Grow Big Always

All of us can relate to covering up something in our lives. For many of us, that can end up being a huge part of who we really are. We can find ourselves living as outsiders pretending to be something we’re not whether that’s at work, with our friends or in our relationships. These lies can literally destroy our life. “Coming out” isn’t something sequestered to the LGBT community. Coming out means bravely uncovering who you really are and it’s a practice that we can all learn from. In this case, Morgana did it in front of millions of people. In front of co-workers. In front of absolutely everyone she knows. And she did it more than once. When you listen to her story you realize just how much keeping secrets can hurt and just how powerfully becoming outwardly authentic can be. This week is SF Pride. Given the recent impossible-to-comprehend massacre within the Orlando Gay community, just days ago, it’s never been more important to take the time to understand, listen to, and defend everyone— no matter who they decide to love.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever wondering what sex therapy was or who it’s for but after my conversation with somatic sex therapist, Elizabeth McGrath, I realized I could have saved a million sessions with my therapist and a lot of time and money if I just would have started with someone like her. Sure, there’s plenty of other non-sexually related issues you can chat with your Counsellor about like facing mortality, how your parents were total assholes, and your fear of meat but at least for me, most of my issues have had to do sex and relationships. If I would have spent time unraveling those, I would have known so much more of myself, so much faster and that would have leaf blown a million mental boxing matches. Just have a listen to this conversation with Elizabeth McGrath and you’ll see what we mean. We cover a massive range topics and really helpful advice that will, no doubt, lead you to the same conclusion I had: Sex-therapy is the new must have.

You may not know it, but loneliness is hard-wired to kill us. Long ago, sticking with our tribe meant staying happy and safe so it’s no wonder that loneliness and rejection developed into hard-wiring to try to force us back into the group in the event we left, got lost or were ejected. Today, there’s a loneliness epidemic thanks to enormous separation in our cubes, cars, and culture— horrifically accelerated by the last decade of “social” technology. Look on any playground, streetscape or living room and we’re all staring down at our hands. This week’s guest, Psychologist and author Guy Winch says that loneliness creates a deep psychological wound. One that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. In his widely popular TED talk, he makes the point that our culture is highly educated about the importance of brushing, flossing, how to take care of bumps, bruises or when to call 911 if the situation is more serious but that when it comes to our minds, we have no idea how to maintain our mental hygiene or how to even recognize if it’s an emergency. We don’t even think of psychologists as real doctors. In this episode Dr. Winch doesn’t just point at the problem, he offers valuable solutions so hopefully, if you’re one of the nearly 50% of Americans suffering deep loneliness, his advice will help you escape its horrible and life-threatening grip.

We might think of our culture as progressive, but I’d argue that shame of the human body has never been higher, in part thanks to a global culture forming around Facebook’s censoring of breastfeeding Moms, nudes in classic art, and pretty much anything that even resembles a nipple or even your kid, naked under a sprinkler. As we shovel more and more of this imagery from our consciousness we’re telling a dangerous story to the world. Before this was an issue, there have been many decades of the religious right beating down what they see as inappropriate. Either literally or monetarily burning them at the stake. In the early 90s, this happened to this week’s guest, Jock Sturges, who had been shooting controversial fine art images of naturist adolescents and their families for decades. His studio was raided by the FBI and his photos and equipment was seized. While the grand jury declined to bring an indictment against him, and the French government flat out laughed at the charges and instead told the right that they were huge fans of his work, it was no less ruinous. The amazing thing is how Jock, shook it off and refused to let it define him. His passion for capturing the shameless human form and the popularity of his work, has endured for half a century. Jock is a very private person and rarely grants interviews. In this special chat, we cover his creative process and how he’s weathered the slings and arrows well beyond his (as he calls it) “do-si-do with the Feds” and into a world where photography as a profession has all but died under the weight of mobile phones, the collapse of the news media and the ever-reaching black marker of global censorship.

Visual storytelling has probably been around since people have been around. Today, it dominates our storytelling. Even in our mind, we're painting our story as we frame our past and future. How we choose those frames can be revealing and powerful. In a way, life is a series of living panels flipping from one to the next. How conscious are you of where you put the camera, what combination of images to choose, and which parts might create a page-turner? It’s these questions that visual storytellers ask themselves every day. It’s hard to imagine someone who better understands the power of visual storytelling than Cartoonist Scott McCloud. He has been called the "Aristotle of Comics” and his non-fiction work, which details the history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics— is the a Bible for visual storytellers. "Understanding Comics" has been translated into 16 languages and was named a New York Times Notable Book. He recently returned to fiction with the graphic novel, “The Sculptor” and it has been met with wide critical acclaim. Scott has lectured at Pixar, Google, and the Smithsonian Institution and I learned in our conversation that he’s also an amazingly sincere, accessible and friendly guy with an enormous attention to detail and a great story to tell.

There are two kinds of people: those of us that are domesticated and those that feel strangely out of place. The ones that feel out of place, might not be able to communicate why, but know in their gut not only that our world is toxic but that the systems and traditions we’ve created don’t feel even close to natural. No matter which camp you fall in, both feel depressed, frustrated, anxious and flat-out unsatisfied as they get dragged through our culture’s unfriendly demands just to stay afloat. Have you ever asked yourself how and why we’ve sabotaged ourselves like this? I know this will sound dramatic and easy to dismiss but there really is a Matrix. That’s why that movie struck a chord. We have inherited and continue to invest in an unfair, complicated world of lies we don’t even like. That’s completely against our human nature. There’s a really good reason all our fantasies are undomesticated and filled with apocalyptic visions of wiping the slate clean, or hedonistic freedom. A huge key to understanding this, is to press pause and look objectively backwards, beyond the short 5,000 years of written history and into the totality of human life 195,000 years before it. To do that you’ll have to look with different eyes and stop using the pejorative, biased, puritanical lens that we were the Flintstones or ugly, violent, selfish, filthy, hairy ape-people. That’s a dangerous and inaccurate story we tell that helps make our lives feel vastly progressive but, in fact, continues to feed the Matrix beast. This week’s guest, author and Psychologist Chris Ryan, has tackled big parts of the Matrix through his and his wife’s book, Sex at Dawn, his podcast Tangentially Speaking and his forthcoming book Civilized to Death.

Where do you place yourself on the animal kingdom ladder? Near the top? Odds are that you’re living inside the “we're so god-kissed and unique” human story that we all seem to march to versus thinking of yourself as a talking, organized ape. I mean, look at all the tests we’ve done on animals to prove how wild their violent, beastly kingdom is and how civilized and advanced we are. Wonder why we win those tests every time? But what if we’re very, very wrong. What if our us-centric frameworks keep us from knowing ourselves and connecting with the world around us in a way that completely destroys that hierarchical "nature ladder?" When I started the Grow Big Always podcast, I made a list of dream people to have on the show and today’s guest was on that list. Frans de Waal is a world-leading primatologist and Biologist. He’s been named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. He is a professor at Emory University. Most recent book is "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are." Why was he on my list? His 40+ years of work with non-human animals is critical and needs our attention. It will demystify and shatter the story you tell to sabotage your point of view of how you fit into the world and how connected we are to it.

Lately there’s a lot that’s been published about the lack of diversity within the Silicon Valley tech community which have been generally populated by a lot of young, white guys and for the most part, still are. So, I was excited to have Anne Bonaparte on the show. I invited her about 8 months ago to come in and chat a little bit about being a mid-stage CEO not just because she's a woman not in her 20s, but really just because she’s outstanding at her job and understands how diversity can come from all sorts of places. Of course back when she originally did this interview, she was the third person I had talked to and I had no idea how to set up a good recording environment, so I ended up with pretty messed up files and not enough experience to correct them. It’s taken me this long to acquire the needed skills to be able to release this episode and not have it sound like crap. Anyway, Anne’s point of view about how to create healthy conflict at the workplace, and a productive, diverse environment for growth couldn’t be more true today then it was when we chatted eight months ago.

There’s a lot out there about marriage. Recently, who has the right to marry whom, as been all over the media and, as we all know, there’s a massive industry focused on profiting from “that special day.” But what happens after that? The rest of your married life is not so clear. As you grow from young adult to middle age and, if you’re lucky, your golden years— what does marriage look like and what do we expect from each other? This week’s guest, Jenna McCarthy, is the author of many books on relationships and her TED talk on “What you don’t know about marriage” has almost four million views. She’s hilarious and a lot of fun to talk to, you’ll get a lot out of our conversation about what midlife spouses want from each other.

This year’s election marks potentially the most dramatic division that we’ve ever had and it could be the beginning of a schism that completely shakes up our two-party system. While a lot of us have opinions about politics, Stanford Professor Doug McAdam is a Political Sociologist that researches the facts around the subject. He’s the former Director of Center of Advance Study in Behavioral Sciences, he’s authored 18 books and 85 other publications all focused on Political Sociology with emphasis on race and social movements. So if there’s anyone who understands how the color of our skin has created two parties that pretty much don’t talk to each other anymore, it’s Doug.