Laura Weiner-Kiser is the founder of Change By Challenge, a behavior change specialist and a certified stress and mindset coach. She works underneath behavior, on the scripts and patterns and the nervous system that are running it, and she calls the goal becoming the CEO of your own mind.

In this conversation she explains why reading about change never changes anyone, the four scripts she hears most, the difference between control and discipline, why we trust our stress more than we trust ourselves, and how she broke her own stress addiction. Steve talks about losing the buzzy highs of a hyped-up nervous system, and what he got back.

00:00 Meet Laura Weiner-Kiser, Becoming The CEO Of Your Own Mind

01:15 Nobody Teaches You How Your Brain Works

02:49 The Basketball Test: Reading Is Not Practice

03:33 The Four Scripts: I Should, I'm Not Enough, Too Much, Failure

08:26 Motivational Highways And Building An Express Lane

09:34 Control Versus Discipline: Two Different Questions

11:47 Steve's Hyped-Up Nervous System And The Buzzy High

14:34 What It Is Like To Be Around Someone Who Is Not Judging You

21:01 What Are You Judging Yourself Against?

23:19 Meditation Is A Game Of Catch, Not A Zen Buddha

25:11 A Boss Nobody Would Work For: Raise Your Hand

34:03 Circling, Listening, And Being Heard Is Close To Being Loved

45:46 Should-Choosing Versus Choosing-Choosing

49:23 The Paradigm Of Suffering And The Two-Sided Sandwich

55:06 What Type Of Regret Do You Want To End Up With?

Follow us everywhere

📺 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

🎙 Host

Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/

👤 Guest

Laura Weiner-Kiser - https://www.changebychallenge.com/

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/change.by.challenge/

💼 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-weiner-kiser-b9a3011b9/

📺 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ6Sui_Vn0TNQE8qz10r8Hw

🎧 The Challenges Of Change podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/05uuM1JCw1Ex1MFLhhOWdk

👍 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Change.By.Challenge/

You have been told to open up. You did not, and this is the episode about why that advice was never going to reach you.

Neil Smith ran some of the biggest production companies in the UK, making The Apprentice, Grand Designs and The Undatables, and dozens of shows with Bear Grylls. At fifty he remortgaged his house and left to build Mettle, a men's mental health and mental fitness app, with Bear Grylls as co-founder and Imperial College behind the content.

He suffered from depression through his twenties and told nobody for ten years. In this conversation he explains the statistic that made him leave television, why the advice to talk more does not reach the men who need it, the three reasons men gave for avoiding help, and what a digital front door has to look like before a man will walk through it.

00:00 A Woman Tells Eight People, A Man Tells No One

00:44 Meet Neil Smith And Mettle, The Mental Fitness App Built For Men

02:24 From Britain's Biggest TV Shows To Bear Grylls As Co-Founder

04:38 Turning 50, His Father's Death, And Walking Away From The Top

05:44 Meditation At Eleven, Depression, And Ten Years Of Silence

07:15 Suicide Is The Biggest Killer Of Men Under 50, And Why "Just Talk" Fails

08:51 Meet Men Where They Are: The Undateables And The Digital Front Door

11:22 Too Female, Too Woo, Nothing Wrong With Me: The Three Objections

13:46 What Using Mettle Is Like, And The Randomized Trial Behind It

16:36 The Man Who Walked His Daughter Down The Aisle

18:39 From Safety To Community: Maslow's Hierarchy Inside An App

21:29 The Flossing Story: Accountability Beats Fear

24:20 Six Weeks And Five Minutes A Day: Habits That Stick

28:32 Investing In Mettle And Bringing It To America

33:54 How Early-Stage Investors Get Their Money Back

Neil Smith and Mettle:

🌐 https://www.bemettle.com

📸 https://www.instagram.com/be.mettle/

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-s-smith/

Follow us everywhere

📺 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

🎙 Host

Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/

👤 Guest

Neil Smith - https://www.bemettle.com

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/be.mettle/

💼 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-s-smith/

You can be surrounded by people all day and still feel completely alone. Jake Ross has spent his career on why that happens, and on what actually fixes it.

He founded BelongTogether, studied the psychology of belonging at UC Berkeley and at the University of Pennsylvania, and recently worked with his father, Howard Ross, on a new edition of Howard's bestseller Everyday Bias, adding what social media and AI have done to the problem.

In this episode you will learn:

- Why Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone reads like it was written about social media, and was published before any of it existed

- What a third place is, why almost all of them closed, and what people are using instead

- Where positive psychology actually works, in Jake's own framing: clinical work takes people from zero to four, this takes them from five to ten

- Daryl Davis, the Black pianist who could not understand how someone could hate him without knowing him, so he called the Maryland Klan and started asking

- Why Jake does not believe any human being is purely bad, including people who do purely bad things

- What the algorithms want from your attention, and what it costs to give it to them

Jake holds a master's degree in psychology and says clearly in this episode that it is not a licence to practise: he is not a psychologist or a therapist, and nothing here is clinical advice.

Follow us everywhere

📺 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

🎙 Host

Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/

👤 Guest

Jake Ross - https://belongtogether.us

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/you.be.long.here/

📖 Everyday Bias, Second Edition - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/everyday-bias-9798216477501/

You can be surrounded by people all day and still feel completely alone. Jake Ross has spent his career on why that happens, and on what actually fixes it.

He founded BelongTogether, studied the psychology of belonging at UC Berkeley and at the University of Pennsylvania, and recently worked with his father, Howard Ross, on a new edition of Howard's bestseller Everyday Bias, adding what social media and AI have done to the problem.

In this episode you will learn:

- Why Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone reads like it was written about social media, and was published before any of it existed

- What a third place is, why almost all of them closed, and what people are using instead

- Where positive psychology actually works, in Jake's own framing: clinical work takes people from zero to four, this takes them from five to ten

- Daryl Davis, the Black pianist who could not understand how someone could hate him without knowing him, so he called the Maryland Klan and started asking

- Why Jake does not believe any human being is purely bad, including people who do purely bad things

- What the algorithms want from your attention, and what it costs to give it to them

Follow us everywhere

📺 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

🎙 Host

Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/

👤 Guest

Jake Ross - https://belongtogether.us

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/you.be.long.here/

📖 Everyday Bias, Second Edition - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/everyday-bias-9798216477501/

If you are doing the work, and you still catch yourself saying I used to be able to do that, this conversation is about the sentence underneath it.

Greg Shindler is back for part two. Last week he told you his story. This week he tells you what he has built with it. He has spent a decade in longevity, starting with PCR testing sold to around 350 doctors' offices, then clinics in Oklahoma and Houston, then a longevity facility in San Jose, Costa Rica that opened its doors in April 2021 and became the selected cellular medicine partner for Fountain Life. He left that business in November 2023. His next one is Amara, a 21,000 square foot facility at Palmilla in Los Cabos, opening next year. Amara is Sanskrit for immortal, and Greg found a second definition he likes better: the flower that does not fade.

His argument is that the whole field is answering the wrong question. Longevity, he says, is an identity long before it is an outcome. So the question is not how long you live. It is who you refuse to stop being as you age, and who you refuse to become.

In this episode you will learn:

Why you experience aging as first losses rather than as birthdays, and what that changes

The flywheel Greg builds everything on: identity drives behavior, behavior drives biology, biology drives capability, and capability becomes the evidence that reinforces the identity

What a stem cell actually is, the difference between the ones that come from you and the ones that come from a donor, and where each one is genuinely useful

Why the Yamanaka factors won a Nobel Prize five years after the discovery, and what it meant to reverse a skin cell back to an embryonic like state

What therapeutic plasma exchange does, explained through a fish tank you have never cleaned, plus the honest price and the honest evidence

Why lifestyle is still 80 to 90 percent of your result, and why there is no magic bullet in any of this

Follow us everywhere

📺 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

🎙 Host

Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/

👤 Guest

Greg Shindler - https://gregshindler.com/

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/gregshindler/

💼 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shindler-aa62b84b/

Identity is the thing running underneath almost everything you do, and Greg Shindler has spent most of his life working out how to change his.

At 12, his world came apart. Then it happened again in 2010, in a completely different set of circumstances. For decades those events were not just his story, they were his identity. He was the person those things happened to. What changed, in his words: that story explains me, but it doesn't define me.

Greg is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Amara, a longevity company opening in Los Cabos in Spring 2027. He is ten years sober. He is a father of three. And this conversation is about the work underneath all of it.

What you will hear:

- Why you can spend decades surviving something that is no longer happening

- The identity loop: how believing you are not enough makes you go looking for evidence that you are not

- The two questions Greg asks himself daily, starting with who am I before I start explaining myself

- What his sponsor said that changed everything: it is who you are, but you do not have to be

- Why ten years sober takes him no willpower, and what identity has to do with that

- The exercise where he spoke to his 12-year-old self, and what he heard himself saying

- The drive to a cemetery he had not visited in over 40 years, and what forgiveness actually looked like

- The question he was terrified to ask his own sons

- Why certainty is a prison you cannot escape without knowing you are in it

- His work with Bikers Against Child Abuse, and the hardened men it reduced to tears

Greg speaks openly about losing both his biological father and his adoptive father to suicide, and about breaking that cycle for his three sons. If you are in a hard place, support is available. In the US you can call or text 988. Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists services by country.

Guest: Greg Shindler

Co-Founder & CEO, Amara

Website: https://amaraloscabos.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shindler-aa62b84b

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregshindler/

Follow us everywhere

Host: Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter: https://theneurosjourney.com/

What if psychedelics are not just a treatment, but one of our best shots at healing, as people, as communities, and maybe even as a planet?

Joe Moore has spent over a decade at the center of the psychedelic renaissance. He co-founded Psychedelics Today, the biggest podcast in the space, and has interviewed hundreds of the researchers, clinicians, and visionaries shaping how we understand these medicines. In this conversation he and Steve go from the hopeful to the genuinely strange.

Joe makes the case that psychedelics could be powerful enough to help us heal and become more resourced, so we can face the crises stacking up around us, from climate to politics to everything in between. Then there is the side most conversations avoid. Telepathy reported in separate rooms. Past-life experiences that keep surfacing in sessions. The phenomena that do not fit the scientific model, and what an honest, curious person does when reality stops making sense.

What you will hear:

- Why Joe believes psychedelics could help us heal ourselves and the planet

- The strange, hard-to-explain experiences that keep showing up in sessions

- How the drug war shaped access, and what changing laws mean now

- Where psychedelic therapy is genuinely helping with trauma and mental health

- Breathwork as a non-drug path to some of the same states

- Why the hopeful story needs a healthy dose of caution

- Steve on how psychedelics helped move him through his own trauma

This is one of the most wide-ranging conversations on the channel, equal parts hopeful and mind-bending. Nothing here is medical advice or encouragement to use any substance. It is a conversation about where this field is going.

Guest: Joe Moore

Co-founder and CEO, Psychedelics Today

Website: https://psychedelicstoday.com/

X: https://x.com/jomo137

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jomo137

Vital psychedelic training (2027, apply now): https://psychedelicstoday.com/vital/

Follow us everywhere

Host: Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter: https://theneurosjourney.com/

The most meaningful lives are not the happiest ones. That is not a slogan. It is what the research keeps finding.

Dr. Ben Rogers studies where meaning actually comes from, and he has built something rare: a psychological intervention, tested in randomized experiments, that measurably increases how meaningful your life feels. He teaches at Boston College, and his work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Time, Forbes, and Scientific American.

In this conversation you will learn what separates a life that feels significant from one that feels like it is happening to you, and why the story you tell about your own life may matter more than what has actually happened in it.

What you will learn:

- The three parts of meaning: significance, purpose, and coherence, in plain language

- Why the most meaningful lives are forged through challenge, not ease

- How Ben's team took the classic Hero's Journey structure and turned it into a measurable scale

- The seven-prompt restoring intervention that causally increased people's sense of meaning

- Why roughly 10% of people in one study flatly refused to see their life this way, and what that taught him

- Why men and women were equally likely to see themselves as heroes on a journey, which surprised him

- Why you should not wait for retirement to feel like your life was worth it

- What empty nesters do to rebuild meaning when the kids are gone

Steve opens up about childhood abuse, the lifelong pull to prove that you matter, and how he has applied this work to his own life. Ben's research gives that struggle a shape you can actually work with.

If your life looks successful from the outside but does not feel like it counts, start here.

Guest: Dr. Ben Rogers

Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, Boston College

Website: https://www.benarogers.com/

Follow us everywhere

Host - Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/

You made the decision before you knew you were making it. Then your brain went back and built the reason.

Howard says the field he helped build got something wrong. After 40 years studying why good people make decisions that do not match who they are, he has come to believe that wagging a finger at people does not change them. People collapse when they are under attack.

He tells you about the young man in Louisiana whose heroes were in the Klan, and why that story broke him out of good person, bad person thinking for good. He tells you about the lawyer earning around $950,000 a year who would trade two thirds of it to see his kids, and why he never will. And he tells you about locking his own car door, five or six years ago, in front of a young man crossing the street, after a lifetime of doing this work.

In this episode you will learn:

- Why your brain needs bias the way it needs breathing, and why that is not an excuse

- The difference between guilt and shame, and why shame stops you from changing anything

- Why positive bias can be harder to spot than negative bias, and who it quietly costs

- What happens in your nervous system when you pause between stimulus and response

- How blind auditions moved orchestras from around 9 out of 10 men to roughly 60 or 70 percent, and where that approach backfires

- Why the men in Howard's program cannot answer the question of who they are without their work

- What AI and social media are doing to your bias that nothing before them could do

Howard Ross is the author of the Washington Post best seller Everyday Bias and Our Search for Belonging, which won the 2019 Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal. His book Everyday Bias returns at the end of summer in a new edition co-written with his son Jake, with new chapters on bias in AI and bias in social media.

Follow us everywhere

Host: Steve Sapourn

Podcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter: https://theneurosjourney.com/

Guest: Howard Ross

Author of Everyday Bias and Our Search for Belonging

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/howardjross/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/howardjross

Udarta Consulting: https://www.udarta.com

Website: https://www.howardjross.com

If you could give someone you love a 15% better functioning brain, would you do it?

That is the question Steve started with when he thought about what to give his son for turning 18. Not a watch, not a car. A better functioning brain, and the 40 years of focus, sleep, and calm that could come with it.

Then he asked the harder question. Could he do it for himself first?

This week Steve walks you through what happened when he stopped guessing about his own brain and actually looked at it. He got a qEEG scan. He watched the red and the blue on the report, the areas running too hot and too quiet, and over a seven month period he set out to change them. Meditation, hypnotherapy, one psychedelic therapy session, and 40 neurofeedback sessions later, he did four scans, and by the end everywhere that was red and blue was gone. His brain had come back into a normal range.

0:00 The 15% Question

0:51 Welcome, And What This Is Really About

1:17 Why I Wanted To Give My Son A Better Brain

2:21 The Organ Nobody Ever Looks At

3:39 What A qEEG Scan Actually Is

4:37 Your Brainwaves, From Delta To High Beta

6:23 What The Colors On My Scan Meant

7:06 The Scan Knew Me Before I Said A Word

8:19 From Broken Man To Man With An Injury

9:03 Your Brain Can Change: Neuroplasticity

9:57 Seven Months, Four Scans, Red And Blue Gone

10:44 What I Actually Did, Including 40 Neurofeedback Sessions

12:55 Three Ways To Look At Your Brain: Scan, Genetics, Chemistry

14:25 The 15% Principle

15:41 The Sleep Math That Changes Everything

16:31 Why I Make This Podcast

What you will hear:

• Why seeing the scan changed how Steve saw himself, from a broken man to a man with an injury, the way a torn ACL is something you image and fix

• What a qEEG scan actually is, and what the colors on the report mean

• What 40 neurofeedback sessions feel like from the inside, and why surf videos were involved

• The 15% principle, and why chasing one big fix kept Steve quitting things that were quietly working

• The sleep math that turns six hours into seven, three minutes at a time

  
  

Your brain runs everything you do, and most people have never once looked at it. This is one man's experience with what happens when you do. It is not medical advice. Watch the full episode to hear what Steve found, and what he decided to give his son.

Follow us everywhere

Host: Steve SapournPodcast Host & Trauma Educator

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-sapourn-642215118/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theneurosjourney/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheNeurosJourney

Join The Neuro's Journey Newsletter - https://theneurosjourney.com/