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 and 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. It 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. 

Image credit: Shani Crowe, Above All

Music credit: Angus & Julia Stone, The Wedding Song

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.

Art credit: Igor Morski

Music Credit: Happy Pills, Limitless Soundtrack

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.  

Art credit: Igor Morski

Music credit: Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle

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, fluoridating— 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. 

When you boil it down, all of us want super intimate relationships. But how do we get there? Especially with our loved ones?  There’s not much out there 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 Hollywood types). 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? 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 only available to people willing to risk it all. 

Art credit: Thayer Nicholas Granstrom Bray

Music credit: Oh Wonder, Lose it

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. 

Music credit: Metallica, Unforgiven

Photo credit: Reuters/China Stringer

The images 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. 

Music credit: Automatic, by John Murphy

Image credit: Danomyte, Shutterstock

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 color 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. 

Music Credit: I'd Love to Change the World, Ten Years After

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. 

Music credit: Billy Grammer - The Kissing Tree

Illustration credit: Joanna Gniady

Photo credit:  Jonathan Ichikawa