Chapter 1: What are the most powerful moments in longevity science discussed this year?
last minute shopping yeah we're there that is what's happening so let me help you out and let me help save you perhaps from spending your hard-earned dollars on just something random by reminding you that the kind of gifts that people actually value are the ones that connect the person you care about to what they care about demonstrating of course that you understand what actually matters to them
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There's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined. Hey everybody, before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to express a heartfelt happy holidays from me and from my entire team here at the RRP and Voicing Change Media. 2025 has been a delirious year for many reasons.
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Chapter 2: How does neuroplasticity influence personal development?
So really, neuroplasticity allows our brains to adapt to a changing environment. And this is important for aging, but it's also important for mental health. So people with major depressive disorder, for example, they have dysfunction and neuroplasticity. And that kind of makes sense, right? If you can't adapt to a changing environment, it's very stressful. It can cause anxiety.
It can be depressing. So there have been a variety of different... You know, researchers that are trying to target neuroplasticity as a treatment for depression. So neuroplasticity not only plays a role in brain aging, but it also plays a role in mental health. And I think that's important to point out because, I mean, I think...
I think almost everyone by now knows that exercise is one of the best things you can do for mental health. Right. I mean, it's like it's just you can't deny it. Right. I mean, you go out even just even doing like a 10 minute high intensity workout. You feel better. You know, you feel better. How important is the plasticity piece in the mental health conversation?
And what is the significance of that plasticity increase as a result of vigorous exercise? Yeah, it's a good thing that you point out. I think there are a lot of things that are changing with exercise. I mean, endorphins that make you feel good, you know, endocannabinoids that make you feel good. I mean, there's serotonin gets increased, right?
So there's a lot of different, I would say, short-term effects that are potentially responsible for the beneficial elevation and mood that you experience after exercise. With neuroplasticity... I would argue there's more of a long-term effect, right? Your brain is now able to adapt better to a changing environment, and that's going to have more of a long-term consequence.
So neuroplasticity is another really important thing that brain-derived neurotrophic factor regulates. And again, coming back to the lactate, which is what we were talking about, Lactate is also, when I say it's a signaling molecule, it is communicating and activating a lot of different things in the brain. So norepinephrine is another one that's been shown to increase.
And norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for focus, attention, but also mood. So people are often treated with norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors for anxiety and also depression. Lactate plays a role in increasing that as well. But again, we're just getting down into the nitty gritty of one aspect of exercise.
And as you pointed out, there's a whole plethora of changes that occur with exercise that are beneficial, not limited to lactate. I just... I think the lactate story is so important because it really is a proven mechanism, both human and animal studies. It's something that's measurable.
And again, it's something also that we've known is it links the more high-intensity exercise, the more vigorous exercise with a lot of these beneficial effects on the brain. Mm-hmm. We continue our best of series with psychology professor Laurie Santos. this is something that culture gets wrong. We talked about culture getting manifesting wrong.
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Chapter 3: What insights did Mel Robbins share about control and power?
and feeling better. But then you have all these experiments where you kind of force participants to do nice stuff for other people. One of my favorite is by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues where they walk up to folks on the street, hand them 20 bucks and say either, hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice to treat yourself, right?
Or hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice for somebody else. You could donate it to a homeless shelter. You could buy a friend, you know, something nice like, but has to go to someone else. When they call people at the end of the day or even at the end of the week, they find that people are happier when they treated someone else rather than when they treat
Right, in giving that money to the other person, if you qualify it, it then becomes a burden for them as opposed to an enriching experience where you felt like, oh, I like, you know, I did something nice for somebody.
Yeah, and this is a spot where even in my own life, if I'm not careful with it, like there's just like a terrible opportunity cost because like all the money you spend on yourself to feel better, you know, buying yourself a massage or buying yourself that new gadget or treating yourself to a nice glass of wine. It's making it worse.
well it's just the same money that you could have spent on someone else i often joke that that every time my brain is like i'm gonna get a manicure i'm gonna do something nice for myself i'm like wait can i give my sister-in-law a manicure can i like buy that in that massage for like someone in my workplace like it genuinely is one of these things that even violates my intuitions even saying it now i'm like dude i would like the massage better than my sister-in-law you know whatever but but you're cultivating abundance and abundance mindset right instead of lack
like you have to hoard it because you're afraid it'll run out or you'll run out. And the benefits is like when you do nice things for other people, like what you get back in the social connection is huge, right?
My producer and co-writer for my podcast, Ryan Dilley, tells this story of he was walking into a coffee shop and someone was walking out with this cookie they were very excited about and then dropped it like on the threshold of the doors they were walking out. It seems sad. And he ran into the coffee shop and brought this person a cookie and like gave them the cookie.
And the person was really happy. And he's like, months later, I'm still down that door. Like, I don't ever tell the story at the time I walked into the coffee shop and just got myself the cookie. Like, now it's, you know, millions of people on your show are hearing it, right? And so, these moments of good deeds that we do for others, they percolate. They percolate in our own memory.
They percolate in our social conversations. Even, you know, just hearing Brian's story, probably all your people have this little boost in happiness that we get. And so, we forget that our actions and our things we do to feel happy at the moment, some of them live on better than others. And the things we do for other people live on in special ways.
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Chapter 4: How can happiness research reshape our understanding of well-being?
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Okay, let's get back to the show with a clip from personal development expert and bestselling author, Mark Manson. We're in like this guru sphere, right?
Particularly in the self-help world where there are outsized personalities out there who are commandeering like very large audiences and a significant mindshare amongst a vast population of people who are probably genuinely looking for good advice and guidance at some period in their life in which they need it.
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Chapter 5: What role does emotional regulation play in achieving happiness?
Yeah. And I think being around people with you and realizing I grew up in a place with no you, where everyone was economically kind of pushed against the wall. And in terms of what are our opportunities? Well, there aren't any.
And so like when you're in a situation like that where you can fall, when you see how far you can fall, I think this is like another thing about the American condition that's a little bit scary is when you see how far you can fall and you can fall to hell, beyond hell in America. There just aren't those safety nets to catch you.
When you see how far you can fall, it's really hard to feel a sense of abundance that you can give to other people. And so in Japan, because of all these structures and these social structures and you can only fall, oh, I can see how far I can fall. It's not that far. It's not that scary for me to help this other person out.
I think just being around that and feeling that and then being on these big solo walks that I've been doing now for six, seven years, it was in that, and I write about this in the book, I was able to I'm able to laugh about who my father was. I was able to find this crazy sense of forgiveness for this guy that I didn't know was possible, I didn't know I was capable of.
And, you know, feeling that, experiencing that is again, is again, we're getting back to this self-worth ratcheting. And I think having a sense of you feeling that you're being able to deploy it in a way that's positive, that elevates people. Again, that just helps you feel like you're, you have more value as a human too. It's like, it's mutually beneficial.
We continue with actor and podcaster, Ethan Suplee. With all the rubber banding and then now in this, you know, stable situation that you're in right now, I mean, we could talk all day about like what worked and what didn't. I'm less interested in the details of that. It's all very personal, personalized and individualized.
But from those experiences of succeeding and failing and rubber banding and relapsing and back and forth, and now it's cycling, now it's the gym. I mean, you have compiled like an encyclopedia of principles around transformation and change. Yeah.
So if you had to write a book and it had like 10 chapters, like each one being one of these principles, like what rises to the top in your mind as the most important factors for somebody who is contemplating making a change?
Having a plan for the day and then preparing for the plan to go out the window once you meet reality and having another plan and having as many plans as you can consider and then having a plan for when all of the plans fail and And kind of, you know, getting through the day is the most important thing.
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Chapter 6: How does consciousness impact our daily lives and decisions?
Maybe. I don't know if Christie Brinkley had done her own things. I mean, she was sort of the generation just before me. And she was already sort of stepping out of the kind of regular model mode. And she had her health and beauty books. She was doing other things. And so she may have done a calendar. I don't know. Yeah. And then you had the lingerie company, right?
That was like a licensing deal though, right? Yeah. But that was also you kind of seizing control and saying like, I can do something outside of the kind of strictures of this modeling world and create kind of financial independence in a different way. I mean, now today with the influencer economy, like that just seems like an obvious thing, but at that time it wasn't, right? No.
And it was really kind of a perfect sort of combination of events because this little New Zealand company was brilliant at making underwear. They came to me and said, will you be the face of our brand? I was looking for a project. I didn't know what because I had already kind of seen licensing in action as a child. I remember playing tennis. Do you remember John Newcombe?
He was an Australian tennis player. And I remember getting a little tennis skirt and it had his logo on it, which was his wink face and his big mustache. And I was like, man, here's a tennis player and he's making clothes. I think that's so genius that he's able to do two things. And so that sort of was in the back of my mind.
And I had this concept that I had a platform through Sports Illustrated. How could I use that platform into creating a business that didn't require me going to the studio every day, like showing up as a model? How could I kind of find some sort of something? And at that time, I thought it might have been swimsuits that I could put my name on and have the swimsuits be the stars.
So the sale of the swimsuits be my income rather than me just showing up at the studio. So making money while you sleep, really. And this New Zealand company had come to me and said, will you be the face of our brand? And I just said, why don't we do a licensing agreement where I'll help you design because I love lingerie. I was living in Paris at the time. I can't find anything that fits.
I have a particular type of thing that I want to do for myself. And if it sells, great, we all make money. If it doesn't sell, we don't, you know, it's a wash. And so that was my first truly entrepreneurial, I think, decision. Next up is filmmaker and Telepathy Tapes podcaster, Kai Dickens. Rupert Sheldrake, he's a biologist from Cambridge University. I mean, that's a very prestigious school.
He's an incredibly smart man. And I loved his story about how he fell into this. He didn't believe in telepathy or that psi abilities could be real. He was in the tea room at Cambridge and there was, I think he was a young graduate student or something at this point. I don't exactly remember, but I know he was early in his career. And there was a scientist at the school Sir Rudolph Peters.
So he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to the scientific field within England. So this is a very prestigious professor. And Rupert was in the tea room with Sir Rudolph Peters who said, I have just come across a blind boy who was able to read an eye chart when his mother was looking at it. And that's fascinating. Well, how is that possible?
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of changing our perspectives on relationships?
One side is narcissism and the other side is masochism. And narcissists, you know, what we think of narcissists, we think of people who are full of themselves, who lack empathy, who are prideful and boastful, but we don't think about the masochistic narcissist who says,
bends over backwards, is constantly working, is delaying pleasure because they believe that they're the only ones who can do it, right? Only they could do it right. And I think many people with high functioning depression have these narcissistic, masochistic tendencies. And it's not because they're a bad person, it's just because they didn't process that pain.
And what they end up doing is finding their self-worth in that role. So they, it looks very narcissistic. I'm the only one who could do it, but it is masochistic because they're bending over backwards. But it's self-validating also. Yes, yes. And then you look at the world through that lens, like, see, when I did it, it worked. And when you didn't, it didn't work.
You know, it's constantly being reinforced that way. But they're not happy. Yeah. They're leaving joy on the table. They are miserable. Yeah. We did it. I really hope you enjoyed this reflection in the rear view and found this episode uplifting and inspiring. The full list of guests featured and links to the full episodes can be found in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com.
And thank you. Thank you for the love and love the support. Part two with a bunch more awesome excerpted convos will be up later this week. So stay tuned for that. And I can't wait to grow and learn alongside you in the new year ahead. All right, everybody, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really do hope that you enjoyed the conversation.
To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit today's episode page at richroll.com, where you will find the entire podcast archive, as well as my books, Finding Ultra, The Voicing Change Series, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free.
Actually, all you got to do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review or drop a comment. Sharing your show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome as well and extremely helpful. So thank you in advance for that. In addition, I'd like to thank all of our amazing sponsors.
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Today's show is produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, along with associate producer Desmond Lowe. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor.
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