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.