The Ronan Levy Podcast

There are few men in this world that I'd identify as being a role model for me. But after this conversation, I may just have one.

Scott Galloway is Professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur. He was named one of the world’s best business professors by Poets & Quants. Scott has founded nine companies, including Prophet, RedEnvelope, L2, and Section School, where he also teaches. He is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona and Adrift: America in 100 Charts. Scott has served on the boards of directors of The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Panera Bread, and Ledger. Across his Prof G and Pivot podcasts, No Mercy / No Malice newsletter, and his YouTube channel, Scott reaches millions. He has won multiple Webby and Best Podcast awards, and his books have been translated into 28 languages. 

Find everything Scott Galloway at https://profgmedia.com/.

Highlights:

3:15 - what gave rise to Scott's interest in the conversation around masculinity.

6:24 - compassion is not a zero sum game.

8:06 - for many men, suicide is not a result of mental illness.

8:54 - the importance of relationships.

9:40 - Scott's business failures.

11:42 - failure as an ingredient of success and the traps of it.

12:22 - kicking dogs and other ways to get over failure.

12:37 - the role of luck in success.

14:02 - the thread that connects millionaire hedge fund operators and lost young men.

16:29 - what failure feels like.

18:07 - the importance of not being too picky and just picking up the pieces.

19:55 - the curse of both genders.

22:00 - men, money and the data.

23:07 - why Scott's life partner has been pivotal to Scott's success.

24:09 - how Scott's identity is wrapped up in his professional relevance.

26:02 - biases in the school system and the workplace.

29:14 - the role of fathers and the definition of masculinity going forward.

30:03 - the story of Scott's childhood and his relationship with his father.

33:54 - Scott's introduction to investing, courtesy of one of his mom's boyfriends.

35:53 - become a frat boy. For your own good.

39:00 - the consequences of refusing to accept defeat and failure.

42:55 - psychedelics, alcohol and more.

47:05 - body dysmophia in men.

50:07 - the beauty of the male form.

52:51 - Scott's appreciation of nurturing men.

For decades, we had envisioned our future as a digital utopia in which technology would solve all of our problems and create a perfect world.

Yet, with the pandemic, we got a taste of what this promised future would be like - and it was awful. So, are we doomed to live in a digital dystopia?

David Sax is an award-winning writer and speaker whose journalistic writings have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg.

Today, David joins Ronan to discuss his upcoming book 'The Future Is Analog' in which he explains why the promised digital utopia never arrived, how we got here, and whether we can build a future that serves us as humans, first and foremost. Tune in to learn more!

Ronan and David also discuss the potential of psychedelics as a way to reconnect with ourselves, Jewish culture, The Singularity, and more.

Key Takeaways 

• Are we doomed to live in a digital dystopia? (00:00)
• The rediscovery of the Jewish deli (08:59)
• Paper books vs. ebooks (26:07)
• What to expect from the future of digital technology (39:11)
• Why the analog world is better than the digital world (42:13)
• Why the psychedelic experience is so powerful (48:48)
• Ray Kurzweil's prediction of The Singularity (57:13)
• The importance of getting back to authentic human connection (1:01:56)

Additional Resources

Leverage the power of psychedelic therapy and start your path to long-term change. Learn more at: https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/

Download the Field Trip App:https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/self-guided-mobile-app

Tune in to The Field Tripping podcast at: https://www.fieldtripping.fm/

Learn more about David's book 'The Future Is Analog:' https://books.google.es/books/about/The_Future_Is_Analog.html?id=3RRjEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

Robbie Bent, CEO and co-founder of breathwork and wellness center Othership, joins Ronan in this emotional episode of Field Tripping. The two discuss Robbie’s evolution from backyard breathing sessions to owning a brick and mortar studio and his personal evolution to becoming the best version of himself. Plus, they discuss how psychedelics are helping to prepare Robbie for fatherhood. Learn more about Othership at othership.us

Every once in a while, life provides a sliding door moment. One of those pivotal moments in life for which there was a before and there is an after.

This conversation with Alex Charfen is one of those moments for me, as it helped me find a level of self-acceptance that I've never found before.

Here is a little bit about Alex...

He was never meant to be the Co-founder & CEO of a multi-million dollar company. As a kid, Alex had a tough time learning, fitting in, and following other people’s rules. His entrepreneurial journey started early on by selling things at school, and he went on to run a window washing service in high school and a financial consulting firm in college. In his twenties, Alex became a Fortune 500 consultant, working with some of the most successful people in the world. In his early thirties, he met his wife, Cadey, and sold his consulting business. Unable to stay out of the entrepreneurial world, Alex and Cadey started buying and selling houses and became one of the largest real estate companies in Florida in less than a year. Following the Economic Crisis of 2007, Alex and Cadey lost everything and went bankrupt. Rising from the ashes, they built an information product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert (CDPE) designation. Through their designation, Alex and Cadey worked with the majority of major lenders and real estate brokerages in the United States to help our country recover from the mortgage crisis. As a result, they helped pull forward the recovery of the foreclosure crisis by five to seven years, sold over $70 million, were featured on the Inc. list of fastest-growing companies in the country three years in a row, and won many other awards.

Alex went on to create the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT), helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs with six-, seven-, and eight-figure businesses to grow and scale. Today, Alex has created multiple multimillion-dollar companies, learned a lot along the way, and is teaching entrepreneurs how they can do the same. Sharing his journey with others led Alex to write for publications such as Success, Entrepreneur, and Inc. Magazine, and his story has also garnered attention from major media outlets like MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Investor’s Business Daily. As a result of his mentorship and success, Alex is now known as the go-to person for helping entrepreneurs ascend the Billionaire Code and understand how to plan strategically. Throughout all of this, Charfen’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to grow and scale their business and make their greatest contribution. 

If you want to learn more about Alex and his incredible work with Simple Operations, visit www.charfen.com.

Key Moments:

03:00 - Alex's tumultuous childhood in Mexico City

10:40 - Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer make Alex even weirder

14:01 - adversity as a precursor for massive success

15:26 - a basic definition of The Entrepreneurial Personality Type

16:06 - Ronan's tumultuous childhood

17:44 - entrepreneurs are information seekers

20:00 - how entrepreneurs are often persecuted by the system and then want to fix the system for everyone

22:00 - momentum as a key determinant in an entrepreneur's happiness

23:26 - what's wrong with me?

27:10 - changing the entrepreneurial scoreboard

32:44 - the three elements of momentum

38:19 - Alex's own brush with insolvency

45:49 - Alex's phoenix rising from the ashes, and near collapse

56:27 - stillness in momentum

1:00:24 - a new definition of success

1:05:44 - some thoughts on Bill Gates

In early 2019, Mira's life was entirely blown apart, when her partner Brian was diagnosed with an unbelievably aggressive cancer. He died seven weeks later, leaving her alone with their almost three-year-old daughter.

The experience forced Mira to explore the grieving process and she has turned that exploration into New Moon Mira, a grief coaching business that supports widows and grievers in more intimate group containers and provides grief literacy training for grief-support people and healthcare professionals.

In this conversation, we talk about the experience of having a life partner pass on, how to support someone who is going through the process of, or soon to be, grieving, how the medical profession fails to support people in the dying process and, ultimately, how grief can help us evolve.

If you're interested in learning more about Mira and her work, check out:

https://www.instagram.com/newmoonmira/

Derek Beres is a multi-faceted author and media expert based in Portland, Oregon. He has served in senior editorial positions at a number of tech companies and has years of experience in health, science, and music writing. He is the co-host of the Conspirituality podcast and co-author of Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.

In this episode, Derek and I talk about his conspirituality, what it is, where it comes from and why it demands that all of us take the word of influencers and charismatics with a healthy sense of skepticism...especially when they are trying to sell you something.

We also explore the unlikely alignment between the alt right conspiracy theorists and left-wing hippies when it comes to vaccines, the origins of modern yoga, some big name podcasters and RFK Jr.

It might blow your mind. Or piss you off.

Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, you better watch out. Derek shows us what real journalism looks like.

Timeline:

3:53 - What is conspirituality?

8:36 - Who in the world is Charlotte Webb?

12:11 - Conspirituality through the modern age.

22:32 - Dave Asprey and the early days of the modern conspirituality.

26:22 - How indigenous practices are being co-opted by conspiritualists.

28:47 - a discussion of AI and intellectual property law.

30:35 - How even real scientists like Andrew Huberman can get caught stepping out of their lane.

31:55 - Russell Brand is NOT a journalist.

38:39 - Why charismatics and conspiritualists try to make you feel like you're on the right side of history.

40:45 - The roots of modern yoga are not what you think.

48:17 - How the rise of modern yoga predicted the conversation around transgendered people.

1:05:47 - a conversation about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

1:10:49 - RFK Jr. vs. ChatGPT in a battle for the truth.

If you'd like to order a copy of the book, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/derek-beres/conspirituality/9781541702981/?lens=publicaffairs

If you're interested in learning more about Derek's work more generally, check out:

https://www.conspirituality.net/

https://twitter.com/derekberes

https://www.instagram.com/conspiripod/

Susan Stephens is a Registered Holistic Nutritionist and an Intuitive Counsellor, and the founder of Liberated Living in Hamilton, Ontario where she specializes in helping people to overcome addictions, trauma, negative recurrent patterns, depression and anxiety. Over the years, Susan has helped thousands of men and women to transform emotional pain, elevate health, cultivate conscious relationships and connect to the divinity within and without.

In this episode, Susan and I open up about some of the experiences in our lives that put us on the not-always-pleasant paths that we have found ourselves on. We talk about childhood trauma, feelings of self-worth (or lack thereof), the traps of success, why many therapists are too shallow (and that's a good thing) and embracing our inner bitch.

This episode gets vulnerable very quickly so there are a number of stretches of silence and some sniffles to choke back some tears. What can I say? No one ever said Evolving is easy. Or pretty.

But it's the first of a few episodes that will feature Susan as I will continue to work with her over the coming weeks and months to go deeper, both for physical health as well as emotional health.

If you want to learn more about Susan's work, check out www.liberatedliving.ca or join her private Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/561484324447592.

4:03 - Susan's shares about her past and alcoholism.

11:19 - Susan shares about her experiences with therapy and AA.

15:32 - overcompensating and a discussion about orthorexia.

16:35 - the quest for success.

23:16 - manifestation is now a thing.

26:45 - a conversation on doing vs. being.

33:34 - the more woo, the better.

34:16 - the spiritual journey is not for wusses.

38:33 - a conversation about divorce.

40:08 - from zero to one and back to zero again.

43:06 - the biggest issue in our culture.

44:57 - a conversation about heartbreak.

49:17 - Ronan's first spiritual realization.

53:41 - this sh*t is bananas.

59:24 - compassion as betrayal.

1:06:31 - anger as an act of self-worth.

1:09:14 - the law of attraction.

Father's Day is a great day to celebrate and honour all of the fathers out there. But it's also a good day to reflect on what it is to be a father and a man in our society. As much as "it's a man's world," men suffer the effects of chauvinism too and if we want to break the cycle of it, it starts (in part) with dads.

Happy Father's Day everyone!

Jere Simpson is an entrepreneur with a beautiful rags-to-riches story. He's known for his prophetic vision in tech, having built landmark companies in SaaS, mobile and cybersecurity and worked with the CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon. He's been recognized by Forbes Magazine as "one of the top minds in tech" and by Entrepreneur as "one of the best entrepreneurs in the world". Now he's turning his sights on AI with his company AtlasUP.

In this conversation, we dive deep into AI, what we can expect from it, how we change our attitudes toward it and work to ensure it doesn't become an apocalyptic nightmare. And we stumble upon two of the most terrifying conclusions about artificial intelligence I've ever considered. But we end on a very optimistic note about how to make this a beautiful life.

28:00 - deep wisdom from Alan Shore (James Spader) that leads to the scariest realization I've had about AI.

32:00 - a surprisingly thoughtful insight from an AI model.

35:00 - post-scarcity world and the age of abundance.

38:00 - marketing and deception

41:00 - the 6 people who can end everything

45:00 - Sam Altman, Elon Musk and politicians

49:00 - if we can't figure shit out over psychedelics, how are we going to do it over AI?

53:00 - the magic of human machinery

Do you remember the first time you truly felt alive?

While we wait for some of the first interview episodes to be finalized I thought I'd start by sharing some short reflection pieces and the first one I'm sharing is on this very question.

The first time you feel truly, emphatically alive is usually a moment in your adolescence, sometimes called The Eternal Youth. It's one of 7 Faces of the Soul that all humans go through as part of the experience of being human.

This is the story of my first feeling of The Eternal Youth.