Best of MBB 2024!

2024's MOST EPIC MBB Moments! Mayim & Jonathan are bringing you the ULTIMATE highlights from this year’s most jaw-dropping, thought-provoking celebrity interviews, like: - Body Image Bombshells with Danielle Fishel (Boy Meets World) - Comedy & Culture with Jeff Foxworthy – Why connecting with people of ALL backgrounds is more important than ever - Holly Madison (former Playboy playmate) helps us identify toxic relationship red flags - Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) on resenting his mega-fame & the shocking spiritual crisis that changed everything - Darryl "DMC" McDaniels gets REAL about his struggles with addiction, his shocking adoption story, & how he made the world believe he was a star We’re also revisiting some of our most powerful mic-drops from expert guests, like: - Dr. Peter Attia explains the real causes of chronic diseases and the BIGGEST myths about aging - Dr. Ramani Durvasula breaks down narcissism, gaslighting, and how today’s world feeds the cycle - Dr. Andrew Weil reveals the hidden dangers of inflammation and how your body can HEAL itself - Deepak Chopra blows our minds with why science NEEDS spirituality & why pleasure can be addictive! And don’t miss our most spiritually charged episodes, featuring: - Theresa Caputo on life after death, healing grief, and unlocking your own intuitive powers - Mayim & Jonathan get their auras read by Mystic Michaela - Elizabeth G. Krohn shares her incredible near-death experience, what heaven REALLY looks like, and what she learned about reincarnation PLUS, the UFO episode of the YEAR! Revisit Luis "Lue" Elizondo on the scientific proof of UFOs he witnessed while working as the head of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program! This is the #1 podcast roundup you don’t want to miss! And trust us—2025 is going to be even bigger. BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Miam Bialik.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  And welcome to our end of the year breakdown, the place where we break things down so you don't have to. The place where we break things down that we did in 2024 that we would like to share with you.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  We've been breaking down all year. Amazing topics, huge guests. This has been a very, very special year.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  And we are taking this as an opportunity to revisit and remind you of some of the most memorable, fascinating, perspective shifting, mind blowing, and possibly even life changing MBB moments with a compilation of some of our most beloved segments of the year.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  We could not capture everything. It was impossible. We tried, we squished, we squeezed. There was too many to choose from, really.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  This is also a great time to give a huge shout out to Valerie Floyd, who is our producer and who helps us break things down all year, but in particular does incredible compilations like the one that we're going to share with you today. So, thank you Valerie for being awesome and for breaking it down all year with us. There's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes and Valerie sees them all.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Without Valerie, we would both be broken just on the floor, unable to break down because we would just be in pieces. Thank you Valerie for an amazing year, another one.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  There's so many other incredible episodes that we just didn't have time to feature in this compilation. We wish we could have included them all. If you think we're missing a big one from the past year, let us know and make sure to listen to all the ones that you missed. We hope everyone has had a great 2024, full of growth, full of good things. And we really cannot thank you enough for being here. So, thank you, thank you, thank you, especially if you're subscribed and supporting the show. We love what we do here at MBB. We can't wait to keep the party going with many more exciting guests that we already have lined up, thanks to Valerie, in 2025. And please remember, you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts to listen to all episodes. Episodes ad free for a low monthly or yearly subscription. Also, great holiday gift for the MBB fan or pre-MBB fan in your life, if we do say so ourselves. We wish you all a happy

• 2:20Speaker 00

  and healthy holiday season, a happy new year. We'll be taking the next couple of weeks off to rest and recharge, and we'll be back with awesome new episodes for you in 2025. Happy New Year from me and Jonathan, from everyone here at MBB. And without further ado.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  On to the best of 2024. Mind, tell people some of your favorite moments.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  We got to speak with Danielle Fishel. She was returning to the public eye after years away from the spotlight. And we talked to her about her time as Topanga Lawrence on the incredibly popular 90s TV show Boy Meets World. Growing up in front of the camera left Danielle with a lot of really complicated body image issues, chasing perfection even into her adulthood. And beyond the nostalgia of, for example, her dates with Lance Bass, Danielle opens up like never before about her divorce, about getting into therapy for the first time, and how her background in psychology actually led her to realize the importance of being established in who you are before you even attempt to have a healthy adult relationship.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  The surprise for me was after we released this episode, I had friends of mine that I went to summer camp with be like, oh, my gosh, you spoke to her. I used to watch that show. I didn't even realize what a huge impact that show had on so many people.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Lance Bass was my boyfriend my senior year in high school. Justin Timberlake. He was like, Danielle, can I get your phone number for Lance Bass? And I was like, he was like, he's too nervous. And then Lance jumped down and he was like, all shy and nervous and blushing. He did tell me before he was gonna come out. When he broke up with me, I was the only person who probably hadn't suspected it at that point. Like, I thought this had been going pretty well, to be honest. I called my mom just sobbing. And my mom said, Danielle, were you in Lance ever?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Intimate. And I said, no. And she said, do you think there's a possibility Lance might be gay? No, you're just saying that because you don't want me to feel bad. I thought prom was gonna be it. We've talked about it many times since. It was a true turning point. That's when he realized he had to break up with me because he wasn't gonna be able to keep this going anymore without really hurting me. I gained weight toward the end of the show. I remember there were talks about it, called me into the office, you've gained weight. But it wasn't like, call you into the office, you've gained weight, so can we talk about what we're gonna do about it? It was called you into the office, you've gained weight, just wanted you to know we're writing an episode about it.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  So much of the last seasons of Boy Meets World where I was really like, I wanted to be done, I felt like I had failed because my body had changed and now all the positive reinforcement I had gotten from being that efficient, quick, attractive kid who gets all this done. You've really let us down now with what's happened with your body. And my way of dealing with something as a person who feels like they're not doing well at it is just, I shut down. I don't wanna do this anymore. I'm making everyone unhappy. I have to go. And there's somebody else who could do this better than me.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  And I don't know how much more I would have enjoyed the end of the show had I not felt that way about my body.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Our next episode I'd like to highlight, you might be a redneck if you know our next guest that we're gonna talk about, Jeff Foxworthy. Or maybe you were one of the millions of people who saw his Blue Collar Stand Up Tour, or maybe you watched Jeff host Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? We talked to Jeff, it's actually a very personal interview, and really surprised us how open he was, how vulnerable. He talked about his signature catchphrase, but he also went beyond the jokes and talked about some things you rarely get to hear. He talks about the shame he had surrounding his parents' divorce, what it's like to live a balanced life in terms of work and home life, and how he realized that everyone deals with their own struggles and what we really need is to laugh more.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  If you're watching on YouTube, he pulls out some of his art and Mayim and I literally cannot believe it. It is unbelievable. What a talented individual.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  For the style of comedy I do, we're looking for that connection. I think if you gathered everybody in this country together and sat them down and said, "What is it that you want out of life?" And I'm talking about pegging left and right politically. I bet you people would agree on 85% of the same things. I'm gonna look for those things that we have in common. It's kind of funny, because as a country now, we don't focus on that 85% we have in common. We focus on the 15% where we differ and we yell at each other about that. But I think there's basic human wants and needs that are universal. You want to be able to take care of your kids. You want to be able to eat today.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  You want to be able to get from point A to point B. I'll just stay in this lane. I don't want to do political humor. I don't want to do religious humor. I don't want to go in those areas where we yell at each other. There's enough of that. I remind myself, which I do, that everybody I'm gonna look at is going through some kind of a struggle. And it might be a financial struggle, or an emotional struggle, or a physical struggle. But everybody's going through one, and which is kind of like why I've always been, you know what, just be kind to people, because you don't know their story. You don't know what they're going through. And I don't think laughter makes people's struggle go away. I'm not that naive. But I do think laughter is like that release valve that keeps the boiler from exploding.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  If that's what my gift does, if my gift allows you to put your struggle on the shelf for just a little bit and recharge, that's why I'm here.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  In the episode, we are also revisiting some of the most powerful mic drop experts. That brings us to Dr. Peter Attia.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, Peter Attia tackles, you know, the tiny question that sometimes you ask yourself, "What is medicine getting wrong?" Peter Attia is one of the biggest health podcasters in the world, and he helped us understand how we age. He basically breaks down the real reasons that we should avoid certain foods, the impact of mental health on our physical well-being, the role of spirituality as a healing component in terminal illness and in trauma. And we couldn't let him leave without breaking him down a little bit, too. He discusses his own addictive patterns and addictions, and he's more vulnerable than we have seen him in other podcasts.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Where most people are dying today is of chronic diseases. And where most people are suffering today is from an erosion of health span. So even if we are incrementally eking out a few more years of lifespan, which technically we're not, actually lifespan is retreating a little bit in the United States. I think we're down to about 76 and a half years or so. We've had a significant retreat in large part on the back, unfortunately, of opioid epidemics. Medicine would be better served if it changed the metrics of interest. So if you go to your doctor, they might simply be putting out fires that are right in front of them. If you only have seven minutes, or 10 minutes, or 14 minutes with a patient, it's very

• 9:56Speaker 04

  difficult to do anything proactive, let alone to take an interest in real health span-related issues. The single most important resource that an individual needs to take control of their life and improve their longevity is knowledge and time. It doesn't mean that money doesn't matter. It just doesn't rank in the top two. So it's really important that people understand that race, wealth, celebrity status don't rank very highly in that hierarchy. Here's the good news. The knowledge is at this point free. Literally, it is free.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  We have these things called podcasts. They are free. Knowledge at this point is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is truly time. You're constantly putting everyone ahead of yourself. This is the typical phenotype for the overachieving mom. Everyone comes ahead of you. And boy, on the one hand, that's really noble, but it's your own health is of such little concern to you that it's become pathologic. And there's usually a reason for that. That's an example of where emotional health, mental health, is impeding physical health at the individual level. And then, of course, it gets to a level where it's even more significant.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  And it's impairing your relationships, impairing your happiness. It's sort of making the whole thing an ironic joke. You're checking all the other boxes of not dying as quickly, and yet you're just basically prolonging misery.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  Spend as much time as possible with people in the last decade of their life. This is a practice that would serve young people, middle-aged people, very well. There's probably a whole sociologic reason why that's valuable in terms of wisdom and accrual of information, things like that. Yes, I'm putting all of that aside for a moment. I think it would be helpful to actually see what people are giving up in the last decade of their life and asking the question, is that inevitable? Or how much of that is inevitable? Does it need to be that way for a decade? Or could it be that way for just a year?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  My MB Alex Breakdown is supported by Honeylove.

• 12:18Speaker 00

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  crossover bra design, plus built-in molded light foam pads for extra support and a contoured shape. Honeylove's now offering a crossover triple bra bundle. So if you want a refresh on your top drawer, you can get huge savings by buying three at once. Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Use our exclusive link to save 20% off Honeylove at honeylove.com/breaker. That's honeylove.com/breaker. After you check out, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

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• 13:34Speaker 00

  Myambea Alex Breakdown is supported by AG1. Hey, November is a crazy time. It feels like you're sprinting to the finish line. Now more than ever, remembering your healthy habits can feel almost impossible. That's where AG1 earns its spot. Not when life is easy and you've got time for a whole routine, but right now, when everything's full and something's gotta give. One scoop, cold water, every morning before anything else. Jonathan and I love how AG1 fits into our routine. I like to put it on a little ice, drink it first thing, so it can jumpstart my brain in the morning. One scoop covers what a full stack of separate supplements would. 75+ ingredients, vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, pre- and probiotics, superfoods. No cabinet full of bottles, no figuring out what to take when.

• 14:20Speaker 00

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• 15:04Speaker 00

  reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Myambea Alex Breakdown sent you.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  This was a really unexpected aspect for our podcast in 2024. Science and spirituality, it just kept coming up again and again and again. And you wanted more of it and we're able to provide you with more of it. And we're so happy because we learned so much. We actually did a talk at South by Southwest specifically about the intersection between science and spirituality. But here's a smattering of some of our favorite guests who really talked about this intersection. We got her. We got the Long Island medium, Teresa Caputo. She read the room for us, literally. She talked all about what happens when we die, how she helps people cope with grief, what her favorite grounding techniques are, and how to enhance your intuitive ability. She even does a little channeling for me and Jonathan in this episode. And we do talk a bit about the science of mediumship.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  There is an energy present. I don't know who it is yet because what spirit does is they make me feel the bond and relationship that they shared with the person. I felt they brought me through the departure. So there are three souls present.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  What just happened? Hold on, Teresa, what just happened? Now I'm crying and I have chills.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  For many years, I asked, why me? Why was I chosen? And then I just came to terms and said, because I'm probably the only crazy person that would just say these things, I feel this is my, my soul's journey. I want people to believe in themselves, to believe and to know that they still have that soul connection with their own departed loved ones. The things that you sense and feel that you might think that are odd or weird, or it might just remind you of your departed loved ones, that is their soul reminding you that they are with you at that exact moment. I believe and know that we all have that ability to connect with our own departed loved ones. I have just the ability to sense and feel others. And I am very respectful to the fact that what I do is not for everyone.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  People pass away where their loved ones do not know what happened to them. How can someone even start to heal or even grieve if this is what they're focusing on? Are they okay? Were they suffering? Were they afraid? Are they at peace? Is there really a heaven? Is there really a God? We're going to grieve the loss for the rest of our lives. The healing process is something different. It was shown that I had the ability to give people that give back of faith, hope, and peace.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Souls have shown me that we are greeted by our departed loved ones that have gone on before us. The soul then goes through a transition. We relive our life here in the physical world. We're brought through scenarios, situations of where have we see if we made different choices, different decisions, how things could be, and then the soul continues to grow. This is what I did struggle with with my faith because I do believe in past lives. I do believe that we do re-enter. I was shown through one of my past lives that this is my last soul's journey here in the physical world. My soul will not return after this journey.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  Grounding, which is something that I consciously do throughout the day. You want to say higher power? I use the term God. I use God's white light, always surrounding and protecting me. Anything negative, emotions, disease from my physical or spiritual body, I always imagine it like kind of being drained out of me where I'm also like translucent. And I'm just like outlined in this white light. And then I imagine myself being filled with white light. So I'm constantly letting go, cleansing myself of anything negative that does not concern me or belongs to me.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Next up is the somatic wonder man, Dr. Peter Levine.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  The brain has the possibility of having all kinds of departments. And in some cases, these different parts are not in communications with each other. They don't connect, but moving through the bodily experience, it did connect. And it allowed me to process those difficult sensations and emotions. Rather than intense emotions, body sensations is the key to healing trauma. It's not about reliving the trauma. That's rarely helpful. Somatic experiencing, it's not a therapy per se. It allows people to do what they do better.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Approximately 40 to 50% of people have experienced some sexual trauma. What does that imply for you in terms of how humans can connect?

• 20:14Speaker 06

  If you have two people, or even one person, that have had sexual trauma, and they try to come to meet each other, to have a healing sexual relationship, what's going to come up are not declarative memories, not explicit memories, but body memories. All of a sudden, the relationship just disintegrates. And we wind up departing ways because we're unable to find that healing connection with each other because we're stuck with it in ourselves. It's something that it takes time to heal and willingness to open to another and willingness to share our feelings and our emotions with others

• 20:59Speaker 06

  so that we can connect at this level and let it be sexual healing.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Our next expert brought up the question of if you know a narcissist, is there one in your life?

• 21:14Speaker 00

  According to narcissism expert Dr. Ramani Durvasula, you probably do know a narcissist. In this mind-blowing episode, Dr. Durvasula reveals one in six people are actually considered narcissists, and it's likely having devastating effects on your relationships. Dr. Durvasula helps us define the different types of narcissists. Narcissism, I didn't know all the types that there were. How narcissism is actually incentivized in our society. The true definition of gaslighting and what it means to be the adult child of a narcissistic parent. This one, people went crazy for this episode. There's been so much talk about narcissism just in the last year, and we were so grateful to get this huge, huge expert to break it all down for us.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Narcissism is a personality, not a disorder. Characterized by low and variable empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, selfishness, superficiality, a sort of vapid attention to self attractiveness, that kind of thing. Excessive need for admiration and validation, arrogance, and a chronic need for control. The rigid and maladaptive personality style that negatively impacts relationships. The big difference with narcissism and many other maladaptive personality styles is that the narcissistic person does well in the world. It's one thing if somebody is sort of eccentric and odd and strange and gets fired from jobs.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  That's a very different public profile than somebody who's charming, charismatic, compelling, confident, attractive, successful. Very, very different game. So then the person who's being harmed wonders, it's gotta be me because this person's got it going on.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Tell us the six kinds of narcissists. So the grandiose narcissist is our classic narcissist. The preening arrogant, pretentious, attention-seeking, but kind of fun at times. Stellar CEO on the stage. The dark side of this is the vulnerable narcissist. These are sullen, resentful, victimized, aggrieved, passive aggressive, poor me. There's a lot of failure to launch there. The communal narcissists get their narcissistic supply by being perceived as do-gooders, saviors, people who fix the world. At the most severe end of it, would be like a cult leader. Now, the self-righteous narcissist, they're hyper moral, judgmental, rigid, cold.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  They're obsessed with rules and order to the detriment of the human beings around them. There's a real workaholic quality of shaming of people who might be down on their luck. The neglectful narcissist, what function do you serve for me? There's very, very little interest in intimacy, closeness. The malignant narcissist, far more severe manipulation, coercion, exploitativeness, isolation, the last stop on the train before psychopathy station.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  We have completely incentivized narcissism. So a personality style that hurts other people is being rewarded. And for the narcissistic person, hurting the people doesn't even bother them. Online dating is the mothership for narcissistic people because they can use it so skillfully. They're very good at reading the data on another person and responding in kind. They're telling whatever story they need to get sex. They are using it as a validation-seeking app and not really for relationships. Buyer beware. We have to give people permission to identify what bad behavior is and throw the backstory away. What do you do if you're an adult child of a narcissistic parent?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Is a relationship feasible? A relationship's possible, satisfying, no. And that parent may forever be a trigger of really early-held wounds. Whereas in another adult relationship, you're not going to have that same gut punch of being in this person's presence, that even though you're a fully-formed 50-year-old person, that the critical comment from that parent can still bring you to your knees in a way that it would not with another adult relationship. You still become the five-year-old child. That memory was once very much a threat. If you can really radically accept the limitations of the relationship and have realistic expectations around it. Some people say it's an amount of time, somewhere around 90 minutes, that's where they start cracking.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  I need to have someone who's almost their handler for a family event so they don't blow up a wedding or a baby shower or something like that. You know it's not going to change, but it doesn't mean you're OK with it. You're not signing off on it, but this is what it is.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Gaslighting is a relational communication tactic in which one person destabilizes the other person. It's predicated on some level of trust or familiarity or expertise. A doctor could gaslight us, a lawyer could gaslight us, and certainly a family member could gaslight us. Or partner can gaslight us. Then there's a denial of perception, memory, experience, or reality. I never said that. That never happened. That's not a thing. You're not remembering that right. You can't be feeling that way. That's backed up with, there's something wrong with you. That's the dismantling piece. You're mentally ill. You're way too sensitive. This is not a normal reaction to this.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  What's wrong with you? You need to see a doctor. Darvo, deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender. Gaslighting is such a prevalent dynamic because it's a way to hold power. If somebody's always off balance, they're going to have less power because you're sort of in survival mode, trying to make sense of what's going on around you. The gaslighter gets to maintain their power. And so that's not a safe relationship.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Brian Murerescu blew all of our minds.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  The Greeks wanted to pull back the curtain and find out the mysteries of life for themselves. They had to see it to believe it. And for those who actually wanted to see and to experience something that was meaningful for them, they had the ancient mysteries.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  And that's a capital M.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Mysteries, which comes from the Greek. So mistes comes from the verb muo, which means to close your eyes or keep your mouth shut. Because the number one rule about the mysteries is that they're all secret. So everything we're talking about is trying to unpack clues and leads that were left in the record and the literature. Every fall equinox, it would call to tens of thousands of pilgrims. Go to the doorstep of Demeter's temple. They drink a magical potion and they would have one of the most profound experiences of their life. They had a vision and through that vision, they made contact with Demeter and Persephone, Dionysus. They all claimed that it erased their fear of death. Only once in your life, you'd make this pilgrimage, have the potion, and basically become immortal. It was an immortality machine.

• 28:04Speaker 06

  Putting people in touch with the secret to life after death.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  You are able to communicate how we arrive at what the actual purpose of sacrament is, what it means to ingest the body of Christ and the blood of Christ.

• 28:17Speaker 06

  Jesus, in the Gospel of John, he's beginning to describe for the first time what it means to eat his flesh and what it means to drink his blood. The way that Jesus describes this cannibalistic meal would be the first instance in Jewish history of the consumption of human flesh at the dinner table. And it would not have been a surprise to any Greek speaker of the time, anywhere in the world. When Jesus says in Greek in the sixth chapter of John, "Whoever munches on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life." Which is really important, the verb tense there, instead of "will have," "will go to the afterlife," "will be immortal," it's in the present tense.

• 28:58Speaker 06

  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, right here, right now. He says in the Gospel of Thomas, "The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but no man can see it." The invitation to all Christians, and there's two and a half billion of them, by the way, is that Christ is present in you. You become one with Christ. You become God. You literally become a God by literally consuming the flesh and blood of Jesus. It is not a metaphor. It is not a symbol, despite the fact that 69% of American Catholics do not believe that the ordinary bread and wine becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus. Wine is the single thing that connects the Greek world to the Christian world.

• 29:41Speaker 06

  Our wine today is very different from the wine of yesterday. Dionysus is not the god of wine. He's the god of delirium, madness, ecstasy, frenzy. They went into fits of madness, not alcoholic stupor. That was the whole point of that religion, is to be possessed by and become one with the God. It is not a metaphor. We have the actual Greek text talking about visionary hallucinogenic wine at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. Were there communities of paleo-Christians carrying over some of that? Intoxicating wine from Dionysus and using that in their version of the Holy Christian mystery. Wine was a drug in ancient Greece.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  Wine was routinely mixed with plants, herbs, spices, seeds of opium and cannabis, henbane, and black nightshade, which Dios Gortes described as visionary and hallucinogenic.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  What do you think is real?

• 30:37Speaker 06

  If you experience a psychological death before your physical death, then upon your physical death, something about the psyche may in fact survive. To confront God face to face in the Old Testament, no man shall see me and live. Humanity has been experimenting with these altered states of consciousness through all these archaic techniques for a very, very long time. The only lesson I've learned is that life is a waking meditation. The things that we witness day to day are mere shadows of the reality of the cosmos that we inhabit. Once in a while, people poke their head above ground and see the world for what it is.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  We got to speak with former Playmate Holly Madison. I did not know what to expect going into this. And obviously, everyone knows that she spent time at the Playboy Mansion. There was the show about it, but she talked about the shocking dark side of being in that world, stuff that you didn't see on Girls Next Door. And now, as a successful author and podcaster, Holly tells her story about regaining control and recognizing the behavior in others that is manipulative, toxic, and how to avoid being seduced by love bombing and manipulative individuals.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Great episode.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  My mom, she said she always suspected that maybe I was on the spectrum. I would just be staring into space and frozen for long periods of time. I knew something was a little bit different about me, but I thought, maybe I'm just extremely introverted, or maybe it's because I grew up in a really remote Area. I looked up the symptoms and I felt like they really resonated with me. I always had a hard time connecting with people my age. I always feel there's like three panes of glass between me and anybody else. I felt like I was meant to be in love with an older person because he's very good at connecting with people and manipulating. I do feel like it affected my decision making process. One of the reasons I wanted to be famous is not because I loved any sort of performing so much. It was totally a subconscious thing.

• 32:44Speaker 05

  I thought that that would be a shortcut to human connection. I'd get so much love and so much connection if I were just famous and known. Spoiler alert, that's not what happens. Finally, having the diagnosis, it's just been so helpful to me as far as connecting with people and letting other people know what's going on with me. Sometimes others don't take certain behaviors of mine that I might not even realize I'm doing so personally. I always like to acknowledge that there's a spectrum and I don't represent everyone.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  One of the biggest reasons I was afraid to leave is just fear of judgment from everyone. I never felt confident enough, like I had my footing financially or knew what my next thing was going to be in a way that would make me feel confident enough to kind of like brave everybody's judgment. And then, of course, there's like the guilt of the relationship because he is very love bombing. Tries to make everything seem so romantic and codependent. And that was something I was not emotionally or mentally prepared for at my age at all. I was somebody who always had a hard time connecting with other people. I felt like maybe I'm not meant to be with somebody my age. My family would ask me questions about it. I'd always give them the very sanitized version of what was going on, just out of a place of like defensiveness or maybe not being ready to emotionally address certain things myself.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  And then when you get in that habit of being defensive and being like, no, everything's great. No, he's the nicest guy. No, you don't understand. It's not like that. It's not what people say. You start to kind of believe it yourself. And then I would kind of get in this weird space where I'm just trying to figure out, okay, well, I've committed so fully to this in so many ways. How can I fix this and how can I make this place better? That was the mindset I was stuck in for so long because if you complain about a relationship that's like emotionally abusive or whatever, people will always want to ask like, well, why didn't you leave?

• 34:27Speaker 05

  Red flags you shouldn't ignore. It happens usually within the first six months. Love bombing feels good, like we all want to be courted and we all want to be complimented and we all want that person who falls in love with us. But when somebody wants to move. Really quickly and wants to put any kind of limitation on what you're already doing, or wants to try and undermine what you're already doing and try and like change you and mold you in a different way. So if somebody is like insisting that you move in with them before you're ready, or they have anything to say about keeping your job or quitting your job, or should you switch your job, giving up your independence, and then you look around and you're like, damn, I really have to make it work because I don't have an income now, or I gave up this, and then you feel so invested.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Myra and I went deep into the world of people who claim to see auras with Mystic Michaela.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  That's right. We actually found a way to explain the scientific underpinnings of seeing auras and reading them, thanks to my overly analytical brain, I would say. And Michaela reads our auras in real time. People loved this episode. People loved learning which aura color they were, which personality corresponds with which aura. This was a really fun episode.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  I've seen auras around people my entire life, and I had no idea what it was good for at all, until I started teaching. Then I was like, there's something to it. A reoccurring problem is I would see a kid, he was a blue kid, so he's a sensitive kid, and he's a boy, and he was friends with a lot of girls, and he was just a cutie. And then his parents would come in and then be like, he needs to be tougher. He needs to try out for this. And maybe they were red, so they were more into sports or competitive. The message is something's wrong with you. You're incorrect, and you're never going to have the space to learn how to work out your own energy, which can cause a lot of problems as you grow and you start to do what you think other people should have you do. And then you're kind of betraying your own energetic flow

• 36:25Speaker 00

  for how you work best in this system as you were created to do so.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Seeing colors for me is something that I just do, like I see anything. It doesn't mean you can't read an aura if you don't have that ability. Because really, it's just feeling someone's vibe. The more you pay attention to the vibes of other people, meaning how they feel to you, and more importantly, how they make you feel, is the journey inside begins. And you realize this person causes this emotion, that's not mine, this is mine, this is my reaction, which is just a way to get to know yourself better. My big passion is creating people's own agency in doing so. Putting vocabulary to it, personifying the colors, creating caricatures of each aura color. It's another way to express personality and how we fit in here. How you connect spiritually, your aura is going to affect that.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  I'm an empathic medium. It's overwhelming for me really emotionally. And I start to get the feelings of that person as if I am that person. Then you don't have to believe me or not, it's fine. It's hard to do with somebody who's already famous, because... You know a lot of things about me if you want to. When I do energy work, I'll open the door with the aura and then other stuff will come in. I say I'm just kind of a vessel or a tool for whatever I need to be at the time I'm doing it. I don't own it, it just moves through me, I don't take credit for it. And what I get is nudges a lot. What do we need to hear to release and let go and move forward?

• 37:59Speaker 00

  You guys, to me, are the same aura colors. It's just you're flip-flopped. Amazing. On Jonathan, I see tons of indigo and like little green. And then on Maya, I see tons of green and then like a core of indigo.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  This is the core of our problem.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Well, you're helping each other.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  And the core of why we're very beneficial. We each supply something the other needs.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Exactly. When you're really, really indigo, it can be hard to look at logic and it can be hard to take inventory and it can be hard to just sit back and observe for a minute. And then when you are more green, it's really easy sometimes to feel something and jump over it very quickly. Like, whoop, that bothered me, I'm zipping it up. Now I'm going into logic. I'm going to do this, here's my action plan. And it doesn't mean you don't care. It just means that it's so intense for you, you learned how to compartmentalize and move forward. You have a lot of green aura. It's the Breakdown Podcast and green oras love to break stuff down. They love to break down engines and put them back together, ideas and put them back together, companies, put them back together. Like, green oras love to be like, hey, what's behind it?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Questions, give me the research, give me the science, give me the nuts and bolts. I've been listening and that is what your podcast does. You ask questions other people don't ask and that's a very green aura trait.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Here's our next one. Years after How I Met Your Mother ended, Josh Radnor comes to us to reflect and reveal some pretty surprising revelations from his nine seasons on that hit CBS sitcom. He tells us how it felt to resent the show that brought him enormous fame and how he eventually made peace with his character Ted. Also, what's he been up to lately? A lot of interesting things, music, and he also explains the existential crisis that led him to spirituality and how he found his purpose and expanded his consciousness through psychedelics. Very interesting conversation.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  There was a moment with How I Met Your Mother, or many moments where I was like, I can't believe I'm still playing the same role. I had a joke with someone, I was like, I've run out of faces to make at Barney. When I got on the show and I was having what looked to be, I mean, by our cultural standard, like a great success, I fell into this kind of despair, which drove me deeper into a spiritual search where I was like, what do I, like, what is meaning, what means anything? I kind of want to reserve the right to feel feelings still, a human, having a human experience. My spiritual practice is how do I navigate losing anonymity, being on this big show, feeling trapped by this big show, also being alert to its many, many blessings?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  How do I still have a life outside that? How do I not wither under the opinion, praise, or criticism of other people? It actually threw me into this kind of existential crisis.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  I have twin impulses. I have a pleasure-seeking hedonist that is okay with some kind of self-destruction. And then ever so slightly stronger is this feeling of wanting to be really healthy and alert and have some longevity to things. Some of my ambition was appropriate and right, others of it, to counteract the discomfort with the fame and the visibility, especially when How I Met Your Mother first came on. For the first two seasons, I noticed my drinking, there was an uptick in it. A bottle of wine and then smoking a lot of pot and then waking up and not remembering getting into bed kind of thing. That started to happen quite a bit. My stuff with women was very kind of tied into alcohol.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  There were interactions that were piling up. I'm only now, on some weird level, like making some peace with that era. Because I found, for whatever reason, the show has continued to blossom and grow. It's really an important thing for people. And I'm like, oh, my God, I was a part of that. I was like at the center of that. What a gift. So you could be a proper atheist neuroscientist and know exactly what's happening to the brain when you're under the influence of any of these substances. But at some point, especially with ayahuasca, you will be so far from thinking about the pharmacology of it. You will be like, I'm being bathed by an angel? There's a being or a consciousness that is very benevolent, feels feminine, it's communicating with me.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  It seems to love me. It seems to know a lot about me. And it seems to be giving me some very good advice. I just had this transcendent, incredibly impactful, heart-opening experience. There's this feeling that you get like kind of homework, like, okay, I need to make an amends to that person. I need to stop drinking that. It took away the fear of my own extinction, like the idea of like lights out.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  We finally got to speak with relationship experts, Drs. John and Julie Gottman.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Most of us don't come from families that were completely healthy and normal. We didn't see good role-playing in terms of how to handle conflict, how to reach out and sustain.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Romance, sustain friendship, sustain passion. So many people have experienced trauma. When people feel attacked in relationship, and that can be just by saying, you know, the kitchen is really a mess. They feel like they are being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. It could be they grew up with a mom who was very critical of them and perhaps humiliated them in front of other people. And they sustained emotional injuries, maybe even physical abuse, maybe sexual abuse. A lot of people want PTSD to disappear. It doesn't. You learn how to handle it. Given somebody might be traumatized in a relationship,

• 43:55Speaker 04

  then how can the other person support them?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Epidemiologists who study disease and illness and pandemics were really interested in longevity and thought that diet and cholesterol were the important ingredients. And not having arteries that are clogged up with cholesterol and plaque. What mattered the most to give people health and longevity and the ability to fight disease was the quality of their closest relationships. And those relationships had to have the ingredients of high levels of trust and high levels of commitment. In other words, you're really cherishing another person and saying, there's nothing in the world that can replace you. You're it for me.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And when a love relationship and a family relationship has those qualities of trust and commitment, people are healthier, they recover from illness faster, they live longer, and their children prosper much, much more, dramatically more. Casual relationships just don't give people those qualities. They have to have deep, committed, and trusting relationships.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  When marriages are struggling, people grow distant from one another.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  They're really afraid to bring problems in the relationship because it's going to lead to conflict. Conflict won't be resolved. They'll use the wrong methods of speaking to one another. It will hurt one another and cause emotional wounds. And so they stop bringing up their problems in order to just have peace and quiet. And they grow more and more emotionally distant over time. Marriages don't end with a shout, you know, they end with a whimper. What couples often really need to do, first of all, is to carve out time to talk about

• 45:56Speaker 02

  what they need from the relationship. And they don't bring up what their needs are by bringing up criticisms or contempt, you know, which are the big predictors, a couple of them, of relationship demise.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  We did a study with 40,000 couples about to start couples therapy, gay and lesbian and heterosexual couples, and 80% of them said fun had come to die in their relationship. It's not just sex and romance. It's really about adventure, learning together. A lot of these things get shut down in the interest of just managing complexities of two careers and children. When they continue to maintain play and courtship and cuddling, they wind up having a great sex life for the rest of their relationship.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  The masters have a different habit of mind as they scan their social environment. They're looking for things that their partner and other people are doing right. Even their children, when they teach them something, it turns out they're looking for how their kids are succeeding. And then they they praise them, you know, directly and encourage them.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  There's much more acceptance of the fact that your partner's not going to be perfect.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Whereas the habit of mind of people who have disastrous close relationships is the opposite. They're scanning their social environment for other people's mistakes. And they see their role as correcting. And giving them constructive feedback. And it's almost like they're cops, you know, trying to really monitor the world. Some people drive too fast. Some people drive too slowly. They're perfect.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Robert Greene joined us in the studio.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Ninety-five percent of life is circumstances that are completely beyond your control, namely death itself, but a lot of other things. Power is the ability, maybe on the margins, to have a little bit more influence than you would have had if you're completely ignorant, if you're completely helpless, if you don't understand anything about power. It's the degree to which you can influence and move people and not feel that helpless feeling like when an animal is on its belly, it feels completely vulnerable and it freaks out. We get that feeling too sometimes. It's not a good feeling. So to the degree that you have confidence that you can direct the course of your life, that you're not just simply open to any circumstances aren't pushing you around, that is the feeling of power.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  It's also the degree of power over yourself, self-mastery, mastering your own emotions, et cetera. It's that slight margin of control that that kind of knowledge can bring you. I wanted people to be less stupid and less incompetent in dealing with power so their lives would be easier, so they wouldn't have the pain that I had. I just wanted to reveal it so everybody knows about, so everybody can share in it. Power is this word or is book of knowledge that basically was limited to white males for so many centuries, millennia. Only certain people knew these laws. If you say, I'm not interested in power, that is a maneuver in the power game. You are implicated in it.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  You were trying to pretend that you're moral, that you're above it all. That is a power move. Powerlessness, feeling that we have no control over the world, is very built into our nervous system. And we cannot stand the feeling of being powerless, of feeling helpless. It's a very primal emotion. We're all scrambling for some degree of control over the world. So the idea that I cannot influence at all my children, I cannot influence my spouse, I have no influence or persuasive powers over my boss, over my colleagues, is deeply, deeply painful. We can't stand it. I wanted to reveal what goes on behind closed doors.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  I just wanted to reveal the truth of it and level the playing field.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Seduction involves vulnerability to another person. It's a kind of mental disease that I see a lot in the world today, where people are totally invulnerable. They don't want to open themselves to any kind of hurt. It looks like somebody that can't fall in love. The ability to let go and to let somebody else into your psychology, into your psyche, and to let them become a part of you to the point where you could become pain, where they could hurt you, they could abandon you. But you learn from it and you grow from it and you develop from it. And the ability to be vulnerable is what makes a great artist in any kind of realm, makes a person creative. And I think there are a lot of people now who are desperately afraid to let go, desperately afraid to be vulnerable.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Everybody is born with a life's task. The DNA that you possess has never been replicated in the past nor in the future. It is one of a kind. It is a mix of hormones, of chemicals, that are completely unique. You are a unique phenomenon in the history of the universe. There has never been anybody like you. And you can add on top of that your parents, who also have their own uniqueness. They're raising you in a unique way with a chemistry that has never existed before. And you can also say that about your earliest experiences in life, the people that you interacted with. What makes you different is your life's task. Understanding what makes you different from everybody else will indicate to you the career path that you should be following.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  I believe for every child, it's very clear. But you don't remember it. But I believe everybody can find their way back to it if we go through this process. A seed is planted at your birth, and that is what your voice is. And that voice communicates not just with words. It communicates with your heartbeat, with your skin, how you react to certain things, what repulses you, what excites you. It's visceral. The signals are things that you love and things that you hate. Want to think of your twenties as a period of adventure, trying things out. You don't want to have this kind of monorail linear perspective. I've got to go to law school. I've got to make a hundred thousand dollars by this. You're going to burn yourself out and you're going to end up miserable.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  You try different things. And then you've got skills. You start to say, this is where I can go. I can mix acting with neuroscience. I can become a film director and a podcaster. I can combine these different things that I love. The human brain doesn't learn very well if it's not emotionally involved. You tune out, you burn out. The money will come if you figure out what you love.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Next, we cover one of the most important topics in health, the gut microbiome and how it is secretly, or not so secretly now, influencing us.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  We talked to Andrew Weil, the OG father of integrative medicine and bestselling author, founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine. He's got the answer to your gut microbiome and so much more. He explains why he believes the body does have the capacity to heal itself, the dangers of inflammation. We've been hearing a lot about inflammation. He breaks that all down. How guilt can be an obstacle to healing. I mean, Dr. Weil, he's literally changed our understanding of health and the medical system in the last half century. His revelations will have you ready to hop into 2025 with possibly a whole new outlook on life.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  One of the things I've always tried to do is to give people greater confidence in the body's ability to heal itself. Most conditions end by themselves. There's a famous saying in medicine that the The main job of the physician is to distract the patient while time heals the disease. And I think that is in fact a common result, but we feel we have to intervene and the most common interventions that we use are medications. And I don't know whether you're aware of the extent of problems caused by medication. Now, it's estimated that just in the hospitalized population in our country, there are somewhere between two and 400,000 deaths a year directly caused by medication.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  And this is not mistakes. It's the right dose of the right drug for the right patient, for the right indication, and hundreds of thousands of people die. And that's just death. That's not looking at lesser consequences. That's just unacceptable. Rather than be obsessed with longevity and life extension, what we should be paying attention to is healthy aging. How to reduce the time at the end of life in which you are suffering? How to reduce the inevitable period of disability and decline to as short a period as possible? The goal is to live long and well and have a rapid drop off at the end. I think that's what we'd all like to do. How do you do that?

• 55:10Speaker 07

  By attending to all the factors under your control, starting with the eating, maintaining physical activity, handling stress, getting good rest and sleep, having good relationships. And the appearance of aging has changed dramatically from what it was. Genes haven't changed in that time. It's that people have access to better preventive medical care, to better information, to better products. And we now have a lot of very old people around the study. There's a lot of things about aging that are difficult, and I think we just have to accept those. Persistent chronic low-level inflammation appears to be the root cause of the most serious diseases that kill and disable people prematurely.

• 55:53Speaker 07

  Cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and cancer, because anything that increases inflammation also stimulates cells to divide more frequently. There's many influences on inflammation. Genetic influences, environmental, things like secondhand tobacco smoke. Stress has an influence on inflammation. But diet has a huge influence, and that's one that's potentially under our control. The standard American diet, which is now abbreviated the SAD diet, is pro-inflammatory. It gives us the wrong fats, the wrong kinds of carbohydrates, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly found in fruits, vegetables, or spices. Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.

• 56:36Speaker 07

  People think that eating healthy means giving up everything you like. And that's just absolutely not true.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  We also got to speak to someone I have been wanting to talk to for so long, neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Boltie Taylor.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  To me, the gift of this stroke is that a neuroscientist, a neuroanatomist who thinks in terms of circuitry, had an opportunity to shut down what was going on in the left hemisphere, to the point where she could really discover, what does it feel like to be completely without those skills of distraction from the present moment? I am watching my own brain experience a major hemorrhage. I'm literally watching circuits go offline one at a time, to the point where I cannot walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  When people meditate, when people reach that space of transcendental goal, it's actually a quieting of the conversational personalities of the left hemisphere, designed to focus on detail, me, the individual, my relationship between me and the external world. When I lost that left hemisphere, what I gained was a non-interrupted or inhibited experience of the present moment.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  People are trying desperately to find this peace inside of themselves. They're trying to figure out, how do I get out of my fear, out of my anxiety, out of the pain of my past, the pain from my trauma, the fear of the unknown in the future, the political, we're being buried. How do we get out of that and step into the part of ourselves that is peaceful? We play a musical instrument, or we play with the puppies. We fuel ourselves in different ways. It's brain circuitry. We're dancing all over the place between this brain. Meditation, it's a tool that we use to quiet the left brain, bring those parts of yourself into communication with one another, so that moment by moment, I can pick and choose who and how I want to be,

• 58:49Speaker 00

  regardless of the external expectation.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  It was such an incredible honor to get to talk to a musician that was so influential in my early listening days of music. Run DMC is kind of everything, the Beatles of hip-hop, as it were. And one of the first hip-hop artists to have gold, platinum, and multi-platinum albums. We get to talk to Darryl DMC McDaniel. He's a legend. He opens up, I think, like never before, about the origins of Run DMC's famous remake of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way", confronting the realities of adoption trauma, after discovering he was adopted at the age of 35, the pressures that led him to suicidal ideation, and his diagnoses of suppressed emotions and OCD later in life. Really, really incredible to get to talk to him.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Hip-hop was just considered black ghetto music at first. And there was the message, broken glass. It was me living in Hollis. I was like, why everybody talking about deaf darkness and destruction? And what I meant, in the streets, of course, it was gang banging, drug dealers, pimps, heroin and all of that. It was kids playing jump rope, skelly. And I was like, why nobody talking about that on a record? It almost overlooked. It's funny how when people say the streets, they say it's everything negative. The streets was beautiful, too. So hip hop's rule is keep it real. So when they passed me the mic, I ain't gonna be some gang banging and killing. Hip hop gave me the permission to be me. We brought white people and black people together. We didn't just sell records. We didn't just create a new culture.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  We really did something good for human beings. MTV put us in every living room, even living rooms, and they want us. So there was a responsibility with us to represent continuously the community that we came from, not to let it get diluted, polluted, or destroyed. Anything sacred or holy to a culture, a community, or a nation of people will get diluted, polluted, and destroyed once it's commercialized. I was an alcoholic, suicidal, metaphysical, spiritual wreck that didn't want to live anymore. Instead of using my imagination, I started indulging in alcohol. And alcohol would just make those thoughts go away, but only when I was drunk.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  You know, I went from drinking three 40 ounces to a case a day. Harmful, unhealthy behaviors is celebrated in our community. The person that takes 20 shots, nobody stops them at number seven and say, yo, what's wrong? It was avoiding me, and it was also things I was trying to suppress.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  But I called my mom's up, and I'm like, hey, mom, I'm writing a book and just to make it more interesting for the reader. I want to know three things. How much did I weigh? What time I was born? What hospital?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Simple questions.

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  Hangs up the phone. Hour later, she calls back with my father. Hey, son. Hey, dad, what's going on? We have something else to tell you. Now, I thought it was gonna go, um, when you was born, there was a power outage in the hospital, and we gave birth to you by cannon, like something like that. Or there was an earthquake, and you made it too. They hit me with this. We have something else to tell you what. Now, I'm an alcoholic, suicidal, metaphysical, depressed wreck. You was a month old when we brought you home, and you're adopted, but we love you. Buy, click.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  When I think about what you created, I'm gonna make a person that believes he's-

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  The king of rock. There is none higher.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  What we saw when we saw you, it was true. You dreamed something, and it became true. You dreamed it out of your house into the world.

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  Think about those words, make believe. I just make the world believe.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Something that everyone should be focusing on in 2025 is understanding our senses. And if we have more than five, spoiler alert, I think we do. And this guest explores it.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  We finally got to speak to one of the world's most well-known and prolific authors on spirituality and health and metaphysics. We got to talk to Deepak Chopra this year. And he pulls back the curtain on mysticism. He talks about why science depends on spirituality, how pleasure can cause addiction, and why the idea of a separation of self is actually an hallucination.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Science depends on spirituality even to experience the scientific method. Scientific theories are conceived in consciousness. Scientific experiments are designed in consciousness. And scientific observations are made in consciousness. And consciousness is the ineffable spirit without which there is no science, no philosophy, no nothing, no artificial intelligence, no internet. So it's very important that this conversation is happening right now in the world. In fact, it's the number two conversation in the scientific world right now. The first is what's the universe made of? And the shortest answer is made of nothing.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  And the second is, well, then, why does it look like this? Why does it have colors and textures and tastes and smells, hardness, softness, rocks, galaxies, if it's all made of nothing? So science and spirituality are how nothing becomes everything.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  What is ailing us is uniquely human. No other animal has this desire for pleasure that ultimately exhausts itself into a form of addiction. Food addiction, sex addiction, porn addiction, drug addiction, melodrama, security, money, success. You can't get enough of it. That's what addiction is. Pleasure has exhausted its energy.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Can't get enough of what you don't want anymore. And yet you suffer. It never ends. We don't know the difference between pleasure and contentment. When people have contentment, their meaning, purpose, reflective inquiry, they also value authentic relationships. Everybody is a walking hologram of the universe. We create these social constructs, then we buy into them. We become part of the herd. Spiritual relations place a deep emphasis on education of fundamental reality right from the beginning, in childhood.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  All our problems, whether it's personal relationships or it's lack of abundance or it's stress or conflict in our families or in our political systems or the wars and terrorism in the world, come from one thing, the socially induced hallucination of the separate self. Spiritual relations place a deep emphasis on education of fundamental reality right from the beginning, in childhood. The history of humanities, the history of war and terrorism, since its inception, the United States has not even had five years or a decade of peace.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  We haven't had this experience that we are all longing for. And now it's come to a point where you have medieval tribal minds and modern capacities for destruction, which is a very dangerous combination.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Oneness is a fundamental reality. It's not fictional. It begins with empathy. We feel what others feel. Then it graduates to compassion, which is the desire to alleviate suffering. The alleviation of other people's suffering diminishes your suffering. So compassion, even though it seems altruistic, ultimately is helping you. That leads to love. Love without action is meaningless. Action without love is irrelevant. Love in action leads to liberation from suffering and the experience of what is called joy or bliss

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  and equanimity and loss of the fear of death, which is the ultimate spiritual experience.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  We also can't wait for you to hear the highlights of what I think might be one of our most popular episodes of 2024. Our incredibly intense, truly unbelievable discussion with Luis Lu Elizondo about, oh, you know, scientific proof of the UFO research that he learned about and participated in while working at the Pentagon in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. This episode blew people's minds. You have to listen to the whole thing. We've got some great excerpts of that here.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  And if you're thinking, wait a second, UFOs, he was literally in front of Congress a week or two after our episode aired. It is fascinating, the emerging research that's happening.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  We always assume or presume we know everything, but we don't. We only perceive and can only really comprehend a very, very, very small sliver of what reality is about.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  We thought we knew everything at every phase of human development. We thought with absolute certainty that we knew everything about every category of our existence.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  There is official US government documentation that has been released that was very classified at one point that has now been released to the public through the Freedom of Information Act process. We were looking at telemetry data. We were looking at electrical data. We were looking at real data coming in from some of the most sophisticated collection sensor systems on the planet. Top Gun pilots that are trained observers that can recognize the silhouette between an SU-22, a MiG-25, and an F-16 from 10 miles away. That was further being backed up by gun camera footage and forward-looking infrared footage. And that was being backed up by radar data, both airborne radar, seaborne, and ground-based radar systems. This is more than just someone saying something or hearing a story. You have Three, if not four or five, different

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  collection systems, all reporting the same information at the same time, at the same place, under the same circumstances. My background is that of a special agent. If I went to court with this, the jury would have no choice but to convict. We are well beyond reasonable doubt. And this goes back, this type of information, not just decades, but in some cases, potentially millennia. There are official historical records from other governments and other religions that talk about these strange encounters.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  I don't think it's overstating it to say that you were sitting on humanity's biggest secret.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  The US government is in possession of pieces of recovered vehicle and biological samples.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  So what you said, the American taxpayer is footing the bill for these retrievals and the subsequent analysis and reverse engineering efforts, but with no proper congressional oversight. Humanity acts as if no one else is watching us, like we are alone. But a more advanced life is likely observing us. Humanity needs to become more aware of our place in the universe and the political consequences of our actions. I believe the public has a right to know.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  One of my most favorite impactful and soulful episodes that we've ever done on this podcast happened in 2024. Elizabeth Crome was a normal mom of two, just walking to her local synagogue in Texas, and she got struck by lightning. The short story is she died and came back to tell the tale, but she came back with a ton of new abilities, some of which are explained by science because she was struck by lightning, and others which are beyond the realm of most people's understanding, such as she came back with synesthesia. She came back able to predict the future with really, really phenomenal accuracy. She also was able to tell when people were going to get sick or die.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  She came on the podcast to explain how her life changed from having a very particular near-death experience. And she comes on with Dr. Jeffrey Kreipel, the professor of philosophy and religious thought, who actually analyzed her experiences when He heard about her and places them in astonishing historical and spiritual context. It's really an amazing episode and that happened this year.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  I looked at myself and I was screaming in my head, get up, get up, you're ruining your clothes. Get up, what are you doing? And then it dawned on me, oh, well, shit, I'm not getting up, I'm dead. I followed the light. I knew the kids were taken care of and I wanted to know, what is this? Clearly, I was wrong about everything, so I'm gonna follow it. So I did and the light led me to a place. I call it the garden because to me it looked like a garden, but not a typical earthly garden.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  I can't explain what it is that I saw because the words don't exist. The colors and the flowers and the plants, the colors that I saw don't exist here. They're not of this spectrum. I do believe that was God and I do believe that he was using my grandfather's voice so I wouldn't be absolutely terrified. And it worked. The first feeling that I had was a feeling of overwhelming unconditional love. The word unconditional here means something different. I have children, I love them unconditionally, but this was different.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  This was deeper. I was there for two weeks.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Even before I finished the question, I had the answer. No matter what it was, whether it was about what would happen in the future. He told me who was gonna be playing in the next Super Bowl and who was going to be the next president. And it was clear from the beginning, the decision was mine to stay there or to come back. And he said, if you decide to go back, when these events happen, it will trigger a memory. For you of the things you were told. And it worked. I didn't want to come back. It felt like that was home and this is hell. It's like we're living in this muck here.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  You can't see your way clear to to make your way through it. It's like this thick hell that we're living in on earth. And I had a happy life here. I do have a happy life.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  It it's not like I'm in some kind of personal hell here. I'm just saying in general, this isn't fun. Everything changed. There was nothing about me that resembled the former me. I started having these precognitive dreams. I would have a nightmare one night about some horrible event. And then a day or two later, it would be on the news. You know, a plane crash or a tsunami. I can see auras around every living thing, humans, animals, plants. We have these contracts of what we want to achieve.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  It's because we have not met those goals previously in previous lives. And there are certain things that we have to learn along the way. And the only way to learn it is to really experience it. So we have to keep coming back until we have achieved all of it. This is the the schooling. This is where we learn. We have been here before and we'll come back again.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Thank you, everyone, for joining us for the best of 2024. And thank you for being with us all year long. We really appreciate it. If you haven't already, subscribe wherever you're listening, wherever you're watching. It truly does make a huge difference and helps us bring you the best episodes we possibly can.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  I thought you were thanking me for being here all year. Thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate that. And Jonathan, thank you for being here all year because there's some weeks when it doesn't seem like we might both show up. So really glad we made it through 2024. Happy New Year, everybody, and let's make 2025 a great year together.

• 1:15:56Speaker 07

  It's my impiolic's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.