people suffering from serious trauma like PTSD in drug-assisted therapy sessions. While that might seem amazing, it’s far from Rick Doblin’s sole focus. He believes it’s a basic human right to have the freedom to decide to change your own consciousness through drugs— that politics are not only blocking science but personal experiences that could help us live more fulfilled and connected lives. In fact, there’s an argument that for our cultural survival we need to reintroduce the same use of psychedelics that was a part of human culture for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. Rick started on this journey after having his own psychedelic experience in 1972 and reading “Realms of the Human Unconscious” by Stan Grof decided to be a psychedelic researcher and ultimately founded the “Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies” (or MAPS) in 1986. That means Rick has been fighting on your behalf for over 30 years, so it’s critically important you listen to not only what he has to say but pay attention to this critical infection point in history which offering a light at the end of the “us and them” tunnel.

Ever notice how frequently the word “addict” is used? Just do a Google News search on the word and you’ll be shocked just how often it’s used in a headline. Articles are plastered with mentions of drug addicts, sex addicts, gambling addicts, food addicts, shopping addicts, work addicts and internet addicts. “These people” are painted as out-of-control and often menaces to society who need to be stopped, jailed, medicated or otherwise cut off. But what if those diseased people weren’t sick at all? What if you suddenly realized you were one of them? Well, that’s what happened to me. In preparation for this podcast, I realized I’m an addict. I’m an addict who comes from other addicts, who has passed it onto my kids, too. I’m constantly looking for a way to not be with myself, a way to avoid the pain I have of not having meaningful bonds. In this chat with physician and best-selling author, Gabor Maté, we talk about the shocking truth about what causes addiction and the things we can do to address the problem. What’s cool about Gabor is that he avoids quick-fix thinking when he tackles things like addiction, ADHD, sickness and the human spirit overall. Rather, he shines lights on the often uncomfortable truths that live at the root of these things. Born in Hungry, Gabor survived the Holocaust, became a doctor and worked for over 20 years with patients with hard-core drug addictions, mental illness and HIV before writing In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and Hold on to Your Kids (you can learn more on his website gaboremate.com). Our brief but information-packed conversation even helped me understand why I love podcasting. These conversations are sort of accelerated intimacy that create quick bonds with each person I talk to and anything that helps me bond, lessens the painful void I have from having that very thing growing up. I remember hearing somewhere that the purpose of life is to create meaningful connections with others. After this conversation with Gabor, I know you’ll have a new point of view of exactly why that’s so important and how and why we as individuals, families and cultures have strayed so far from it.

We’re born into a culture where trillions of decisions have already been made by the people who have lived before us. The entire human world is constructed of these expectations, so by the time we join that world as an adult, it’s pretty easy to feel like most of our decisions are limited and oftentimes made for us. When that operating system is screaming to go to school, get a job, buy all stuff that makes your life better, have some kids and borrow enough money to make it all happen, it can feel like your margin for independent ideas and motivation just got squashed. It’s no wonder the decisions we think we’re making don’t feel very rational. No wonder how we can completely lose the motivation to keep slaving away. If you were an alien watching our evolution, you’d see a few big decisions but on a day-to-day basis we’re blind to how the decisions we’re making affect not only our own life but the future of our culture. This week’s guest Dan Ariely, studies decisions and motivation. He is the James B Duke professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and the founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. Dani is also the author of three New York Times Bestsellers including Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty and is preparing to release his next book, Payoff, later this year. By the end of our chat, hopefully you have some new frameworks to evaluate our own road, not to mention the many paths around you.

Language used to evolve slowly back when we were far-flung. Wide-spread human contact was made through one civilization taking over another. That’s drastically different, today. New words can take over the planet literally in minutes. While that speed is incredible, it’s even more so when you stop and think about the fact that new words and analogies are little shift our points of view— gay vs same-sex, criminals vs justice-involved, murder vs honor-killing. While new words flow like rapids, filling new spaces or displacing old ideas, and as English becomes a global platform— our human experience is shaped and reshaped within even within our own lifetime . Anne Curzan studies the history of English, the evolution of slang and it’s migration over time. She’s the author of several books on language including her latest, “Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History” as well as co-hosting “That’s What They Say” on Michigan’s NPR. If you’re a language nerd like me, and even if you’re not, you’ll find the quick conversation that Anne and I had super interesting. It for sure will have you stop and think next time you hear a someone on the news use a word like “friendly fire”

My friends know I have this thing with toilet humor, with poop, with butts, with holes in butts, pretty much everything rear-facing. So yeah, it wouldn’t be a stretch (so to speak) to be up front with the fact I’m completely fascinated by anuses. That “poor friend in the back” is a prominent theme at my house, certainly with having a toddler, and even around the dinner table. Heck, I use the poo emoji as my heart emoji. In fact, I poo all of you. Some people don’t find it as funny but either way, we can agree our anus and rectum is a pretty private, vulnerable, and mysterious place. For sure an uncomfortable social taboo. Unless you’re science writer Mary Roach, who has written many funny books about the science of the human body. My butt radar noticed that many of them include super interesting starfish adventures from the other side, if you know what I mean. So, I asked her to spend an entire podcast talking about our fannies— from interesting stuff that happens when we’re at war, when we have sex, when we go to outer space, when we swallow something, when we die and even the afterlife. I guess you can say, we take about why shit matters.

How do you tell the story of your life? Turns out a big part of your personality are the snapshots of experiences you assemble and re-assemble of your past and future. Of course, that means that you can curate and shape those things, refine them based on what works for you and how others respond. When you stop and think about it, we have a lot more control over the frames we choose then we think, a lot more control of how we design our own narrative and how it works with our character. The more aware we are of the story we want to tell with our lives, the clearer our choices for the future can be. That means that the narrative habits we have, the micro-stories we tell, get hardened over the years, don’t really need to be that way. This week’s guest, Dan McAdams chairs the Psychology department at Northwestern University and got his own doctorate from Harvard. Dan has written over 200 scientific articles on personality and life-span development. You can think of it as someone who has devoted their career to understanding how we develop our personal myths. He’s also written the books “The Redemptive Self” and “The stories we live by” and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today among others. In fact, he recently wrote the Atlantic cover story analyzing Donald Trump’s personality, which he talks about later in this episode. In this quick episode, Dan does a great job breaking down how the layers of our personality form our identity and how they work together to create our life story.

Just take a moment and ask yourself, “does my life seem gripped by an assembly line of chores which, as the years go on, create an undertow of sameness?” When you look back and curate your life story, how many exceptional experiences have you had? In western culture it’s not okay to embrace the things that don’t fit neatly into acceptable boxes, we’re meant only to be distracted and addicted with the things that fuel our capitalistic machine. But that’s not the way it is around the world. For some it’s more unusual not to have had out-of-body experiences, not to have communed with the dead, not to completely lose your identity. It’s experiences like those that add dimensionality, texture and deeper understanding to our lives. The can be sprung from the deep recesses of our brains, whether we’re asleep or whether we participate in rituals that release them. It’s been said that if psychology had a Mount Rushmore, Stanley Kripper’s head would be on it. Stanley is 83 and for the better part of the past 40 years has been a psychology professor at San Francisco's Saybrook University. I found at least 30 books he’s written or co-written on Amazon and close to 1,000 papers on subjects as far-reaching as childhood creativity, combating soldiers' post-traumatic stress disorder, and worldwide shamanistic rituals. He has won more laurels from more organizations than he can keep track of, including several lifetime achievement awards from the American Psychological Association. He’s traveled to every continent, save Antarctica, to participate in mind-altering tribal ceremonies. He’s participated in Timothy Leary’s LSD studies, and been connected to so many famous people that naming them would sound improbable. While his uber driver got lost and drove him in enough circles on the way to the show that would have many anyone hallucinate, Stanley and nothing but great things to say about her and her journey from Iran. I hope you enjoy this brief conversation with Stanley and that some of his examples of hallucinations, dreams and shamanistic ritual help you figure out if and how how they fit into your own life as you plunge ever more deeply into your amazing journey.

Imagine having truly a complete picture of humanity, having spent a lifetime experiencing hundreds of world cultures first hand, face-to-face and welcomed by each one of them. The result would be an extraordinary vocabulary of the human spirit like no other. A celebration of our differences brought to life through an enormous voice, studded with the poetry of each unique cultural experience. Wouldn’t that voice be more important to listen to than anything else you can imagine?  As giant Capitalistic cultures continue to assimilate and stamp out human diversity faster than all endangered species combined, and as these giants collide and become increasingly more homogenous— never has it been more important to step back and seek to understand and respect different people. To nearsightedly continue means irreversibly harming the treasure of human diversity. I wish I could create an introduction for anthropologist Wade Davis that did him and his work justice but given the enormity and importance, I can't. He has spoken before audiences around the world, published dozens of books including the best-seller, “Serpent and the Rainbow,” and been interviewed by many people smarter than me. What I can say is that he will, in the incredibly short time of our conversation, take you not only around the world, but to space and back. He will begin to paint the picture beyond our cultural nearsightedness in a way that will stir your heart and open your mind. The best way to introduce Wade Davis is to listen.  Wade earned anthropology and botany degrees from Harvard as well as a PHD in ethnobotany. He is a best-selling author, photographer, high-priced lecturer, has had chairs at Oxford and Cambridge, and became on of only 8 Explorers-in-Residence with the National Geographic Society and was named "Explorer for the Millennium." Wade makes trips to the edges of the world but lives with his wife Gail Percy on Bowen Island in B.C.

Usually the question “what is reality” is saved for entertainment— it’s the stuff of sci-fi movies— because if your friend cornered you and pressed you on it, you’d probably just want to slap them. Mostly because of just how frustrating it can be to rip and replace your entire perception of what’s real. That said, it’s the sort of insanely big question that the very smartest, most ambitious people have asked through generations. Just last month, Elon Musk made the argument that we’re all probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game. It might not surprise you to know that there’s actual science focused on how to crack this huge question. This episode’s guest, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, has not only been researching it, he’s had some recent breakthroughs that could change absolutely everything we perceive about reality. Don is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine and he makes a very compelling case supported by lots of research and testing that the entire perception we have for reality is nothing like what we think it is.

All of us can relate to covering up something in our lives. For many of us, that can end up being a huge part of who we really are. We can find ourselves living as outsiders pretending to be something we’re not whether that’s at work, with our friends or in our relationships. These lies can literally destroy our life. “Coming out” isn’t something sequestered to the LGBT community. Coming out means bravely uncovering who you really are and it’s a practice that we can all learn from. In this case, Morgana did it in front of millions of people. In front of co-workers. In front of absolutely everyone she knows. And she did it more than once. When you listen to her story you realize just how much keeping secrets can hurt and just how powerfully becoming outwardly authentic can be. This week is SF Pride. Given the recent impossible-to-comprehend massacre within the Orlando Gay community, just days ago, it’s never been more important to take the time to understand, listen to, and defend everyone— no matter who they decide to love.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever wondering what sex therapy was or who it’s for but after my conversation with somatic sex therapist, Elizabeth McGrath, I realized I could have saved a million sessions with my therapist and a lot of time and money if I just would have started with someone like her. Sure, there’s plenty of other non-sexually related issues you can chat with your Counsellor about like facing mortality, how your parents were total assholes, and your fear of meat but at least for me, most of my issues have had to do sex and relationships. If I would have spent time unraveling those, I would have known so much more of myself, so much faster and that would have leaf blown a million mental boxing matches. Just have a listen to this conversation with Elizabeth McGrath and you’ll see what we mean. We cover a massive range topics and really helpful advice that will, no doubt, lead you to the same conclusion I had: Sex-therapy is the new must have.

You may not know it, but loneliness is hard-wired to kill us. Long ago, sticking with our tribe meant staying happy and safe so it’s no wonder that loneliness and rejection developed into hard-wiring to try to force us back into the group in the event we left, got lost or were ejected. Today, there’s a loneliness epidemic thanks to enormous separation in our cubes, cars, and culture— horrifically accelerated by the last decade of “social” technology. Look on any playground, streetscape or living room and we’re all staring down at our hands. This week’s guest, Psychologist and author Guy Winch says that loneliness creates a deep psychological wound. One that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. In his widely popular TED talk, he makes the point that our culture is highly educated about the importance of brushing, flossing, how to take care of bumps, bruises or when to call 911 if the situation is more serious but that when it comes to our minds, we have no idea how to maintain our mental hygiene or how to even recognize if it’s an emergency. We don’t even think of psychologists as real doctors. In this episode Dr. Winch doesn’t just point at the problem, he offers valuable solutions so hopefully, if you’re one of the nearly 50% of Americans suffering deep loneliness, his advice will help you escape its horrible and life-threatening grip.

We might think of our culture as progressive, but I’d argue that shame of the human body has never been higher, in part thanks to a global culture forming around Facebook’s censoring of breastfeeding Moms, nudes in classic art, and pretty much anything that even resembles a nipple or even your kid, naked under a sprinkler. As we shovel more and more of this imagery from our consciousness we’re telling a dangerous story to the world. Before this was an issue, there have been many decades of the religious right beating down what they see as inappropriate. Either literally or monetarily burning them at the stake. In the early 90s, this happened to this week’s guest, Jock Sturges, who had been shooting controversial fine art images of naturist adolescents and their families for decades. His studio was raided by the FBI and his photos and equipment was seized. While the grand jury declined to bring an indictment against him, and the French government flat out laughed at the charges and instead told the right that they were huge fans of his work, it was no less ruinous. The amazing thing is how Jock, shook it off and refused to let it define him. His passion for capturing the shameless human form and the popularity of his work, has endured for half a century. Jock is a very private person and rarely grants interviews. In this special chat, we cover his creative process and how he’s weathered the slings and arrows well beyond his (as he calls it) “do-si-do with the Feds” and into a world where photography as a profession has all but died under the weight of mobile phones, the collapse of the news media and the ever-reaching black marker of global censorship.

Visual storytelling has probably been around since people have been around. Today, it dominates our storytelling. Even in our mind, we're painting our story as we frame our past and future. How we choose those frames can be revealing and powerful. In a way, life is a series of living panels flipping from one to the next. How conscious are you of where you put the camera, what combination of images to choose, and which parts might create a page-turner? It’s these questions that visual storytellers ask themselves every day. It’s hard to imagine someone who better understands the power of visual storytelling than Cartoonist Scott McCloud. He has been called the "Aristotle of Comics” and his non-fiction work, which details the history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics— is the a Bible for visual storytellers. "Understanding Comics" has been translated into 16 languages and was named a New York Times Notable Book. He recently returned to fiction with the graphic novel, “The Sculptor” and it has been met with wide critical acclaim. Scott has lectured at Pixar, Google, and the Smithsonian Institution and I learned in our conversation that he’s also an amazingly sincere, accessible and friendly guy with an enormous attention to detail and a great story to tell.

There are two kinds of people: those of us that are domesticated and those that feel strangely out of place. The ones that feel out of place, might not be able to communicate why, but know in their gut not only that our world is toxic but that the systems and traditions we’ve created don’t feel even close to natural. No matter which camp you fall in, both feel depressed, frustrated, anxious and flat-out unsatisfied as they get dragged through our culture’s unfriendly demands just to stay afloat. Have you ever asked yourself how and why we’ve sabotaged ourselves like this? I know this will sound dramatic and easy to dismiss but there really is a Matrix. That’s why that movie struck a chord. We have inherited and continue to invest in an unfair, complicated world of lies we don’t even like. That’s completely against our human nature. There’s a really good reason all our fantasies are undomesticated and filled with apocalyptic visions of wiping the slate clean, or hedonistic freedom. A huge key to understanding this, is to press pause and look objectively backwards, beyond the short 5,000 years of written history and into the totality of human life 195,000 years before it. To do that you’ll have to look with different eyes and stop using the pejorative, biased, puritanical lens that we were the Flintstones or ugly, violent, selfish, filthy, hairy ape-people. That’s a dangerous and inaccurate story we tell that helps make our lives feel vastly progressive but, in fact, continues to feed the Matrix beast. This week’s guest, author and Psychologist Chris Ryan, has tackled big parts of the Matrix through his and his wife’s book, Sex at Dawn, his podcast Tangentially Speaking and his forthcoming book Civilized to Death.

Where do you place yourself on the animal kingdom ladder? Near the top? Odds are that you’re living inside the “we're so god-kissed and unique” human story that we all seem to march to versus thinking of yourself as a talking, organized ape. I mean, look at all the tests we’ve done on animals to prove how wild their violent, beastly kingdom is and how civilized and advanced we are. Wonder why we win those tests every time? But what if we’re very, very wrong. What if our us-centric frameworks keep us from knowing ourselves and connecting with the world around us in a way that completely destroys that hierarchical "nature ladder?" When I started the Grow Big Always podcast, I made a list of dream people to have on the show and today’s guest was on that list. Frans de Waal is a world-leading primatologist and Biologist. He’s been named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. He is a professor at Emory University. Most recent book is "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are." Why was he on my list? His 40+ years of work with non-human animals is critical and needs our attention. It will demystify and shatter the story you tell to sabotage your point of view of how you fit into the world and how connected we are to it.

Lately there’s a lot that’s been published about the lack of diversity within the Silicon Valley tech community which have been generally populated by a lot of young, white guys and for the most part, still are. So, I was excited to have Anne Bonaparte on the show. I invited her about 8 months ago to come in and chat a little bit about being a mid-stage CEO not just because she's a woman not in her 20s, but really just because she’s outstanding at her job and understands how diversity can come from all sorts of places. Of course back when she originally did this interview, she was the third person I had talked to and I had no idea how to set up a good recording environment, so I ended up with pretty messed up files and not enough experience to correct them. It’s taken me this long to acquire the needed skills to be able to release this episode and not have it sound like crap. Anyway, Anne’s point of view about how to create healthy conflict at the workplace, and a productive, diverse environment for growth couldn’t be more true today then it was when we chatted eight months ago. 

There’s a lot out there about marriage. Recently, who has the right to marry whom, as been all over the media and, as we all know, there’s a massive industry focused on profiting from “that special day.” But what happens after that? The rest of your married life is not so clear. As you grow from young adult to middle age and, if you’re lucky, your golden years— what does marriage look like and what do we expect from each other? This week’s guest, Jenna McCarthy, is the author of many books on relationships and her TED talk on “What you don’t know about marriage” has almost four million views. She’s hilarious and a lot of fun to talk to, you’ll get a lot out of our conversation about what midlife spouses want from each other.

This year’s election marks potentially the most dramatic division that we’ve ever had and it could be the beginning of a schism that completely shakes up our two-party system. While a lot of us have opinions about politics, Stanford Professor Doug McAdam is a Political Sociologist that researches the facts around the subject. He’s the former Director of Center of Advance Study in Behavioral Sciences, he’s authored 18 books and 85 other publications all focused on Political Sociology with emphasis on race and social movements. So if there’s anyone who understands how the color of our skin has created two parties that pretty much don’t talk to each other anymore, it’s Doug.

Even without hard numbers you most likely feel the economic polarization that’s been happening over the last few decades. And who needs numbers to know just how much technology has changed our lives. It’s the connection between tech and the economy that I personally find super fascinating and it’s an area of expertise for this week’s guest, MIT’s Andrew McAfee. Andrew is a principle research scientist at MIT. He’s focused on how tech is changing business, the economy and society overall. He’s written a number of books on this, the most recent one is The Second Machine Age, which was a New York Times bestseller and won a book of the year award. He has been a referenced source by Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times. He’s talked about his work on The Charlie Rose Show and 60 Minutes, at TED, Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in front of many other audiences.