Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Tommy Wood, a UK-trained MD with a PhD in physiology and neuroscience.

He received an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge before attending medical school at the University of Oxford.

After working as a junior doctor in central London, he moved to Norway for his PhD work and then to the University of Washington as a postdoc, where he’s now an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics.

Tommy's work and research interests include the physiological and metabolic responses to brain injury and how that impacts brain health across the lifespan, as well as developing easily-accessible methods with which to track health, performance, and longevity in both elite athletes and the general population.

So, this conversation is far more than just how to “live longer” - it’s about first principles to work from, for health – over time – and we also dive deep into best practices to enhance and optimize your brain functioning.

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This week’s conversation is with Hillary Allen, an endurance athlete and one of the best mountain ultra runners in the world.

Hillary’s career as an endurance athlete has not been straightforward. 

Through injury, setbacks and unexpected challenges, Hillary’s had to re-think what she considers impossible. 

Early in her career, Hillary earned the nickname “Hillygoat” when she proved her ability to run fast on steep, technical mountain terrain – a style of running known as Skyrunning.  

Since then, she has raced all over the world, racking up wins and course records, establishing herself as one of the best mountain ultra runners in the world. 

In 2017 she had a life threatening accident, where she fell 150 feet off of a ridge-line during a Skyrace in Tromsø, Norway. She was told she would never run again. 

After several years of rehab and recovery, Hillary made a full recovery and returned to elite level racing, racing some of her longest and most challenging events post-accident. 

She maintains the belief that ‘your best athletic days are ahead of you, if you’re willing to work hard for what you love.’

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This week’s conversation is with Chris Burkard, an accomplished explorer, photographer, creative director, speaker, and author. 

Chris travels to pursue the farthest expanses of Earth, working to capture stories that inspire humans to consider their relationship with nature, while promoting the preservation of wild places everywhere.

Layered by outdoor, travel, adventure, surf, and lifestyle subjects, Chris is known for images that are punctuated by untamed, powerful landscapes. 

Through social media, Chris strives to share his vision of wild places with millions of people, and to inspire them to explore for themselves.

His visionary perspective has earned him opportunities to work on global campaigns with Fortune 500 clients, speak on the TED stage, design product lines, educate, and publish a growing collection of books. 

In this conversation, Chris shares his desire for discomfort and why he continues to choose the road less traveled.

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This week’s conversation is with a legend, Cody Townsend, one of the most awarded skiers in freeskiing history.

Cody has evolved from a California beach kid obsessed with the mountains … to now stand atop the pinnacle of the sport.

From a successful alpine ski racing career to stunt doubling for Hollywood films, or skiing the “Most Insane Line Ever”, Cody skis some of the most challenging and dangerous lines on the planet - all with an affable nature and a smile on his face.

Cody’s latest project, called “The FIFTY,” is in his words, “simple” - it’s a goal he set to try to climb AND ski all fifty of the lines and mountains chronicled in the classic book, “The Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America.”

From Alaska to Colorado, California to Baffin Island, these lines are among the most difficult in the world and all of them have at least one historical descent. 

But no one has skied them all.

Cody’s goal is to change that. And in my opinion, there’s no one more suited to do so.

He’s about halfway through this project, and you can follow his progress on his YouTube channel… he uses skiing as his medium for insight, mastery and expression

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This week’s conversation is with Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (the “d.school”).

For over a decade, she has helped lead the d.school to nurture creative thinkers and doers and help spread the methods of design.

Sarah teaches at the intersection of design and social impact - she likes to tinker with old educational formats and adapt them to today’s learners.

She has taught the d.school’s foundational class Design Thinking Bootcamp, an experimental course called Design Thinking for Public Policy Innovators, and the long-running, high impact Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, whose students have gone on to design products and services that have helped over 100 million people worldwide.

Sarah is also the author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Uncoventional Ways.

It’s a timely, highly visual resource for people who seek to choose curiosity in the face of uncertainty, filled with ideas and 80 innovative exercises around the art of learning and discovery.

So, this is a conversation about learning how to better define the problem before you try solving it and I think you’re going to love it …

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This week’s conversation is with Dr. Dan Dworkis, an attending emergency physician and professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, where he works at the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center (one of the largest and busiest emergency departments in the country).

Before that, he did his training with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency.

ER doctors or not, we all face emergencies in our lives– times when we are called on to make a decision to act, or not act – with skill to meet the demands of the moment – whether that’s in an environment of uncertainty, pressure, or even intimacy.

Dan believes deeply that all of us can improve how we function under pressure and in doing so perform at our best when we are needed the most. 

He’s the founder of The Emergency Mind project which helps individuals and teams perform better under pressure both in and out of the emergency department – and that sets the tone for this conversation.

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This week’s conversation is with Dr. Antonio Damasio, a Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Antonio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying affect and consciousness. 

His work on the role of emotions and feelings in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. 

Antonio is considered one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era - you may be familiar him with from his previous appearance on Finding Mastery - episode 168.

Antonio is brilliant... When I speak with him, I find myself on the edge of my seat - my mind expanded and my heart thumbing with excitement for what he’s about to share.

I wanted to have Antonio back on to discuss his recent work, which addresses the evolutionary development of mind – the intersection between feelings, consciousness, the mind and the nervous system – and how a deeper understanding can lead to a robustness of flourishing. 

His newest book: Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious is fantastic!

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This week’s conversation is with Dr. Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. 

A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. 

Anna sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations.

In 2016, she published Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop, which was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic. 

Anna appeared on the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, an unvarnished look at the impact of social media on our lives.

She's also the author of the recently published, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, which explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a world where feeling good is the highest good.

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This week’s conversation is special. It’s heavy, it’s rich, and it will change you. It’s a two-parter, recorded on two separate occasions, about a year apart.

It’s with Corey Coopersmith, known professionally as PunkTheBunny - he’s a singer/songwriter and producer.

Born and raised in New York, Corey was a competitive grappler and MMA fighter prior to embarking on his journey with music.

For some background, I worked professionally with Corey, over a decade ago, in his MMA days. And let me tell you, he may not be doing it professionally anymore, but he IS a fighter. That’s just who he is.

In March of 2020, Corey was hit with COVID19 and it left him with chronic symptoms... for over a YEAR.

Part 1 of this episode was recorded in January of 2021. At that point, he had been suffering symptoms from “long haul COVID” for 10 months already... or so we thought.

Even after we recorded Part 1, Corey kept getting sicker and sicker, and no one could figure out why.

We stayed in touch after our conversation and then I connected him with one of our Finding Mastery guests, Dr. Fajgenbaum, - a ground breaking immunologist out of the University of Pennsylvania.

In Part 2, we catch up and dive into what Corey’s journey has been like over the past year. I don’t want to say too much and spoil his amazing story, but his fighter mindset and insights shine through.

I’m so honored to introduce Corey to you. 

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Support Corey's cancer GoFundMe page

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This week’s episode is with David Farrier.

David has always been drawn to the stranger side of life, reporting and hosting across a range of news and entertainment programmes for TV3 New Zealand for nearly a decade.

For many, David’s name conjures up images of grown men tickling each other in boxing rings. 

That’s not because it’s a hobby of his, but because his critically-acclaimed 2016 documentary Tickled, which is still cemented firmly in the minds of any who watched it, follows the largely unknown subculture of Competitive Endurance Tickling.

Following its release, David was quickly approached by Netflix to create Dark Tourist, an eight-part docuseries about, you guessed it, dark tourism—those who forgo sandy beaches to instead visit places that are historically associated with death and tragedy. His stories from this show are… unbelievable.

David now co-hosts Armchaired and Dangerous, a monthly podcast with Armchair Expert’s Dax Shepard and Monica Padman about conspiracy theories, and last year launched a newsletter named Webworm that is a joy to subscribe to.

In this conversation, we discuss why he’s drawn to the stranger and more dangerous sides of life, how conspiracy theories are growing, how they’re changing the world we live in, and some strategies for dealing with that one whacky uncle over the holidays.

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