Category: Podcast

Happiness is something that we all want to achieve. Finding a way to create a life that is fun and successful is possible through a culmination of study, searching, and personal transformation. Today’s guest, Valerie Sheppard shares a four step process to finding happiness that she has distilled from her own personal journey and search for happiness. Valerie spent many years studying and searching for information about finding and achieving happiness. Her four step process consists of the commonalities she discovered in many different teachings.

These days, when we hear about “the 1%” and “the 99%,” it’s almost always in terms of social commentary on the disparity between the highest financial class and everyone else. In kabbalah wisdom, though, the terms mean something else entirely. The 1% is the aspect of something (or someone) that we can perceive; it’s the external, physical aspect. The 99% represents the internal aspect, encompassing the energy underlying everything.

Don’t worry if this Kabbalistic concept isn’t immediately clear! On the show today to help explain this, as well as many other profound and potentially life-changing ideas, is Yehuda Ashkenazi. Yehuda is actually my Kabbalah teacher here in Los Angeles at the Kabbalah Centre, so I can vouch firsthand for his deep understanding of Kabbalistic principles and his ability to explain them clearly. Yehuda was born and raised in Israel, but spent a decade studying and practicing Kabbalah worldwide before settling in LA. He has dramatically improved many lives, including mine, and I look forward to him changing yours as well!

There’s a single trait in your handwriting that may indicate how likely you are to be a felon. In fact, the correlation is so strong that around 80% of imprisoned felons demonstrate this trait in their writing. But this doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to a life of crime if you happen to form your written words a certain way. Instead, consciously changing your handwriting has been shown to change your personality accordingly.

My guest today is Mike Mandel. Mike is intimately familiar with topics such as hypnosis, influence, and handwriting analysis, with 6 awards and 18 nominations to support that fact. We talk about the correlation between handwriting and crime, and whether or not you can adapt your writing to change your personality. He’ll teach you tricks of persuasion and tools for understanding yourself and others. You won’t want to miss this conversation with a man who is widely regarded as the world’s greatest hypnotist.

My guest on today’s podcast is Adam Siddiq who believes in using energetic discipline to optimize your soul, life and emotions to achieve peak performance and leave a positive impact on the world. If you’re listening to this show, you’re probably the type of person who’s enlightened enough to know that the healthy response to being cut off in traffic isn’t to succumb to shallow road rage, but rather to plug into forgiveness, understanding, and calm. But let’s be realistic: that’s far easier said than done. Adam brings incredible value to our conversation today, partly in his explanation of how he approaches this sort of everyday aggravating situation from an elevated response rather than letting himself fall into a reactive state.

Are you confused about what kind of diet to follow? Harvard educated psychologist Melanie Joy helps shed light on this controversial issue and how to choose a path that creates better health and aligns more with our basic human values. She even has tips for meat eaters to support a more sustainable lifestyle in a non-judgemental way. Dr. Joy explains how carnism, an invisible belief system or ideology that conditions us to eat certain animals affects all of our lives. Listen to this episode as we discuss taking back your power by choosing what you want to eat and making this a better planet regardless of your diet.

Sam Morris, my guest on the show today, after being paralyzed in 1999, was determined not to be the victim of his circumstances. Would you be angry? Resentful? Bitter? All of those are understandable human reactions, but shifting your perspective can turn that injury (or any other tragic accident) into a gift and a catalyst for change in your life and the lives of countless others. Facing his physical paralysis head-on allowed him to see other kinds of paralysis (such as mental or emotional paralysis) for what they are, and to help others overcome them through his Zen Warrior Training. In fact, Sam now experiences more vitality and clarity than he had before his accident. We talk about all that and more in this conversation.

Imagine a world in which just about everything about you (from your location to what you do online to everything on your TV) is tracked by various machines and companies and is then sold — after you willingly give away your rights to this information. A world in which there’s a second version of the internet, full of people selling nefarious services. A world including innumerable people ready to steal your entire online identity and then ransom it back to you.

Did you know there’s technology that can detect pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer for just three cents in only five minutes?  Or that we’re increasingly able to modify our DNA? There have been incredible advances in diagnostic technologies, nanorobots, and the function of genes, all working towards saving lives.

Today our conversation is with Jack Andraka about his love of science, how persistence paid off for him, and about the future of medicine. Prepare to be charmed by the 20-year-old wunderkind, who was only 15 years old when he invented groundbreaking cancer-detecting technology. Jack is also the author of the book Breakthrough, on the faculty at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, a TED speaker, and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. Listen in to this thought provoking episode.

If you’re concerned about aging, turn your attention to your telomeres. These protective caps of our chromosomes play a key role in aging, and can even indicate how your body might react when faced with the common cold. While we don’t yet fully understand every aspect of telomeres, it’s clear that our everyday choices can affect their length, and that making good choices can help you keep them as long as possible.

Elissa Epel, today’s guest, is an expert in the field. She co-wrote the The Telomere Effect with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering telomerase. Elissa, an associate professor at UCSF, explains in this conversation how certain behaviors and experiences can impact telomere length. She talks about stress, for example, which affects telomeres differently depending on the kind of stress. She also offers insight into how to protect yourself from premature cellular aging through mindset and lifestyle choices.

We’re constantly bombarded by pathogens and toxins, and fortunately the immune system offers a defense against them. However, most of us are compromising our own immune systems through poor lifestyle choices, often without even realizing we’re doing it.

Dr. Susan Blum, who wrote The Immune System Recovery Plan, knows the ins and outs of the immune system, and is intimately familiar with the types of lifestyle choices and behaviors that negatively impact it. In this conversation, she discusses several important topics at length, including inflammation, food sensitivities, lipoprotein particles and cholesterol, statins, and much more.