Best of MBB 2024!
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It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's gonna break down. It's a breakdown. She's gonna break it down.

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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. 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. We've been breaking down all year. Amazing topics, huge guests. This has been a very, very special year.

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

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.

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

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.

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. 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 going to 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 and Lance ever together?

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 going to 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 going to 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 going to 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. 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 want to do this anymore. I'm making everyone unhappy. I have to go. And there's somebody else who could do this better than me. 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. Our next episode, I'd like to highlight, you might be a redneck if...

you know our next guest that we're going to 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. 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.

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 thing. I'm going to look for those things now.

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. 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 going to 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.

It's like that release valve that keeps the boiler from exploding. If that's what my gift does, if my gift allows you to put your struggle on the shelf for just a little bit of recharge, that's why I'm here.

In the episode, we are also revisiting some of the most powerful mic drop experts. That brings us to Dr. Peter Attia. 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. Where most people are dying today is of chronic diseases.

And where most people are suffering today is from an erosion of healthspan.

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 because

If you only have seven minutes or 10 minutes or 14 minutes with a patient, it's very 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. 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 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. 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.

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? Mind Beyond Breakdown is supported by BetterHelp.

My favorite part of the holidays is seeing people that I don't normally get to see and cooking for everyone, which you all know that I love to do. I also like to stay very cozy, especially during the month of December. I pretty much try to live in my robe as much as possible, which I think you may have seen me doing on Instagram live like a couple weeks ago. For some people, wrapping up in a blanket with a mug of hot cocoa or watching a movie with family is their best way to spend December. I also like to stay very cozy, especially during the month of December.

I've found that therapy is a great way to bring myself comfort that never goes away, even when the season changes. Therapy is especially helpful during the holidays. There's so many expectations and pressures and do this and how do you make time for yourself? But therapy is a year-long way that I manage all of the things that come up. Even if it's not super busy holiday stuff, therapy is a constant for me year-round. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try.

It's entirely online and designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch at any time for no additional charge. Find comfort this December with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash break today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash break, break. My NBLX Breakdown is supported by Quince.

I love giving gifts around the holidays. I enjoy showing loved ones not only how much I appreciate them, but how much I get them. Maybe even more than they get themselves.

It's really great when you can get someone a gift that they wouldn't necessarily get for themselves, like it's a little bit of luxury that they just don't know they're missing. For quality gifts at an affordable price, my go-to is Quince. Quince lets you treat your loved ones and yourself to everyday luxury at an affordable price, like Quince's iconic Mongolian cashmere sweaters, which start at $50, or for the ultimate year-round gifts, check out their 14-carat gold jewelry, Italian leather handbags, and European linen sheet sets.

Whatever you're looking for, all Quince items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. How do they do that? Well, they partner directly with top factories and cut out the cost of the middle person, which passes the savings on to you. Quince is on the nice list. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices, and they use premium fabrics and finishes for that luxury feel in every piece.

Jonathan is a huge fan of their classic Italian wool overcoat. It dresses up all of his outfits, even his sweatpants. Gift luxury this holiday season without the luxury price tag. Go to quince.com slash breakdown for 365-day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash breakdown to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash breakdown.

My Ambience Breakdown is supported by AG1. Staying motivated and eating healthy during the holidays can be much more of a challenge than it already is the rest of the year. It's easy to fall off your exercise and other wellness routines. Sweet treats are tempting you around every corner. That's why we rely on drinking AG1 for the past, gosh, three years.

Jonathan and I plan to bring AG1 travel packs with us when we travel this holiday season. It helps you stay on track during holiday travel when diets tend to get a bit more indulgent. AG1 remains a non-negotiable in our routines, and it's like daily self-care. We know we're doing at least one good thing for our bodies every day when we start our day with AG1. It gives us the vitamins, minerals, and more that we need supporting whole body health, including gut and immune health.

This new year, try AG1 for yourself. Come on, do it. It's the perfect time to start a new healthy habit, and that's why we've been partnering with AG1 for so long. AG1's offering new subscribers a free $76 gift when you sign up. You'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of D3K2, and five free travel packs in your first box. Make sure to check out drinkag1.com slash breakdown to get this offer. That's drinkag1.com slash breakdown to start your new year on a healthier note.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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 reenter. 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.

grounding. It's just 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. Next up is the somatic wonder man, Dr. Peter Levine.

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.

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

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

Our next expert brought up the question of if you know a narcissist, is there one in your life? According to narcissism expert, Dr. Ramani Dharvasala, you probably do know a narcissist. In this mind-blowing episode, Dr. Dharvasala reveals one in six people are actually considered narcissists, and it's likely having devastating effects on your relationships. Dr. Dharvasala helps us define the different types of narcissists.

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. 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. A rigid and maladaptive personality style that negatively impacts relationships, 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. 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 got to be me because this person's got it going on.

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 narcissists, they're hyper-moral narcissists.

judgmental, rigid, cold. 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.

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? Is a relationship feasible?

of relationships 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're

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. 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 okay with it. You're not signing off on it, but this is what it is.

Gaslighting is a...

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 a 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. 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. Brian Murarescu blew all of our minds.

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.

And that's a capital M. 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'd 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.

Putting people in touch with the secret to life after death. 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. 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. 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. 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. Wine was routinely mixed with plants, herbs, spices, seeds of opium and cannabis, henbane, and black nightshade, which Dioscorides described as visionary and hallucinogenic.

What do you think is real? 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

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. 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. Great episode. 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, well, maybe I'm just like 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. 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. 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. 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?

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.

MindBL's breakdown is supported by Rocket Money. Rocket Money recently helped me find and cancel an extra subscription to a streaming platform that I managed to sign up for under two separate emails. That was a big whoops. I bet many of you out there are like me and are currently overpaying on subscriptions that you've just forgotten about. Thanks to Rocket Money, we don't have to remember every subscription because we can see them all laid out right in front of us. It's

Thank you so much for joining us.

and see where I can cut back. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. You can see all your subscriptions in one place, know exactly where your money's going. For ones that you don't want anymore, Rocket Money helps you cancel them. Easily create a personalized budget with custom categories to help keep your spending on track. Get alerts if bills increase in price, if there's unusual spending activity, or if you're close to going over your budget.

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saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com slash breakdown today. That's rocketmoney.com slash breakdown, rocketmoney.com slash breakdown.

MindBalance Breakdown is supported by Calm. There is so much happening these days. It can feel especially stressful or hopeless when things are outside of our control. But Calm can help you restore your sense of balance and peace amidst outside chaos. Calm helps me with the big three, anxiety, stress, and anxiety.

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YMBL's breakdown is supported by Mint Mobile. You know, Jonathan and I love a great deal as much as the next person, but we're not going to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a few bucks. It's got to be easy. No hoops, no BS. So when Mint Mobile said that it was easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month with the purchase of a three-month plan, Jonathan called them on it.

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

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 who 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

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

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 and doing so. Putting vocabulary to it, personifying the colors, creating caricatures of each aura colors. It's another way to express personality and how we fit in here. How you connect spiritually, your aura is going to affect that.

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...

pretty 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. They 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?

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 little green. And then on Mayim, I see tons of green and then a core of indigo. This is the core of our problem. Well, you're helping each other. And the core of why we're very beneficial. We each...

supply something the other needs. Exactly. When you're really, really indigo, it can be hard to look at logic and it can be hard to take an inventory and it can be hard to just sit back and observe for a minute and

And then when you are more green, it's really easy sometimes to feel something and jump over it very quickly. Like, well, 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 learn how to compartmentalize and move forward.

You have a lot of Greenora listeners. It's the Breakdown podcast, and Greenoras 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. Greenoras love to be like, hey, what's behind it? 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 Greenora trait.

Here's our next one. Years after How I Met Your Mother ended, Josh Radner 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.

There was a moment with How I Met Your Mother, 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 it 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 care? Like what is meaning? What means anything? I kind of want to reserve the right to feel feelings still in 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. 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

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. Yeah.

My stuff with women was very kind of tied into alcohol. 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,

The show has continued to like 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. 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. It feels feminine. It's communicating with me. 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 it lights out. We finally got to speak with relationship experts, Drs. John and Julie Gottman.

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 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 tooth 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, then how can the other person support them?

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

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. And when a love relationship and a family relationship has those qualities of

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.

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

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 what they need from the relationship. And they don't bring up what their needs are by bringing up criticals

criticisms or contempt, you know, which are the big predictors, a couple of them, of relationship demise.

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 the 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. 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 praise them directly and encourage them. There's much more acceptance of the fact that your partner is not going to be perfect than

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 them 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.

Robert Green joined us in the studio. 95% 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. It's also the degree of power over yourself, self-mastery, mastering your own emotions, etc. 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 it, so everybody can share in it.

Power is this word or 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. You are 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 systems.

And we cannot stand the feeling of being powerless, of feeling helpless. It's 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. I just wanted to reveal the truth of it and level the playing field.

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 pained, 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. It 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.

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. 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. You want to think of your 20s 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 $100,000 by this. You're going to burn yourself out and you're going to end up miserable. 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.

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. We talked to Andrew Weil, the OG father of integrative medicine and best-selling 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.

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 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 four hundred thousand deaths a year directly caused by medication. 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? 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. We now have a lot of very old people around to 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. 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, herbs, spices. Eating is one of the great pleasures of life. People think that eating healthy means giving up everything you like. And that's just absolutely not true. We also got to speak to someone I have been wanting to talk to for so long, neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor.

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?

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. 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. 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 and 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 regardless of the external expectation.

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 Daryl DMC McDaniels. 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.

Hip-hop was just considered black ghetto music at first. And there was a message, broken glass. It was me living in Hollis. I was like, why am I talking about deaf darkness and destruction? And what I meant, in the streets, of course, there was gangbanging, drug dealers, pimps, heroin and all of that. There was kids playing jump rope. And I was like, why nobody talking about that on a record? They almost overlooked. It's funny how when people say the streets, 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 going to be saying I'm gangbanging 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. It really did something good for human beings.

MTV put us in every living room, even living rooms that didn't 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. 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.

But I call 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? Simple questions. 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 going to go, when you was born, there was a power outage in the hospital and we gave birth to you by candle, 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. Bye. Click. When I think about what you...

created. I'm going to make a person that believes he's the king of rock. There is none higher. 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. Think about those words, make believe. Make the world believe.

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. 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 important.

and hallucination. 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

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. 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.

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 and you 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, they have 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 traditions place a deep emphasis on education of fundamental reality

Right from the beginning, in childhood, 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 traditions place a deep emphasis on

on education of fundamental reality right from the beginning, in childhood. The history of humanity is the history of war and terrorism since its inception.

The United States has not even had five years or a decade of peace. 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.

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

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

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. - 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.

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. 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—

There is official U.S. 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 electro-optical 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 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. I don't think it's overstating it to say that you were sitting on humanity's biggest secret. The U.S. government is in possession of pieces of recovered vehicles and biological samples.

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 that.

One of my most favorite, impactful, and soulful episodes that we've ever done 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. 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 Kripal, 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.

I looked down 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 going to 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. I can't explain that.

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. This was deeper. I was there for two weeks.

And 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 going to 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. You can't see your way clear 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. 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. 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 schooling. This is where we learn. We have been here before and we'll come back again.

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.

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. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.

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