A POWERFUL Story of Overcoming Addiction, PTSD, & Bi-Polar Disorder | Cory Richards x Rich Roll

[Music] it is so profound that we wake up in the morning that is miraculous the ordinary is extraordinary just the fact that we're sitting here I am that's all I really know Cory Richard's life has borne witness to the color of everything an app title for his recently released Memoir which happens to be in my humble opinion among the very best books I have read this year most know Corey as a worldclass high altitude climber and National Geographic photographer and adventurer of the Year Cory successfully summited Everest without oxygen and was the first American to

scale an 8,000 M peak in Winter an expedition in which he survived a death defying Avalanche his epic self-portrait of which taken in the immediate aftermath graced the cover of National Geographic Magazine's 125th Edition but Cory's most staring feet isn't scaling treacherous mountains it's surfing the Peaks and The Valleys of his turbulent unquiet mind so the photograph that you're talking about feels as if I'm looking at myself asking for something but I didn't know what it was diagnosed with bipolar disorder Cory's story is about Madness and living madly to escape Madness from itinerate youth to

Salvation in art and the outdoors it's a journey from hopelessness and Desperation to moments of Peace the occasional flirtation with Transcendence and the color of everything in between we are mechanisms of the stories we tell and what if that story isn't [ __ ] true what if I've been telling the wrong Story the whole [ __ ] time and what is the true story um [Music] today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show possible welcome thanks for having me you're among friends here thank you so much uh I really

appreciate you coming here as I mentioned to you before the podcast started started I was profoundly impacted by your book uh which we're going to talk about today I think it's a remarkable work of art and Candor in service to a greater issue that is urgent in our times and I just wanted to recognize you for that it really is a magnificent book that you've written thanks yeah and I want to just say first before we even get into any of it that I see you I feel like I see you and in the process

of seeing you I feel seen in the reading of your book that that is the and I it's you know I think I started writing it for me and you're familiar with this process but the biggest gift that I've gotten was when people say I feel so seen in it and to me that's there's no greater Accolade that I could ask for coming out of it so thanks for voicing that yeah it's a it's exercise or a demonstration of the universality in the specific because as they say in in AA meetings the facts of your

experience are very different than mine but it's the interior emotionality that I relate to I'm not bipolar I haven't scaled 8,000 meter Peaks like the things that you have done and your childhood and your upringing all very different from mine but the openness and the humanity and en courage and the vulnerability and the honesty that you brought to every single page made me able to deeply relate to you as a human being and and to your story and there is something you know beautifully Universal in in what you're expressing thank you but also like I

think that is also one of the things that you do is really well is you make the extraordinary ordinary and when you make the ordinary extraordinary that's when everybody comes together right because the ordinary is extraordinary just the fact that we're sitting here if you're paying attention and you're noticing you can slow down enough right yeah in La that's a chall on the yeah uh you know and as you kind of you know recursively reflect upon over the course of the book like wherever you go there you are it doesn't matter if you're in LA

or in Nepal like you're bringing your brain with you yeah you know you can't get it out of your head so this conversation might be a little bit different from some of the other ones that I've done like I I kind of purposely avoided doing a big research Deep dive and opening up a million tabs and reading all this stuff about you like I just read your book and I've sort of been marinating in that and I kind of want to just be present with you and and see what comes up but I do want

to read you just some notes that I took on my like just on my Note app as I was as I was going through the book um and if I was to like give you a blur or or a review Maybe it would sound something like this so I'm just going to read it to you all right so this book like these are just bullet points that I made but I felt like your book is is like this postmodern sidartha story it's it's very much a hero's journey but it also has the drapings of a

a mental health Treatise like interwoven throughout you're continually going back to um you know research and studies about mental health and healing protocols and your personal experience kind of layered in with you know what you've learned in all the reading and the practitioners that you've spent time with and the message also goes something like this sex drugs rock and roll and neither giant mountains nor Great Adventures are a match for the Cravings of a Hungry Ghost or the insanity reaped by trauma unhealed because you simply cannot outrun or out climb the unquiet mind it must

be reckoned with and because in acute mental health disorder isn't some cute puppy dog thing or cause it's instead a [ __ ] beast that left unhealed leads only three places insanity institutionalization or death it's also about identity and delusion and denial and death and Summits and high highs and low lows and adventure and confusion and Clarity all these stories told with profound honesty and vulnerability which gives the reader us permission to talk about deeper [ __ ] to Grapple with what lurks in the dark as you show us a path to Hope and growth

and light and love and healing and wholeness I wish I had you to write the blur yeah we'll just erase the other ones and just be like a tretis by R yeah yeah no thank you so much does that capture it is there anything you would push back on no I think I think that's it I mean I think everything you said it's it's it was meant to be about mental health it was always it was never meant to be about Everest or climbing or I had to wrestle with the publisher to make it more

real and actually this all initially came from when I was still working for National Geographic they they were like hey we want you to write a memoir and we want you to write a we'll get a Ghost Rider and all this stuff and and I met the Ghost Rider and his name is Matthew clam brilliant writer and that kind of fell off the table for a number of different reasons and then I sent him some chapters a few years later and he's like there's no way I'm writing this you know your voice is so specific

and unique there's no way anyone else is going to capture that or complement that this had to be you and you alone with reading it too they're like who do you want to read it and I was like nobody can read this for the audio book it has to be in the same way that read yours you know but I had to lobby for that they were like oh we have other people for that I was like what yeah how how could you let somebody read something that's so deeply personal you know we have the

gift of voices that that aren't grading at least hopefully but yeah I just couldn't imagine somebody talking about my childhood reading my childhood out loud that wasn't me the book defies what might be expectations held by somebody who who who doesn't know your story well or you know sees this image on the cover of you know a beautiful mountain and conjures you know an expectation that this is going to be a John crack hour type Adventure novel and maybe that's what random house or your editors were were looking for the hero's journey Without You Know

The Dark Knight of the Soul you know so fully so fully painted perhaps it's fine you've got low lows we need a 3X structure here but like does the low low have to be that low or that honest at times they were like do I you know and i' I've heard this also people are like I feel like I shouldn't be in this room with you you know like I'm looking at something that is so reserved for most people so locked away that I it's almost uncomfortable but I felt really strongly that those low lows

are what actually and the high Highs are what actually make it relatable in some ways it's what offers that pathway to connection mhm when somebody's willing to say this is how bad it was without making it a victimhood story mhm yeah it's not a victimhood story it could easily it could easily Veer into that if you're not careful but you you definitely crafted it in a way where you don't walk away with that sensibility at all like there's an ownership and a responsibility that you're that you're taking that makes me happy to hear because again

like I and I think I even say it towards the end I think I did start writing it from a place of victimhood mhm in fact I know I did because I had rehearsed the story in my head enough that even though I could say I'm not I'm not a victim the actual truth of it I still very much did think of myself how did you Traverse that and get to a greater sense of clarity you said something you know it's it's the what you can't start with the what you have to start with the

why and then you have to question the why from the inside right and and I always refer to that as the where and I think over the writing of it I started like where am I like truly where am I and so there was a deconstruction that took place over the process where I started to get more and more and more honest about my contributions how I had fed into things how I manipulated the world around me to either deal with pain to get what I wanted and it was just if there's one thing there

was it was and I'm not trying to celebrate myself here it was just a willingness in fact it was really really not comfortable but it was a willingness and it's sort of an insistence a self- insistence that if it didn't feel authentic I took it out or I changed it mhm and there were moments where I was like you know I I wrote something about my brother and my mom she read a version of it and she's like is that true you know and I looked at her and I was like it's not it's your

preferred version of the truth as opposed to the objective reality yeah or as close to the objective reality you can get uhhuh we should probably contextualize this a little bit for people who have no idea who you are right I don't quite know how to do that other than to take us back to the beginning but maybe you can you know paint paint a picture or produce a portrait that will allow people to feel grounded in who you are and what your story is sure so I think top level top tier you start with okay

these are the things that people know so I was a I photographed for National Geographic magazine for about 12 years and I worked concurrently as a professional athlete focusing primarily on climbing and high mountain mountaineering and alpinism so Himalayan climbing now we'll back up I was born in Salt Lake City I grew up in the mountains I started skiing when I was two climbing when I was five my parents met at Alta where my dad you know worked for 30 years on the ski patrol my brother then went on to work there for about 20

years so we have a 50-year family history there and we were so we were brought up in the mountains um I was not good at team sports or Ball Sports and we probably not with coaches either teachers or any there's a big Authority thing here huge thing and so my mom took me to see a psychologist when I was one which you can start to plant the seed of this Narrative of mental health complications or even the story of Brokenness right there and I was a gifted kid I um I went to high school two

years early and I was getting straight A's and during this time period there was a sort of a proliferation of violence between my brother and I that then became abusive that I fed into uh in in many ways and we can get into that um and so 2 years after going into high school when I was 12 I had ended up dropping out and I was put in a psychiatric unit because it was clear by this point that I was definitely had clinical depression um and there was some anxiety and so basically we got to

a a bottom point where I ended up in the Primary Children's Hospital psychiatric unit how old were you at that time I was 14 at that time I think and um 13 or 14 I'd been on Prozac for a year and it was there that that then that was sort of carded off to an 8mon inpatient outpatient rehab facility for for Wayward teens basically called lifeline and it was based on the 12 steps and bear in mind this is in Salt Lake City so there was a heavy Mormon bent to this or at least an

an undertone of it and I ran away three times and on the last time my parents sort of hands up were like okay you know I'm 15 by now and so I ended up on the street I really used the word homeless carefully because while I had no place to live my squatting days were limited my time in parks and without anything was they were very limited but so I was on the street for lack of a better term and yeah and then and then it was through in um that I sort of started to

to find myself again but that took several years yeah yeah yeah there's this idea that you reconnecting with the mountains and nature and the outdoors becomes this incredible Salve to this confusing pain that was driving you in Wayward directions but the idea that basically at 13 you're out of the house and you're bouncing around in institutions and running away and out of school and you know like it isane you know that you like even survived that and landed in some place of normality and it's interesting that that you know these experiences that you had as

such a young person with your dad teaching you how to climb and and these like basically it sounded like every weekend you're in the car and you're going to the mountains and this is what we're doing you kind of rediscovering that becomes this incredibly healing thing that that takes you back to yourself on some level and then ultimately much later on in your life becomes its own trap well yeah and I think it was also you know you've talked a lot about sort of that feeling of being on the outside looking in and certainly as

there was more and more violence in the home there was a sense of not belonging it was nobody's fault right trauma is often what you don't experience as much as what you do and so while there's this violence taking place I'm thinking to myself why am I not being protected that's this internal story so there's this story of not mattering that starts to sort of Bubble Up and climbing in the outdoors at least initially gave me a place where there was a sense of belonging because it it it stood outside of social demands or anything

I just belonged you know it's like that thing where you're in nature and you boil it down you are nature you are an ape you you belong and so it gave me a sense of belonging when I didn't have any prior to that though on the idea of of trauma often being something that's absent as much as something that occurs to you clearly you had emotional needs that went unmet right and you're you're kind of General about like you say others violence there's dysfunction in the household but you're not you're not casting anyone as the

villain you're pretty vague about whatever your conflict was with your brother yeah and you know your parents Behavior it's Etc other than to say there's dysfunction here and you develop because you're not having a certain emotional need being met that makes you feel safe and loved you're seeking attention you're seeking that notion that idea of feeling like you matter and the only way to do that at that time was to fight and create chaos because attention is the equivalent of love and that was the best that you could you could hope for at that time

well that's the best that any of us knew and and I'm making some assumptions here because I'm not a clinician I'm not a psychologist I'm not a Psy like I I don't have those those letters behind my name so I'm making some assumptions and I and I admit to that in the book that I don't I'm trying to connect the dots the best I can but for whatever reason it could be postpartum depression uh that my mom suffered through there were insecure attachments and so both my brother and I found mechanisms by which we could

get the attention that we so badly craved even though my parents were doing everything they knew how to do right yeah I mean your mom is like taking you to therap like she's trying to solve this problem she's like out of a place of Love she's like how do I help this kid I don't have the tools to like manage what the hell is going on it's and that's the thing they were doing everything they knew how to do so that's why there's no blame there's no that like I see it clearly and there's no

blame towards my brother either it's just that when emotional needs are met we find wildly effective coping mechanisms and adaptations to get those needs met so he learned that if he picked a fight then he got attention and I learned that if I picked a fight I actually became the victim cuz he would beat the [ __ ] out of me uhhuh and so you get the sympathy I get the sympathy and he gets the ey and how [ __ ] up is that you know so but early on especially through the teenage years and

I think for a long time it was like oh my brother did this to me instead of really taking full accountability of like yes and like it was still my coping mechanism too so I became an agent of chaos and to use your words acting out in order to get that attention those needs met and yet there's also a lot of Beauty in that there's an undercurrent of creativity and um curiosity that I think is it was that was really beautiful there's still this self-preservation kind of Gene inside of you though cuz when you're you

you can call it homeless you can call it whatever you want you're bouncing around you're couch surfing you're kind of blowing in the wind out there as this young kid but you still kind of make sure that you're eating and you get these kind of odd jobs here and there was there a specific moment where you kind of locked in on getting back out into nature and did that math in your mind like oh this is this is what I've been looking for this is what is going to lead me out of the you know

morass of my mind when you were still in that kind of young State I don't I want to say yes I want to say that I was that intelligent I think it you know it was a more subtle intelligence that led me back to it the truth is there was no one defining moment and I think there often isn't I just think there was enough darkness that there was sort of a grasping for anything and certainly after I got put back in in the hospital after I had sort of run away from from this rehab

and 2 years later all of a sudden I'm back in the in the psychiatric hospital and they recommend we're sitting in this therapist office classic you know therapist office there's tissue boxes and snot stains on the chairs you know all this stuff you talk about the smell and the you know the fluorescent lighting and like all the all the kind of institutional trappings of those places like it's the worst man so oh this is where you go to get better and it's like the worst environment least conducive to that it's the least conducive environment to

Healing I've ever been in and and you know we're in this family sort of therapy session and you know I'm 17 now and the therapists go well there's this really great program called Lifeline that we think your your son should go to my parents just they're like did you read the [ __ ] file like this kid has been there you had been doing that was the best advice they could come up with that was the best advice that was the best advice they had so it sort of hints at like some of the stuff

that's sort of broken in the institutional psychology system that we live in but but then what happened was I I sort of moved well not sort of I moved to Seattle and I became deeply Christian for a moment yeah and that's actually surprising yeah well I needed a place to belong right I felt completely out of who was I I didn't matter nobody cared my parents were trying but I I mean they did care obviously but that was my interpretation and so this moment of spiritual what would I call it there was like this this

spiritual gravity that pulled me in to this Christian Community and in that in that moment that was when in that moment of calm I think that's when I really started to be curious about the outdoors again H and had you been forly diagnosed up to that point yeah when I was in Lifeline the yeah when I was in Lifeline they diagnosed me as bipolar uhhuh I think I was 14 or 15 when I got that label and it was so heavily medicated that I just remember I you know I would sleep under the the table

any any chance I could get you know when we do school I had no interest in school at this point I would literally just curl up under the table and again there's at some point there's nothing a therapist can do were you on a battery of different medications to try to figure out what was going to work and what wasn't working well we went through paxel you know Zoloft all of the ssris that were out at the time and you know they all had some effect but basically we landed on depote valproic acid and bupropion

or Wellbutrin and I stayed on those really without monitoring for 26 years MH but initially the doses were so high that you know I put on a lot of weight we weren't getting exercise we weren't getting sun again these healing environments that are questionable especially in the troubled teen industry that they're healing anything if not causing far more trauma but again it's we're doing the best we can and so I was just I was kind of drugged out for a little while m what inspired the move to Seattle was there not an opportunity to kind

of move back home or had that card just been played out at that point I think that card had been played out we had tried that after Lifeline I had been in this sort of state of semi homelessness I got taken in by a family uh family friends in McCall Idaho and I turned 16 I took my GED and I moved back home and we tried we tried but it just didn't didn't work and thankfully my parents had been kind enough because I I was working they got me a car it was this old Subaru

1989 Subaru or something so I had was mobile and uh and then I got fired from like my third job I was working at Patagonia and they're like you're just flirting with with girls you know you're just coming in and getting paid to flirt you're fired and so I had this christop from a candless moment I'm going to drive to Alaska and I ended up with my aunt and uncle for a short time I left I drove around again I got super depressed couldn't find another job and that's when I ended up back in the

hospital the second time and and that was when my parents finally it was like this Revelation they're like what do you need what do you what do you need not necessarily what do you want but it was this moment of feeling for the first time like somebody had considered what I actually thought I might need and I said I want to go back to Seattle and so I ended up with my un uncle there that's what drove me there that's what got me there and that's where the outdoors starts to really kick in for you

right cuz we're around Mountain R near and I got a job at REI and um my uncle started saving he was like you I'm going to take half of every paycheck yeah and I was like all right yeah yeah for rent for food little did I know he was H holding it away and then he said I'm going to give it back to you if you choose an experience to go do that's an Incredible Gift that he gave you I mean that is an inflection point in your life huge huge it was one of the

most formative moments of my life and I cannot give my aunt and uncle enough credit for a taking in a 17-year-old when they already have three kids right Young children maybe they just wanted me as a babysitter a living babysitter which is fine yeah but you're you're erratic you're like you're not like I'm not a stable human yeah you're not at the top of the list you know for babysitting at that time this is a incredible Act of generosity huge Act of generosity and love and and that was the moment of Christianity that was the

moment of getting three jobs and so there's all this this huge gift that they give and then okay we're going to give this money back what do you want to do you know my dad had this group of climbing partners that were all late 50s at this point but I kind of came up with a hair brained idea that maybe they'd want to go into the Alaska range into the Ruth Gorge and unsurprisingly now in hindsight they all said yes and they were like of course let's do that and so we flew in and I

asked my mom to borrow a camera mhm and she let me [Music] I am a total gear head and I've learned that people often Overlook apparel but what you wear isn't just clothes it is without a doubt technology that can make or break a performance and I can tell you that on is innovating in this space like no other with nextg premium fabrics and just this heighten level of sophistication and intentionality previously unheard of that puts them just miles beyond the competition I've been rocking on high performance running apparel all super lightweight tailored fit built

to move and just gorgeous to get you out and get it done in Fleet foot Comfort no matter the weather I'm super proud to be a brand partner with this impressive team truly Swiss innovation at its finest to get you moving an is offering an exclusive 10% discount to redeem head over to on.com rroll and sign up for on a [Music] news and that's the beginning of the photography part of the story yeah it's so interesting looking at all the things that you've done and the many ways in which you've been celebrated for your accomplishments

and your work U but when you kind of zero down on you know this young kid it's not looking good you know what I mean like it's it's not it's not set up for succcess here like it's shocking that you crawled your way out and made your way into the world in the way that you did because this appears to be a relatively you know kind of deadend situation and I think people look at you and they see your face on the cover of National Geographic and they see the you know Adventurer of the year

and these Peaks that you've climbed and these incredibly stunning photographs that you've taken many of which are in this amazing newbook bipolar which we're going to talk about and it's easy to just kind of create a mental framework of where you came from and who you are and you know I'm aware of some of the criticism around your book like you will be repaid for your vulnerability with criticism in the form of self-indulgence or right because you're a handsome guy too which makes you a Target um that you're just privileged or something like that and

your story is like you don't have to read very many pages into your book to realize that this is not a story of privilege in any way shape or form like it's shocking that you made anything of yourself well again thank you I'm going to sit with that thank you I have a really hard time still just taking that on I really do two things males who drop out of high school before 15 or before have some ungodly chance of dying right they're just the death rate they're the young death rate for people who pursue

that path is incredibly high and so I am very very lucky I'm also very lucky that uh I was born a white male middle class in America there's absolutely no argument against that so when we talk about privilege I acknowledge that what I will stop and say and try to be very clear about is privilege in terms of mental health is access and resources but Mental Health itself does not give a [ __ ] what color or gender you are that does not equate it does matter potentially your socioeconomic background and status because in poverty

there is more abuse and violence and in more abuse and violence there's more trauma which begets more but to think that we could lay this story off at the feat of privilege that I could do what ended up happening because I was a white man is just not true that's just not what the numbers say did I have a leg up because of the access to to care you bet there's no argument there but when we have the conversation about mental health to start throwing around the word privilege is quite frankly just uninformed does that

make sense yeah no I understand that I think that that I think that was well said in hearing you say that I I think privilege is maybe the wrong word um to use to you know properly understand this but yeah like let's acknowledge you know there there is privilege at play here but it doesn't tell the full story yeah and I don't hear you saying that I don't see hear you having that criticism I just think that's a because it is easy to be like cool cold white guy great story you know cool man like

you went to the mountain handsome guy with cool tattoos right exactly but that's the problem FL flirts with girls at the Patagonian store you know right rough dude yeah rough your life has been so rough and you just need to peel back one layer but I think that's a reminder too for it can be a reminder for all of us that compassion in its fullness is omnidirectional it's very easy to extend compassion to people who we actually think are somehow below us or have it harder than us that's that's easy extending compassion towards people who

have a different situation or we might View as above us whether that's economically racially gender-wise but extending that same compassion is incredibly difficult but that's what real compassion is and it's dropping the idea that because you look a certain way that you don't have deep deep deep internal struggles in fact often times you might have more we're not prone to be compassionate about people who have more are more hands all those things right in fact we make a sport of trying to take them down Peg or or judging them for sure so the camera is

in your hands the other story that needs to kind of be stripped back is perhaps a false notion that you took a photograph and then like just your life opened up to you yeah it was amazing in the book like how many thousands of photographs you took and and this you know kind of persistent submitting to all the magazines and all that kind of stuff even once you figur it out like oh like this and I think maybe I'm good you're just submitting all the time and it's just nothing but rejection forever it's all reject

it's so funny I remember sitting with my dad and I was like I think I want to I think I want to pursue photography and he was just kind of silent and he's like he didn't say it's a bad idea he just said I think that's a that's a really big uphill battle and my dad is a man of few words in beautiful words usually he but he he chooses his words carefully and I think that again like you point out there's this idea that yeah I started taking pictures and I was immediately good at

it no there were thousands tens of thousands of pictures that were taken before anything got noticed or anything got published it was an experience of rejection at first and that was challenging that was really really challenging to just be rejected but but you know there's a story where I'm submitting them and um I was submitting them to Patagonia they were one of my first clients and all of the slides had this like little the the date and time burned into that's a little you knew That's how little I knew like those old like Kodak instatic

kids yeah and the and the photo editor Jane sver she's like yeah you can turn that feature off you get you don't have to do that she was kind about it though she was kind yeah and she said keep submitting so you have this opening like oh well now I know somebody there and they said keep submitting like that's I need yeah it's like you get that taste and we've all had that experience where something inside of us whether we're learning something new we're reading a book we're we're experiencing something and there's this click where

it where it it just it's something that happens in your brain is so ineffable and it's this moment where you go oh that's it and you and so that little invitation Keep It Coming Keep It Coming there's an invitation and you go I'm going to do this mhm and sometimes it's a really bad decision and sometimes it takes years before there's any Kickback or feedback or success in it and it took years yeah meanwhile you go to solsburg you go and study photography like in Europe well so I had when I was Christian I was

going to be a youth pastor uhhuh and I went to this I think it was called Simpson College in read in California and I did the whole campus tour and I was so fired up about Jesus at the time like I mean that was my life you know and and I was like well I've had this I was perfecting my narrative at the time I have this really tortured past so who better to be a youth pastor right I can lead these Wayward teens towards Jesus nothing wrong with Christianity there's you know of course we

can have our critiques but I actually hold a very high value around it because it changed my life but something about that choice felt flawed and instead I wrote but I I had terrible SAT score [Music] you know I had a GED and so I just I basically wrote like a short essay to a tiny school in Billings Montana called Rocky Mountain College and um and you know basically begged for admission and I was there for about a year and a half and then I begged to to leave and so I found this study abroad

program in salsburg yeah but this is the self-preservation thing right despite the fact that you're kind of out on a limb like you're trying to take care of business like you realize like I need to go to school you know I've got a GED what's available to me and you're you're making it happen trying really really hard and with a lot of failure and a lot of ups and downs you know because then now there's this idea that now stuff's sorting itself out and it kind of was it kind of was cuz now I had

climbing I had these anchors I had Faith you know so and and I could kind of keep a job so yes things were sorting themselves out and where's Mom and Dad and and bro at this point so my brother and I hadn't spoke we didn't speak for years there was one incident where right before I went into the hospital it was what precipitated me going into the hospital the second time was you know we got in a allout brawl on the front line and um so we kind of swore each other off for for a

long for a lot of years actually and um and Mom and Dad are look they're just they're just [ __ ] thrilled that I want to go to school at all so they're doing anything that they're like thank God this child is not like a full-blown addict on the street we have a Lifeline so we're going to give we're going to we're going to try to provide as much opportunity as we can M but they also knew that because I was deeply deeply volatile it was not going to be a smooth path you know yeah

yeah and on top of the volatility where are you at during this time with respect to drugs and alcohol I mean there's more than dabbling that's going on when you're a kid bouncing around and there's some you know risky sexual behavior there's all kinds of you know things that accompany the the sort of semi homeless runaway teenager I mean there were a lot of things I think chapter 8 is one of my if I can call it a favorite chapter but it you know it kind of talks about a very dark experience when I'm on

the run and end up squatting in this house and what unfolds I try to Handle With Care and and Grace but it you know in hindsight I think it really affected me and it was a sexual experience that it's incredibly raw and vulnerable yeah I mean you told that story it was rough and also I I land somewhere in the middle with it you know and you signed up for it and you participated in it willingly willingly and it would be really easy to look back and be like well this terrible thing happened to me

but again it's like no I I was present I showed up and I would I don't want to go back and sort of give away my agency but to your point there was you know hypersexuality um as it relates to bipolar 2 and even ADHD well in bipolar is really really common especially when there's sort of a core belief of a value deficit and because sex and sexuality is a sort of an it's it's like intimacy light it can be intimacy full-blown in its in its healthiest Expressions but it's it's kind of trying to matter

and be valued and be desired and so sexuality was one that wasn't just dabbling I went full on into that at a very young age um and it's continued throughout my whole life to be a you know if we talk about primary addiction or addictions later on you know like that I would say has been always my primary addiction drugs and alcohol I loved being around them and I did quite a bit I used quite a bit but I wasn't there was again there was a self-preservation there was a governor that was inside because I

was very very scared of them and partly because I'd been told that because my brain was essentially fragile that if I did these things that I would inevitably go crazy like into pure psychosis and and that was likely anyway so I was horrified of going too far with them but I really wanted to be a part of them because I saw the community I saw Community around them like it was cool my sense also is that this is an outgrowth of the inner kind of Chaos Agent and uh although drugs and alcohol were problematic at

times it wasn't your primary malfunction no no primary malfunction what's that uh number five uh what was that that movie number five alive you know the anyway my primary malfunction if I had one was um a misunderstood how do I even want to say that was there a primary malfunction I dude I was just [ __ ] up I I I don't even know how to say it you well help me understand the lived experience of being bipolar I mean when I grew up it was called being a manic depressive and I have borne witness

to people in you know full-blown Bic States I've been around it scary experience but I can't say that I fully understand what it feels like and when you talk about like hypomania I have some relationship with depression but not the depths to which you've experienced it but I'm not sure I know really what hypomania is or you know walk us through what it feels like and what it is so what it is there's basically two levels this again this is the way I understand it there's Mania and there's hypo Mania Mania is fullblown uh manic

expression I.E you're blowing through bank accounts you are selling houses you're basically in a state of psychosis and it can go so far that you stop making sense at all you're going so fast you can feel a deep connection to to everything you are seeing auras you are seeing all sorts of things now you look at this from a shamanistic perspective maybe this is what people were experiencing all the time and maybe in a container it's not always totally bad who knows in the mental health space Mania is dangerous right because you are not in

control of your faculties hypomania is different it sits right below that where you get all of the benefits without the immediate danger so when you're cycling up you'll be very very social very effective you don't need a lot of sleep you can take on information wildly effectively it can be very very pleasant sounds [ __ ] awesome yeah you know it's like euphoric it is euphoric and Mania can feel euphoric too it's like did you see the movie Limitless yes okay with Bradley Cooper that's hypomania like you cannot be stop you're dialed in you're dialed

in if it tips into mania the the wheels start to go off but it doesn't even have to do that the wheels will come off at hypomania anyway there's an inevitable crash it will come because you're exhausting all of your nervous systems to try to regulate and how long does that state last for it depends I mean it's it's it's person to person but it doesn't Mania tends not to last too long because you're you're spinning off so much energy hypomania can last a little longer because you again you're sustaining some but as soon as

you start to like just not sleep at all you're staying up for days on end you're you're nearing the end right so like week 10 days you're talking about like that's that's a long time it's a long time and I honestly I would be I would be dishonest if I said I knew the exact number I just don't know how long it can last yeah I don't know always followed by it precipitates this crash and you go into a dark hole of depression it's it's necessary your body's trying to regenerate and all of your serotonin

and dopamine they've been completely wiped out so it's similar to what happens when people take too much something like MDMA that you know suicide Monday kind of feeling is when you're just depleted and and that can go into you know suicidal depression what I experienced it as you know when I was 13 and I was sitting there and I was like what is going on I couldn't sleep I mean it was Moody but I I was an insomniac highly highly irritable very distractable and then one night I was in The Family Den and and it

was just as if my brain sped up so fast that I couldn't make sense of anything like the thoughts were coming so quickly that it's like trying to catch fragments you know a thought becomes a sentence becomes a word becomes letters to the point where if you almost like you're in The Matrix and you're just watching letters fly by and it's so disorienting for me and then it was these flashes I'd closed my eyes and it was like this you know it was loud but there's no sound there's it's so disorienting to the point where

I just started and then I was just weeping I was just weeping and I'm standing in in our family's Den basically and I was so horrified cuz I just didn't know I didn't know and at the same time that's this tip over into where you start to have really really low depression because then the point is now you're having sort of what I always experienced was more mixed episodes where once it gets to that point you're so you're also getting depressed right and then it was like I just want to [ __ ] die and

how long would those episodes go for in your case I mean they could happen intermittently throughout you know the day where I would just have to I didn't know was I was kind of like and then but it would take you know a week or two weeks but it was all Al during those times that I'm like completely ditching school and going and doing asset in the park with sort of like this Carefree like I don't you know like zero future forecasting zero that's why people blow through whole bank accounts because they just lose the

capacity to to understand where is this going you know what do the latest science tell us or not tell us about what brings this on cuz it's seems like it visits from time to time like in an unmedicated state but I don't know that I understand if anyone understands like is there are there things that that you can identify where you're like oh we're headed in that direction and this is going to happen or does it just happen I found that once I've started to um really be more embodied and paying attention to what my

body is doing I'm aware I'm hyper aware of oh my thoughts seem fast right now that's curious okay then that's my that's my cue to be like how am I sleeping what's my sleep doing once I start to notice a couple things stacking up I don't want to eat my thoughts are a little elevated and I don't want to sleep or I don't need to sleep or I can't sleep that to me is an indication that I'm cycling up and usually what precipitates that is a period of high stress and unregimented living M right where

I'm off a routine I'm not exercising time is being eaten in all sorts of different directions the demands are high and so you in some ways it's almost like my body's reaction to step into the role that it needs to but then you know if I'm being mindful that's when I'm like oh [ __ ] things are uh this could go sideways but it's taken it took me into my late 30s I knew I carried this diagnosis from the time I was 14 but it wasn't until my late 30s that I really started started taking

it very seriously and are you on a medication now that that works for you yeah I take lamotrin which is one of liol is the is the brand name it's one of the most effective um low impact High efficacy bipolar management medications that there are and I went through periods where I was like [ __ ] this you know like in fact is it that thing where you're like I just feel DED out I want to get off the medication or you feel so good that you're like I don't need this anymore MH and that

can be that can be another indication of cycling up where you're like I don't need this I think we are a heavily overmedicated country I think we're a heavily overmedicated world I think some of the things you've talked about we try to address the symptoms rather than the root cause and I'm an advocate when and where it it really has been you know there's been some curiosity about does this help you know and so it's a yes and for me sure sure back to the photography yeah so so you know tiptoe me up to your

first sort of breakthrough with this where it occurred to you like oh maybe I can do this this is working for me well I kept climbing and I kept so after the the um I was working at a gear store at this point after the Alaska trip before I went to salsburg I went back to Al the next summer I saved up and climbed in Al and then I went straight to Peru and climbed in Peru and I was just funding these with you know you're living on scraps you know how it is you're living

out of a truck and I had this this folder of images so when I went to salsburg and I met Andrew Phelps he looked at him and he's like these are you know there's something here I don't know what he really saw but um he encouraged me and then it was this that summer I ended up living in basically a broom closet in Shaman and I was climbing with two guys ston Hogan and Jamie striken on the North Face of the ug Med and I took a picture and I knew that picture I knew I

had done something and that was the first picture that ever got published but that was in 200 I think it was 2004 MH that I had my first published image so I've been taking pictures for 5 years before I had one image published the guy in salsburg though this is another inflection point huge he becomes sort of a mentor he helps you understand the difference between a good picture a great picture and a Transcendent picture yeah he gives you technique and form but in sort of an off-handed way he just says you should keep doing

this it was sort of a throwaway comment but it's again sort of like the woman at Patagonia it was like just enough encouragement to keep you locked in just enough right but it's like with some of your coaches right when you expect them to do something a big gesture often times it's the more subtle gesture that has the most impact have you like stayed in communication with him like did he oh so he has seen everything that you've done we talked to we talked the other day yeah cool yeah he's um you know cuz when

I was 20 he was like 33 34 he felt miles older than me and now I realize you know we're basically essentially in the same age demographic now and so we yeah we communicate we talk a lot about we don't really talk about photography anymore I was with him the other day like like a couple months ago and I'm sitting there and I realized was sitting at dinner with him in salsburg and [Music] um I looked around and I realized oh [ __ ] it didn't even occur to me to bring a camera on this

trip not that I thought about it and I left it behind it didn't even occur to me to bring it and that was well I mean well I'm sure we'll get to that point but it was so interesting to be sitting because you're just so present in your experience right you don't want to have any anything in between you and experiencing the presence of the moment right you talk about like you can confuse taking photographs for being present in a particular moment but in truth it's not that it is a creative act like you're you're

participating in that moment but being fully present in lived experience is something qualitatively different well it was that moment where I was sitting with this guy who started photography I realized I didn't have a camera with me in Europe at all and I realized holy [ __ ] photography's done here's the guy that started it and it ends here too somehow you know has it though I don't know who knows you know yeah that's a story too I'm done with photography just as much as I am a photographer right yeah yeah yeah good good call

[ __ ] you right so what is the difference between a good photograph a great photograph and a Transcendent photograph how do you describe in words what makes a truly Transcendent photograph so Timeless and fantastic I mean the way I describe it is there's yeah there's four kinds there's bad photographs which are most there's good photographs which are a solid understanding of light and composition they're interesting they draw you in a little bit but that's the kind of stuff that you see on you know Hotel walls that are you know you're like oh that's a

good picture then there's great photographs which are really articulate they they show this strong understanding of composition light Serendipity moment all of these things and they're really you know you see a lot of those in photo journalism there's something about them that really draws you into a deeper emotional experience and those are I think a lot more rare because they require more educ they just you're so much more versed in lensing and how to layer things or how to capture a moment and also which photo to choose that get that you put out into the

world and then Transcendent photographs which I think are the highest calling of Photography are these ones that are [Music] so powerful that they it's almost like they punch you and and the the examples that I use in the book are like the um the Napal girl um by Nick UT you know where it's this even thinking about it this this pain of this naked Vietnamese girl running on fire on fire in horror you know or um Eddie Adams you know that's the the the judge jury executioner in Saigon where the guy's literally in the moment

of shooting a via Kong in the head and you just they have so much less to do with composition and lensing and all of it right it's just the indelible moment captured perfectly that says way more than what you're actually seeing in the image about the world Humanity what have you and I think usually those photographs have to do more with humans usually they're just there are great Wild Life photographs but there's something about for me at least where people you know what's your what's your favorite animal to photograph well humans are the wildlife photographs

are generally more Majestic or tragic but and they can be Transcendent but but it's those moments of humanity and often times it's in its worst expression that shake you you know mhm the photograph of the surfer uh from this past summer yeah uh Gabriel Medina what's I can't remember his last name but where he's you know he's levitating and his board is perfectly lined up he just looks like a Jesus likee figure I mean that's pretty epic I don't know does that fall into the category of transcendent or great it's definitely great it's absolutely great

I'm not sure that it's Transcendent we can't can we judge those in the moment it's only years later that we can make that call yeah they're more times time capsules you know like um or the the photograph of trump with the assassination I me that's a pretty indelible image yeah of our moment that says a lot absolutely and I would all politics aside that photograph is um it's powerful man it is a moment in time that will and so that could be Transcendent but again you make a good point I don't think you can judge

try we can't really know you can have an inclination um I think you know the surfer is a epic sport moment that represents sort of This Global coming together to celebrate sort of the human Triumph of sport is it Transcendent does it say anything deeper about The Human Condition I don't know yeah I don't I to me not but then again remember like it's all it's all subjective like some people are going to hate this book and that's okay right and some people are going to go oh this is really great and that's okay same

with photographs but there are some that we can agree upon um yeah like like uh the Monk on fire mhm what is your relationship to your most iconic most famous photograph which is basically a selfie it is right all the like epically you know kind of intentional photographs that you've taken where you're like you line it up perfectly and you've got the light and all of that like the most resonant and perhaps Transcendent is the one that captures you know a very unique moment in your life that I think does speak to The Human Condition

and our relationship with life and death I mean so the photograph that you're talking about comes at as well the book starts there and kind of ends there but comes back to it in the middle but it's you know it comes in Pakistan middle of winter we've just climbed this mountain called Gasher 2 and we've just been in an avalanche and I'll leave a little bit up to the imagination there but it um we were it was about an hour after the avalan a long time people like directly after the it wasn't that it wasn't

right after it was about an hour later we were walking down towards base camp and I just you know I had all this I could feel all this ice Frozen on my face and in my beard and I and the Avalanche was still very present with me and I was still very much in a State of Shock and I just I I felt the urge to turn the camera on and take a picture of myself that was the picture that was that's talk about inflection points that was when like life just changed that moment and

I have so much gratitude for it and I hate it at the same time but it's mostly gratitude but it's so emblematic of something that is so begging to be addressed in me but I didn't really know it at the time but I think maybe that's what people see is this sort of I don't want to get too poetic about it and too flowery but I look at it now and I've had experiences with it and I can talk about the circumstances and those where I'm looking at it and it feels as if I'm looking

at myself asking for something but I didn't know what it was when I first saw the image it's like oh this is a guy on the precipice of dying and he's reflecting upon his own mortality in learning about your story and reading your book now when I look at it I have a totally different experience which is I see a little boy crying for help there's a desperation and a sadness in it crystallized in this moment that very much is a before and after moment because in the wake of you sort of buried the lead

which was like you were buried in an avalanche literally like you almost did die you and your the two people you were climbing with all buried in an avalanche like very well could have died mhm in the wake of that though that brings to the surface all this stuff that you've worked so hard to compartmentalize and repress that perhaps you've convinced yourself as in the rear view because now you're this Mountaineer and you're this Adventurer and you're working for National Geographic and you're making money and people know who you are and all of that need

for validation meaning and validation it's all being met right so you're like this is this is what I've been waiting for my entire life and then you get smacked and you realize like it's not actually it that's the illusion and there is all this stuff deep down in here that is now kind of roaring up and I'm going to have to deal with it you know it took 12 years to deal with it 14 this year where I'm pausing [Music] because it's really easy for me to get wrapped into a um a rehearsed narrative here

so I want to be I don't want to do that that photograph was in the moment I think and I've talked about it a little bit I just in other interviews and the book I think I was trying to just get away from it all but I don't really know it was just it was reflexive and so to say that I knew what was happening it would be dishonest to say that it's clear to me now that I was asking for something might be an applied meaning I don't know but to to your point there

was a a little boy that was really scared really really scared not just in the moment but really scared of I think if you really want to get metaphysical about it what was coming because this was the point where I got lost under the photograph I got buried under the photograph because with it now there's all this added attention now there's real in a small container right and I say Fame with a lower case f here like Fame within a community right and for a moment we are celebrated as some of the best climbers in

the world right whether you agree with that or not is inconsequential that was the attention that we were getting so it was easy to just not pay attention to it but if as I started to understand trauma later on on in life and I and as I realized that there was actual acute PTSD which I still have a hard time giving myself permission to actually have experienced if you see it from that lens if you see it from that angle all of a sudden you see all of the childhood trauma all of the violence all

of the chaos all of it being displayed in this single image because I had learned that my mind is scary so the best way for me to not go crazy is to go do crazy [ __ ] right and I learned that I you at least I had a narrative I don't really matter so I'm going to prove to the world that I matter and here's proof that I matter and then there's all of the the violence and stuff that are like little seeds of trauma planted all through this big fertile field and then you

take an experience like an avalanche it's like just dumping water and fertilizer all over it and and that's what acute PTSD is it's just this explosion of trauma it's usually kicked off by a single event but people who have a lot of Developmental trauma are more likely to have acute PTSD right and so that moment is that where you're dumping water onto it it's literally the moment and that's what you're seeing I think hey everybody today's episode is brought to you by seed gut health I talk about it all the time on the podcast you

know it's important if you've even listened to a few of my podcasts I think I maybe devoted I don't know a dozen two dozen episodes to the microbiome you got to take care of your gut health if you want to have Optimal Health how do you do that well your nutrition your lifestyle habits sleep all of these things play into that but it's also important to find a really good Prebiotic and probiotic how do you do that well there's a lot of nonsense out there so you got to follow the science and the best evidence-based

product that I found out there is seeds ds01 daily symbiotic I've been taking it for I don't know over 3 years at this point every single day there's just a tremendous amount of science behind this product I urge you to check it out and right now it's a great time to do that because you can get 25% off your first month of seeds ds01 daily symbiotic hit the link in the description below to visit seed.com roll and use code rich roll2 get on [Music] it further disorienting is the fact that this Photograph ends up on

not only the cover of National Geographic but the the 120th 125th anniversary of the magazine so it's like a it's like a special edition of this already you know highly prestigious magazine so you being amongst this team of three you were the first and I think only American to Summit in 8,000 meter peak in winter so there's the accomplishment as a climber and then there's the accomplishment as an artist and you layer those things on top of this traumatic incident that's bringing up all this other stuff right so you are going back into the world

and and being celebrated for this and getting invited to conferences and people want to talk to you and you're on stages and you're being celebrated as an athlet and as an adventur athlete and as as an artist at the same time while you're also trying to make sense of this experience that you just had and its relationship to all this other stuff that you haven't actually dealt with like it's a time bomb dude I've never heard it described in that that term it was a time bomb it was a time bomb because then there's the

stress of all and the and the adrenaline of all the good good stuff that's happening right which is pushing those buttons of a feeling like you want to matter right like now I do matter and all these people are telling me that I matter and your dopamine is like going crazy it's going nuts cuz now you belong you're part of this special you always wanted and now you're here and now you're here you've arrived so the the idea that you'd have to actually pay attention to anything that was really internally happening is you know it's

just clouded by everything else and coupling that with then I go and get married right which was it's own added stress and I thought it was what I was supposed to do and all the you know she was beautiful and a yoga instructor and just a kind person and uh had all these great you know benefits and attributes so I I did that and then immediately immediately immediately the attention of it all um started to seep into my behaviors and I started to just notice like I just feel even more disconnected and that's when I

started kind of like drink more cuz [ __ ] it it's time to celebrate and then I was on the road more and that's when all of the hypersexuality stuff starts seeping back in and then I'm hiding then I'm under this mountain of Shame as this newly married guy who has all this success starting to cheat and starting to lie about it and starting to do so now there's this massive disconnect between what people are seeing and the reality of what I'm living and there's the shame that's built in between that that is just this

it's a time bomb yeah it's a powder keg it's waiting to explode and how long was that fuse like what what actually caused it to finally explode it was more like a cluster bomb right right like there were things that exploded first and then I thought I was dealing with it and then like you know the first thing to go was I mean there was just anger was so much anger there was rage that I don't even think I dealt with until really this past two years and then there was the first thing to really

come out was like the the cheating mhm yeah and that was about four years into the marriage and it was the end of the marriage and also you know if I look back if I look back at pictures I was gaining weight and I didn't drink you know you've been very open about how you drank I didn't drink quite as it wasn't like binge drinking as much it was um like Advanced medicating where I would come home from these hyper stimulating experiences climbs whatever they were assignments where I felt really I was the guy I

was the you know the guy on on set um and I come home and i' have nothing to do and so again it's time to celebrate take the gas off you know and I go out and like I'd have a beer for lunch and then I'd have or maybe two but then it's the happy hour call somebody else go out to happy hour I have a couple more you know now I've had five drinks then and then it's dinner time you know so you crack a bottle of wine or you have whatever and then you

know that's two or three more and then it's time for your for your night cap right and so by the end of the day you're having 10 or more drinks I was never highly of course I got very much blackout drunk but that was rare one of the things that I really admired you talking about that you've been open about is the DUIs and one of my greatest regrets I have very few regrets well one of my greatest regrets is driving when I was under the influence like that and the irresponsibility and sort of the

invincibility that I felt and that's something that all you can do is say you're sorry to everybody cops didn't get involved no accidents or anything like that yeah that's some decent you know yeah self-medication right you know there's the travel in the hotel rooms and the anonymity that comes with that that leads your brain to start entertaining behaviors you probably shouldn't indulge you know it's like it's a whole hole of Darkness yeah that thing right I mean you've had Johan har on here sure love that guy and I one of the things he says is

like addiction is an adaptation it's not you it's the cage you live in and then what I love he says the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety it's connection and when I look back as much as attenion as there was I was so disconnected I felt so incredibly isolated and the way to solve that isolation is through substances and sex and the hiding of that in the same way that you hide drinking becomes a loop of Shame MH and that cycle of Shame is the driving force behind continuing sure yeah because the shame is so painful

that to be numbed and especially when the outside vision is so [ __ ] different right that plays into you know this fraudulent impostor syndrome thing which makes you feel even worse like it just it just basically ratchets up and ratchets up ratchets up it gets worse and worse and worse on Johan Harry's point I always push back on him on this a little bit I feel like that idea I think there's truth in that idea that the opposite of addiction is connection but that binary I have a big problem with that like I I

feel like for people that aren't really addicts connection can be a solution to like addictive behavior but if you're like a full-blown alcoholic or addict or gambling addict you can surround yourself with people and connect with them but this is not going to disabuse you of your malfunction entirely it's like that idea he tells the story of the I've told this before on the podcast so people the the rats in the yeah like the rat Park and the cocaine and all of that and it's like well then when you put friends around them they don't

want cocaine anymore it's like well if that actually worked with human beings all you'd have to do is surround the cocaine addict with a bunch of cool people and friends and he would stop doing cocaine we all know that that's not that's not what happens but wait a minute but wait a minute I love this this is so a [ __ ] you know you hit a point in a podcast where you like you drop in like it's like this really deep like I felt it a few minutes ago where I'm like okay now like

like I love that like you know you click in but then you get into these really interesting cool points where I would argue that the strength and power of AA or na is the connection so you're surrounding yourself at that point that's your rap Park it's not surrounding yourself with cool people outside of that there's more to it I I'm just not I guess I push back on the reductive aspect of of just saying this is what it is for sure and I as you know like my whole thing here is about avoiding binary thinking

in some ways it's not as it's not so reductive it's not so simple I just like being curious about what the solve is and I think a huge piece of it is connection MH feeling connected like when I eventually started to sort this out and I started going to AA what I felt was again like I when I started going to church which of course I'm not Christian anymore I'm you know I'm one of those guys that says I'm not religious but I'm spiritual and people can gag how much ever they want but when I

started going to the going into the rooms and and participating what I felt was accepted and belonging like I felt a deep sense of belonging and I think for me at least that was the primary driver of my sobriety for a long time time and it was the most meaningful part of it I think the self-inventory is very clearly an amends and service obviously yeah there's the inventory there's the amends there's the spiritual connection I mean it's a spiritual program there's service there's these other things but you fundamentally it is community based it's about the

community so I get that aspect of it I'm not discounting it I'm just making the case for it being a little more complicated than it's way more complicated than and I would say in the same breath and I'm curious what you think I love the work that Gabor mate does where he basically traces adult dysfunction back to Childhood trauma whether it's addiction or whatever kind of you know um maladaptations you know we all make as a result of things that happen to us but I would probably push back a little bit on those who use

that in a overly reductive way to say that like well all alcoholism anybody who's an alcoholic for example it can always be rooted back to you know X Y and Z that happen to them as a kid maybe that's true I don't know is there a genetic piece is there something that gets passed down well it's not the alcoholism that gets passed down generation to generation it's the trauma and the behavior right that instills within that person the need to you know behave in that way um but I often think like is that reductive also

like like I'm not a clinician my guess is that it is reductive a little bit I think you know again we're talking about so many contributing factors and ultimately it's I think it's an interesting question but I don't think we're going to live in a trauma-free world at least not for the next 500 600 years until we start living in the age of Aquarius or whatever you want to you know like and I don't think that it actually is really all that in some ways I don't think it's all that meaningful of a question not

your question but the the the Inquisition is it all trauma based because guess what if you're [ __ ] addicted it doesn't matter it like yes you can go back and Trace to that and yes you can work on that but if you're addicted and the best way for you to say stay safe is abstinence who [ __ ] cares you know what I mean that's the thing with with a I'm with you I'm with you it's so practical because it's not about looking in the rear view mirror and trying to make sense of the

why it's about like what are you doing today and here's what you need to do in order to move forward I think there is value in looking in the rearview mirror once you've achieved some stability with your sobriety to try to understand your past and to identify wounds that remain unhealed so that you can so that you can work towards healing them and that's really like the latter part of your book is is about this very thing well and that's I mean again it's like the other thing that that I think is can be complicated

about AA is it's not looking in the rear view but often one of the things that I found hard for me is that it felt like at times the the environment would be about retiga or rehashing trauma you know you're in these rooms and everybody's telling their nightmare stories and I'm like and that to me felt at times like people were still chained to the identity of their trauma if that's your process by all means I get it if that's what's working and it keeps you safe keep doing it I think for me there was

a moment of curiosity where I was like wait a minute do I need to keep telling this story you know because the the identity that I had around addict and addiction was one that was deeply shame based and so it just it felt to me like perhaps I was perpetuating my own I was reinforcing the cage does that make sense yeah I understand that I mean that's a common relationship or perspective that many people have with AA I mean I would share or offer a different lens which is this idea that shame can't survive the

light and when you're telling your story you're exposing all of this to the light which is like an antiseptic to that shame that you might still be harboring and once you've made peace with it it no longer triggers you and part of sharing your story is to say you know we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it because it doesn't own us anymore like here it is like it's out here and I can laugh at it or whatever because I've done the work and it no longer holds that power

over me and the reason that I share it is a to remind myself this is where I came from because my brain wants to tell me everything's fine and I don't need to worry about this [ __ ] anymore and secondarily or perhaps more importantly because it's of service to the newcomer who's in in there for the first time and and has never heard anybody get up and tell such a crazy [ __ ] story and can identify their own emotions like again to that place where we began this conversation the facts of our experience

are different but we have a shared emotional relationship to it and you tell that story because maybe there's somebody in that room who's going to hear something that you share that they've never heard before that's going to allow them to plant their feet in that room and take the next step towards sobriety I think I just got taken to the mat no no in a and I will also acknowledge you know that that I think I would be dis uous or or dogmatic if I didn't say that there is something to be deconstructed about the

idea of getting up and saying my name is this and I'm an alcoholic or an addict like are you not further entrenching yourself in an identity or a story that no longer serves you this program has been instrumental in my life and it still is and I feel fine about that and I understand why it isn't for other people and I don't have any judgment about how people get sober and stay sober but the larger issue also is a big theme in your book which is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and

the power that they hold over us and this is something I think about a lot and I'm doing some writing on myself but this notion that human beings are storytelling machines and stories are how we make sense of the world and ourselves um but we all tell ourselves stories about who we are what we're capable of what happened to us what our future might look like but these are just stories MH mhm and those stories are only as powerful as we allow them to be and none of them are actually true right they have a

relationship to the truth they're neither false nor true exactly um and you know memory is very unreliable and those stories are formed by memories that perhaps are not objective in nature right they be so it's in service to the self to like try to deconstruct those stories and to see what's true and what is serving you and and what isn't serving you and what's keeping you stuck and I think where I related so deeply to your book and your story is the way in which these stories of success and identity can also entrap us and

become their own prisons right so you are a photographer you're a National Geographic Explorer you're a mountaineer you're all of these things right and what's confusing and complicated about it is those things saved your [ __ ] life gave you this incredible life this aspirational life that so many people would just kill to have right right and yet it's these are the very things that are holding you back and keeping you stuck in a story that is basically just enhancing your wounding and keeping you stuck from the healing that will ultimately make you whole because

all of these things they're great right and I'm not casting aspersions on any of them and I see myself in this in this very same story they are serving that childhood need that went unmet to feel like you matter look at me look what I've done all these people are out in the world and they're saying look at Corey like he's amazing right and it feels really good and you do feel like you you matter right so that need is finally getting met but is it a flawed need the hole can never be filled right

like the the Hungry Ghost cannot be sated so the more that you receive that the more you become dependent on it for a sense of self and it distances you from the ability to love yourself independently and to you know have a relationship with yourself that isn't contingent upon external validation or anything external other than this internal you know animating force of self-love amen did I get that right amen amen there's no I mean we'll add to it but there's nothing to add to that in so many ways you could end it there like truly

that is the um and I don't want to end it there by the way I'm just saying like that is you encapsulated the the whole message of this in in so beautifully and so articulately like that is that's it 100% we are we are mechanisms of the stories we tell and the way I always refer to it is there data that is sort of as close to truth as you can get there's just hard data and then we interpret that data right there's an experience the table is hard starts when we're really little and we

just start taking on that data and then we start to form a rough framework of a story around that I fall down my knees bleed right that is what happened but also now you're building a sense of meaning around what it means to ex exist relationally in the world to everything around you and so there's data and then you start the stories and then the stories form the meanings and then the meanings form the beliefs right and then you come up with these strong beliefs that then inform or reinforce the stories and they're self-reinforcing to

the point where they become what we call identity right and all of this happens unconsciously totally unconsciously our brain on an unconscious level is reflecting things that happened to us memories of things that occurred and making a decision that these are the important things and it will then select other things that have occurred and it'll create this Matrix and that Matrix helps tell that story and ultimately craft that identity that becomes calcified until you're at a point where you don't even question it or wonder where it even came from in the first place exactly and

then you're saying I am Corey I am rich that is a huge huge story massive ball of yarn and we're also applying and everybody has that that's why everybody is sort of this this we are all truly equal in that way and we all have in my experience B very similar experiences of forming stories right but the stories themselves as you pointed out can become very very problematic over time if we're not courageous and I do believe it takes a lot of courage to start questioning which stories are are generative and which are corrosive because

what it asks of us or what it asks of me I'll say is that I stopped the hard binaries it demanded it demands continually that I live somewhere in the middle not in ambiguity but in curiosity and I make space for the fact that it's not as clear as I want it to be and that my ideas of Truth are actually at times very subjective and paradoxical and hypocritical I mean we're all walking paradoxes right we're all massively hypocritical by our very nature this is where it gets interesting and tricky you know this is where

the book this is when the in the writing process it really started to come alive for me because I started to figure out oh this is what I've been trying to [ __ ] say it isn't one thing I mean you're this guy who who you know basically is smoking cigarettes like a chimney and yet somehow was able to Summit Everest without oxygen while Adrien Ballinger who's one of the world's greatest Mountaineers like struggled like there's that right but you're also the same guy who in 2021 on doll like backed out from an expedition where

a lot of money was spent around a documentary and there were a lot of people involved and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration a lot of judgment against you for pulling the rip cord under the rubric of like mental health right and I don't know if those wounds are are even healed I mean the wounds that you know relate to the other people that were involved in that story like this is the same person mhm but perhaps those experiences those more ult moments are the ones that allow you to kind of that

motivate you to deconstruct the truth of these stories and the identity that's crafted around them but how do you how do you have these heightened experiences and come down from the mountain and say am I a mountaineer am I done with the mountains I'm done with photography how does that arise and what does that relationship look like for you now well like you mentioned earlier you know you start getting the the Adoration and the and the accolades and all of it it's a bottomless well right it's a bottomless hole and so you need more and

more and more to fill it up and so in my case I tried to do the same thing but more dangerous and harder and at a higher level over and over and over again cuz you're on that hamster wheel you're on the so once you get that affirmation for climbing a mountain the next one has to be bigger and the next one has to be bigger after that and harder and more dangerous and you're just yeah it's like a heroin addict like you're you're chasing that original high you're never going to get it you're never

going to get it and this identity as an a high Alpine Mountaineer become like as I said earlier they become these traps and it's no different than somebody who does Iron Man's like they discover Triathlon it changes their life they they find a community there they feel so nourish they feel healthy they're back in their body again they have this Transcendent experience crossing the Finish line at an Iron Man but rather than learn from that and move on to the next thing that allows them to grow you stay stuck and then year after year you're

just doing Iron Mans and doing it's like yeah maybe you go a little bit faster maybe you go to this race or that race or whatever but ultimately it becomes an impediment to growth it becomes this blind spot as opposed to the accelerant that it once was and you could see this in any Community or or in any movement any place where being asked to perform at a high level and you are rewarded for that performance I think the it's almost necessary that you keep going back to the well for a little while it's human

nature it's human nature because the thing that feels really good is all the the external love we and I will speak for myself I have been been really really great at mistaking attention for love and you know it's this oh I'm getting attention so I'm So I must be loved and so you cross that finish line and and there's so much um Transcendence around it that you revisit it I see this with psychedelics all the time too you go back to it over and over and over again and you think you're learning something new and

maybe you are maybe I don't want to take that away from people but ultimately you're not becoming more humble You're Building hubris right and crafting a new identity around whole new identity around it and then you suddenly you're wearing a big hat and you got like a costume on yeah yeah and you're and you're you are that guy and you see it all you live in Venice yeah I live in Venice you got the flow Stone yeah exactly exactly and you're wearing you know your Mala and your linen and you know you're you're the Tanga

guy look I I've those are my friends right yeah mine too and it's I know I know these are these are my people they're my people but I also can recognize that and I and I say that as as someone who can recognize that proclivity in myself for sure I've done it and I still am doing it in some in some way I'm sure I'm just trying to be more careful about those stories because like you said there's this moment where I just I let it all go how did you do that well so often

there's a story that we we we self-discover through we have this moment we transcend and then we achieve and for me it was very different the moment of achievement came in a very different form after Everest in 2016 with Adrian where I'd done it without oxygen had I been paying attention I would have seen that like I had kind of tapped out but I kept going and and then 5 years later after another Everest climb after a second Everest attempt on a new route that hadn't been climbed ever Co happened and I went to daliri

which is the seventh highest mountain in the world and I'm so happy we talked a little bit about what's cycling up into hypomania looks like earlier because now this is kind of the real life this is where the rubber hits the road so we flew to Nepal I was with toppo my climbing partner uh guy named Tommy Joyce um Carla toppo's partner girlfriend and Kellen and we were making a film about my dad who's got cancer he's still with us but he and um it was sort of a dry run for Everest this new route

on Everest so we were going to try again and we got to Nepal and I noticed I was just very emotional like I was very teary at things and then I would like and then I wasn't sleeping and I thought it was jet lag I wasn't hungry and I was just sort of like my thoughts were a little fast but I was just like this is just jet lag this is just travel and then we go to base camp and we fly to base camp this is interesting there's a direct link to depression and altitude

um and higher suicide rates at altitude I don't know if that applies acutely but it sure does feel like that sometimes for me where I get far more Moody as soon as I start going high and we were at base camp we were all exhausted I got more exhausted but I couldn't sleep you know we had to really carve out this this base camp area cuz we were at the bottom of the Northwest Ridge so there's no established base camp there and I got sick thought maybe it's co it's not Co and then the team

I was I was sick in my tent and the team decided to go try to find a route onto the lower Northwest face and I was in my tent and I just started felt that cycling up where the the thoughts were just so fast that I couldn't keep track of them and I was reading I forget I was reading a book um anyway there was a passage about love and I just started weeping like uncontrollably weeping and the thoughts were just so so fast and I couldn't keep up with them and then it was that

flashing sensation behind my eyes again and I just erupted and I was I yeah I mean I I was screaming as loud as I could into my sleeping bag bald up and it was it was horrifying it was so so scary and I didn't I couldn't make sense of it but but there was this deep inner knowing that at least for now because you called me out on this earlier at least for now this piece of my life had exhausted itself the climbing the photography the identity of all of this was somehow it was rung

out it was done I couldn't do it it was over and and and yet here I am like screaming at the top of my lungs and sort of reciting mantras and having wild sort of Daydreams of dying but also success and just it was so disorienting and I tried to calm myself down and it sort of Abad for a minute and then and then the team came back at the end of the day and I've been crying for hours just hours and hours and hours and I went into the tent and I was like I'm

done and they all looked at me like what do you mean you're done and I'm like I'm I'm done you know what do you mean and I said I'm not going to climb anymore you mean like this mountain I'm not going to climb anymore I don't want to take pictures I don't want to do any of it and it was this moment of like sh just shock just shock and they're like what are you going to do and this is it sounds crazy and yet here I am four years later I was like I'm going

to move to LA so there was truth in it there was there was clear Direction how do you parse the hypomania from the deeper truth message like could it not just have been this idea like that you're not going to climb anymore or take pictures could could have that just been a manifestation or a symptom of the the Mania impulse yes it could be and it likely presented that way but this is one of the things that I think is so interesting and there's a moment actually in in your book where you talk about this

where both things can be true the hypomania might be influenced by the stress of the deep inner knowing that this is not working anymore right and at the same time the hypomania might be informing wildly erratic decision-making they can be concurrent and yet they can also be true even if they are erratic and this is kind of the hard part about mental health pulling it apart you talk about a moment where you're completely out of gas you're on a training ride you're riding home and you start basically levitating and you have a moment of connection

with the Divine Right and it changes you it really [ __ ] changes you and you even know well maybe this is just like complete deprivation I have no sugar in my system I'm my blood sugar is gone right but maybe it's something deeper or maybe it's both and maybe that's why people use deprivation to achieve spiritual levels mhm all I'm saying is it's not either or MH it's they're both can be accurate and true and as it turns out you know so then the next day does that make sense I just want to yeah

and I think on top of that in terms of both things being true what's both true is the idea that that the responsible choice is to back out if you're mentally not in a good place to handle this because the stakes are high and is on the on the table and there are other people involved right and what's also true is all these people have followed you the pi Piper you know all over the world to this place to Great expense and time and all the like on the promise that you're going to do this

thing together you're going to make this movie and and and and for you to just pull the rip cord and say not only am I not feeling good and I'm going to get off this mountain like I'm never doing this yeah yeah and so you know Joyce goes on to say in the New York Times and I you know it's like this is could not have been easy for you to read I think he figured that he could leave and go back to being a quote mental health Advocate Joyce the filmmaker wrote in an email

Corey had to create a new narrative that protected his ego from his everpresent fear that he doesn't matter you know what he wasn't wrong entirely not known not known that was a very astute observation and part of that came from the fact that he had been making a film about me and about my family and I had shared very clearly that I felt a deep value deficit and a need to matter in the world so he's not wrong what was troubling to me in that and and I write about it a little bit is not

that he said that at all and I hold Z my God I love the guy still I really do he is a Powerhouse and wildly talented it was more that I had expressed for so long that these things were real in me and they were very much a part of me And yet when it when the rubber hit the road and the monster came out of the dark and showed its head in a very very tangible way that people just couldn't understand they couldn't make space for it because conceptually when we talk about mental health

issues it's very easy to be like yeah yeah I understand you struggle it's very very very different to watch somebody as you said earlier experience Mania hypomania depression it can be so confusing for loved ones and friends around them because it doesn't seem to make sense and yet the decisions I was making while they were seemed erratic ended up being some of the best decisions I could make so again as you pointed out earlier one thing that appears to be very negative can also be very positive in the same moment it's the old DST good

news bad news who knows right and so when I walked away which again I I take full responsibility like you said I was a pi Piper follow me around the world make this film let's do this thing when I walked away people were Furious you know especially Tommy and and uh toppo and they made it very clear that they were Furious I think that anger has abated over time I did not feel like I was trying to go back and create this new identity or fall back into a mental health advocacy identity to matter but

I felt like actually this moment was where I started finally to understand somebody asked me the other day like when did you start to really understand your bipolar diagnosis and I would say when I came back from doag in 2021 because because I across a desk from a from a psychiatrist and for the first time I actually took on the information because it was so evident that there was something like I I I don't know why it finally sunk in he just looked at me and he goes Cory if you don't get this under control

right now it's probably going to get worse and that's where all that fear that I had picked up as a child I'm going to be crazy screaming at trees it all came flooding back in he's like you know in my mind what I was hearing him say is that might happen mhm that might happen you could lose all of this if you don't get this under control and at the same moment in that same moment you know I'd come home and I fa so much backlash and there was this very very hard email sent to

my parents that sort of accused me of this massive manipulation and and then on top of that the brick through the window with Nat Gio yeah and the Scandal and the Scandal there that ended up making you have to part ways with them yeah so that was a lot of chaos dude there's a lot of chaos it's not like oh I had an epiphany and I walked away from these things like there's a lot of wreckage right that was contributing to and I just gone through a pretty pretty rough breakup and I'll leave that to

the to the reader to to read about the na Geo thing but like yes these pieces of my identity were already being Stripped Away and to come back and then be sort of a the other thing I just want to point out really quickly is like this high level climbing for me had become like year-long meditations on my on mortality I was constantly thinking about dying all the time in my visualizations and everything so I was living in this fight flight or freeze I'm basically living in my amydala constantly and I'm overtrained I'm under nourished

I'm catabolic all of it is going sideways for for basically a couple years in advance the Nao things happens I go through this breakup I end up in a highly stressful situation below this big face of course I'm going to have an episode and then I come home there's this sort of accusation of manipulation you I'm hiding behind mental health like I was like [ __ ] it I'm call I'm calling it in and and that's when I don't call it a suicide attemp tempt as much as I was it nearly happened you know and

I always I've said this many many times it's not that you want to die it's just that you don't want to live in the pain it becomes unfathomable to wake up the next day and go through it again and again and again and that's when the psychiatrist is like this will kill you or it certainly can if you don't get it under control this is what my wife would call your great dismantling and your Divine moment yeah there yeah crisis is the point of growth yeah yeah and hence begins a new story for which caution

Flags must be thrown because as you kind of point out and talk about in the book also we can craft an identity around our own innate Brokenness just as much as we can around our accomplishments mhm and I think that you're absolutely right we and they can exist concurrently again they can it can be at the same time that's what's so confusing around it is we can Harbor stories of Brokenness uh at the same time that we're trying to mend those stories with other stories of accomplishment look at me look at what I can do

but there's also sorry to inter like you can in the same way you can be like look at me I climbed all these mountains you can also say look how [ __ ] up I am man like I'm more [ __ ] up than everyone that's way of getting attention and validation right and I had done that throughout my life even as I started to talk about mental health I learned all the words I learned how to talk about it and articulate it and I knew it through and through conceptually I knew the conversation of

trauma and then I learned that if I shared in certain ways especially with women I could hijack connection you know then you're the vulnerable guy you weaponize trauma speak exactly yeah you weaponize you trauma dump you trauma Bond you're literally leveraging trauma to try to fix trauma right and I will be the first to admit that that is a a manipulation of the information and it also is a place of victimhood even even addiction I think I used I will say this you know I'll just speak for myself I used addiction as a way to

be special at times I used my well I'm I'm in so Bri you know I'm in AA it was a way for me to stand out it was it was emblematic of my deep Brokenness and what another great way to get attention what another great way to matter I'm this fragile guy you know care for me pay attention to me look at this story of my [ __ ] upness balanced against my Triumph all stories all stories that are all working and somehow not working and falling apart you know and then I started to really

dive in you know in the process of writing where I started to dive in and go wait a minute like is this story of Brokenness actually the base story of all of it and what if that story isn't [ __ ] true what if I learned something really early on that I've stuck with and clung to that I thought made me special that actually Amplified shame at times and it's just not true what if I've been telling the wrong Story the whole [ __ ] time and what is the true story um for me it's

it's going to sound cliche um and I don't I don't want it to I want to say something more profound here but maybe this the simplest thing is the truest I am that's all I really know I am I wake up I am and my brain loves to spin narratives that guide me through the day and of course it does that's its job right it spins narratives to protect me it creates uh identities and ideas in order to guide me but at the end of the day I just am and the more I can go

back to that story The More calm and peace I find Within Myself the rest of it is helpful at times but it can also be really harmful you know and in the I am moment when you have that when you're there when you connect to it when I connect to it there is the sense of ultimate awareness of things around me because I'm no longer clouding my perception with with all the stuff that's distracting me does that make sense sure I'm reminded I can't I can't help but think of Tom shadec documentary I am you

know and he was in here recently so he's he's on my brain I mean it's a similar story and message that he shares and and this is how you conclude the book with this idea around I am but that notion comes from thousands of years of spiritual tradition the viic tradition um from Hinduism and all these things Judaism chrisan it's anchored uqu it is ubiquitous it's different phraseology is draped around it but in essence it's this idea of Oneness and the universality of The Human Condition and this disabusing of this notion of specialness as a

path to anything other than separation and and suffering right yeah so it's one thing to talk about these ideas from a place of intellectualization and another thing to actually feel them from a heart- centered place and a lot of healing has to take place to Traverse that crass right so nice well played what are some of the modalities that have been most helpful for you I mean you talk in the book there's a lot you've done a lot right so what's worked what hasn't what have you found most helpful so I mean look action activity

finding finding a reasonable Outlet does work to a degree right so long as when you realize you're chasing it so far you stop and have the wherewithal to go well wait why do I need to go to the extremes that's the first thing but having an activity that you really connect with being outside specifically is so so important as far as therapies concerned I've tried everything from CBT to EMDR to you know um TMS everything everything under the sun they all have very specific impacts um some people respond better than others and then I and

then I've tried psychedelics and I will say this I don't think psychedelics are a Panacea and I hate when they're frames that way I think it is absolutely a disservice to the community at large I think they require a lot of special care and attention and I don't think that having a big trip at Burning Man is necessarily therapeutic it's okay it's a great experience I just don't think it's the same thing as doing it with set setting and intention um what I will say is that psychedelics did help me when we talk about heart-c

centered feeling and experience it's it's real but it's very ineffable it's very hard to put words to and what psychedelics did for me and psychedelics coupled with meditation and building a strong Community here a strong community of men what all of that did for me was start to allow me to actually feel like tangibly feel from my chest where I was I was actually out of my head and I can do it at any moment now it's hard to stay there but where you're actually experiencing the world not through thoughts but through something so much

bigger than thought and it literally is a sensation that comes from here so the heart is not a metaphor the heart is essential in Emotion processing it sends signals up the vagus nerve to the brain which starts emotion processing there is so much going on in here and yet because of all of the conceptualization all of the intellectualization all of the hiding behind the knowledge and all of the action I had completely forgotten that this existed it was just a word it was it was completely a metaphor so meditation I think therapy is very helpful

I think if if psychedelics are if you're curious I think being very very intentional with them help Community has been one of the biggest things for me like I said especially men tell me about this men's group I am part of a men's group I've been doing it for three years now you know we use some modeling where we start to understand where our time is going but really time and energy is going um of course we bounce like business ideas off of each other it's a support group in some ways but beyond that it's

more of a it's a group of men who have made the agreement to align on Integrity vulnerability and authenticity to unburden ourselves from the isolation that so often comes with the masculine identity that we've been taught in our culture and this sort of idea of individual exceptionalism and that the idea that our primary value is in provision and divorcing ourselves from these ideas and coming together over uh our real emotions in a safe space that allows us to not navigate the world with anger and pain but release some of that with each other in the

container that masculinity can create for the safety of of Brotherhood and I you know we get together every every other Monday I'm in two groups I co- facilitate one we have Sundays together where you know we sit around barbecue just hang out that's informal so we do this three months chunks every quarters we you know we read a book um and that can be sort of the you know the basis of discussion um we do exercises like uh one quarter can be writing your eulogy and you can write it from the perspective of anybody one

one could be a cordon Mogi which is doing something that really really scares you and challenges you you know and if so if you rich were to come to me and be like I'm going to run an ultra that's my I'd be like [ __ ] that's the comfort zone know what that looks like your Mogi might be not running an ultra you need to sit down and not work out for six months right see what that feels like yeah so that's the basic framework of it and it's really about you know it's about learning

how to be loved outside of the idea of accomplishment and provision this is the Holy Grail this is the golden chalice you know I mean we are of course it's it's not unique to say that we're living in a world of you know mental it's it is a mental health uh epidemic that we're living through right now you can almost just just reflexively say that and I think it's important to say that there's an acute and specific aspect of mental health that challenges men particularly young men who are in search of meaning who are on

social media and all the messaging is sort of hustle porn or you know outwork the next person be strong all these sorts of traditional tropes around masculinity and what it means to be a man in this world right and I think you and I can sit across from each other as two people who have you know played it out right like what does it look like on the other side of that and how do you feel right to report back and say there's more to be learned here right and a different way and I'm in

the process of trying to navigate that like it's not easy you know to let go of these patterns and identities and stories and and to really grock and embrace this idea that you have value outside of your ability to provide or your accomplishments in the world or the external validation that you receive like can you stand on your own two feet and love yourself and feel that love is not a transactional thing that you're out there trying to seek to make you feel whole but is something Universal to all of us that doesn't need to

be earned yeah it's [ __ ] hard man it's so [ __ ] hard and and the messaging even with the best you know look I I don't love the words patriarchy and feminism but I'm going to just basically I'm going to briefly touch on them because I think they polarize people as I learned about like the toxic expressions of patriarchy um and and how that's trapped men specifically reading books like the will to change by Bell hooks I don't want to talk about it by Terrence reel like these books that and learning about feminism

as well I really started to unravel why where so much of my anger came from and it felt like this in this incredible and unreachable point of of shut up and do and then what I found was when I started to speak so there's this base level of patriarchal thinking which is shut up and do be strong sort of bottle the emotions toughen up and certainly there's a place for that in the world right we need some of that as in the masculine sphere but at the same time as I learned more about it and

I see how much the world demands that of young boys and how we grow up into it um I started to see also that when we express when men then are asked to be vulnerable and then we express specifically around frustrations around all of it and being confused and often times we're met with well stopping fragile mhm well that's just reinforcing patri ground level patriarchal thinking you'll just pivot back to exactly you just told me that my actual expression my Tru expression even if it goes counter to what your you know your experience as a

woman or whatever you just told me it's not welcome that's my experience right now and then what I think is also interesting is that so many people don't realize and B hooks was so good about pointing this out that patriarchy is a system that we are all responsible for and all feeding into men tend to reap the socioeconomic and power-based rewards right but it's a system that we're all contributing to and for example like I love Scott Galloway I think so much of what he has to say is really interesting I watched him on podcast

the other day and he was saying you know get your [ __ ] together do this like and I really agree with it like kind of like find your purpose go out into the world and then he ended [Music] with because the truth is women want a man who makes as much or more than them he had me right up until that point he's not wrong but he just reinforced what is I understand I think he would say in his defense he would say I'm a social scientist and this is what the the studies in

the data reveals so I'm just trying to basically tell these young men the way that it is and what the data says not that that's the way that it should be or that there aren't exceptions to that right but if that's the sound bite on social media right this is what women want what women want yeah I understand I understand what you're saying I'm not saying he's absolutely right he's 100% right but in that way that's where women in a system that we've been fighting so hard to make equal if that's still their driver and

their desire well then they're feeding back into the system because then men are going to continue to seek that in order to achieve that and it's just going to keep it going so we have to all I'm saying is yes and let's let's be more creative about what can be yeah I think to your point like it's it's risky to be vulnerable and listen the word vulnerability has almost lost all its meaning because there's so much performative vulnerability on social media yeah sort of like what does that actually mean like what what is real and

you know I can wholeheartedly say that like the authenticity and vulnerability that you bring to this book like it's indelibly real like I I can just feel it but I'm curious like when you're writing it are you thinking like is this like you you've been saying like oh is this real is this true is this not am I being honest like you're asking yourself those questions which I think is part of what it means to be genuine and authentic but in an environment where where vulnerability has been commodified it creates confusion and then on top

of that you have The Men Who summon the courage to be vulnerable into your point like are are then punished for that or it's not received in the spirit in which it's given which is only going to you know reinforce the old behavior that led to the need for that sort of confessional vulnerability in the first place we're in a cycle we are and we're also in a cycle of victimhood and I think that's perpetuating this and this relates to Mental Health but our culture seems to be rewarding victimhood and the question for me and

something I've really been wrestling with is what are the what are the mechanisms to honor what happens when terrible things happen to us but not stay stuck in victimhood and there is a certain element of victimhood that comes with like this sort of like poor white man Trope I don't believe in that don't give me that but also there's a lot of victimhood and everything's [ __ ] and and the world is sort of I have all this trauma and the world is sort of out to get me and it's like I'm not saying that's

not true but we cannot ask the world to accommodate for our trauma our trauma is our responsibility to address it's not an excuse for your behavior no it can't be it can't be and it shouldn't be and I don't like the word should and should but it look man the world's Hard Knocks Hard Knocks and I'm sorry I'm so sorry for for people to go through it I look all around me in Venice and I see people on the street and I'm like godamn that is just pure trauma expressed right and that might be Beyond

repair I I like to think that it's not but for most of us it's not the world's responsibility to accommodate us no it's your responsibility and I think you know listen talk to you all day you got like wind this down I mean maybe this is a good way to do that by by talking a little bit about what you would say to the person who's been listening to this and is starting to identify something unhealed within themselves that might be producing maladaptive behaviors in their life right like how does one begin to make sense

of what that is and take that first step on the journey towards healing it first of all pay attention to again I this word o drives me nuts but pay attention to your triggers triggers are the most powerful internal compasses we have when stuff bothers you when you get triggered whether it's in a relationship whether it's in society culture that is your first indication that something is unresolved or unhealed because when it's when it is resolved in my experience it doesn't trigger you that way you pay attention to it you notice notice it but it

doesn't [Music] disregulation is and nobody can heal that for you nobody look at your triggers love them because they are pointing you in the direction of your wholeness and your healing the other thing that I would say is you know if if you're chasing if it feels if there's a sense of fatigue and you're just going going going it would be worth asking what's driving the extreme Behavior right we're always like well if I do this next thing and you know you've talked about it a lot if if it's worthwhile to stop and go is

the next Ultra why am I doing it and when I answer this am I lying to myself is it truly honest because I just love the experience and we're so good at lying to ourselves the best best at lying to ourselves or another way of framing it is are you running towards something or or away from something and generally or are you just run may just [ __ ] up like yeah I'm just I think it's like pretty much running away from things most of the time it's rare that you're running towards it we don't

want to run towards the hard thing right we'll dress a hard thing up as running towards something but in fact it's running away from what we really should be looking at that's 100% it you know or can you just run can you just run for fun can you just run because it feels good you know metaphorically and physically right right right so because I mean I think here's the thing like the stories you start to unravel them you start to look at them you start to just unpack them and the more honest you get the

more the more painful it can get but also the more peace you feel and the more you do that or The more I've found that I've done that like we talked about a little earlier like it is and I've said this before but it's worth repeating it is so [ __ ] profound that we wake up in the morning that you know I have the mathematical probability of existence tattooed on my hand um whether or not it's accurate I don't really give a [ __ ] it's it's a reminder that this is from the beginning

of time 13.8 billion years ago something big happens and it sends 10 to the 80th atoms Greening a toppling over each other and becoming this [ __ ] this stuff right imagine every single thing that had to happen on that chain that happened exactly as it did all the way back through every ancestor that didn't die in your lineage back to our Evolution and all the way beyond that how many things had to line up for Rich to be rich that is that is absolutely astronomically mindblowing the fact that you woke up this morning morning

took a breath and we're like I'm going to go do a thing called a podcast it is so special and the more we pay attention to how much [ __ ] is wrong and how broken stuff is the more stuff is broken so the reframe is you have a body at all there's always gratitude in that moment and that's so much of what I hear you saying is the shift towards gratitude is the ultimate reframe it doesn't mean you don't have headaches and life doesn't suck sometimes that you have a body at all that gets

to have headaches and gets to go through divorces and gets to be bipolar how [ __ ] cool is that beautifully put very true and also so abstract that it's difficult for me to go yeah man you know what I mean it's like because it's so vast it's like the difference between look at those two people and there's a billion people like it's so vast and incomprehensible that find myself detaching from the emotional Resonance of what you just shared like that's my struggle right and this is why you know listen I've said it a million

times like gratitude doesn't come easy it's I have to like exert a lot of effort to like feel even the slightest flirtation with it and what you share it helps but it's also like everything inside of me is like fighting against that like [ __ ] off with you and your [ __ ] vast you know like mathematical equation of the of Universal probability right and that's fair and I and I was there for a long time honestly I didn't even know what gratitude meant until I was 39 I truly did not know all I'm

saying is that I've gotten to a place and it's true [ __ ] off with it it's okay but once that moment happens and I know you know it even though it's conceptually difficult once that moment happens you never forget it it is I I don't know how else to say it then you woke up that is miraculous you're here with all of it that is astounding I think we did it you're like I still don't buy it but I think we did it no I think we did it we did the podcast yeah yeah

we did how you feel I feel great man I think it was pretty good I think I had a great time are there any paring thoughts that you want to leave people with about the book like what do you what do you want people to to get out of your story and the way that you told it and there's one thing I I I forgot to mention about the way that you write like you have a very idiosyncratic style it's a very unique writing style that that I love but it's almost like in the stories

that you tell they're not linear they're they're their own abstractions they're like Picasso versions of the story or a collage like a mange yeah it's a coll of portraits like like each sentence is a photograph and these photographs aren't taken exactly one after another and you assemble them to create a narrative like this pasti that evokes like a sense memory that allows you to kind of understand what happened but you're sparing us all the details to make it like a Technicolor right like 1080p image right well first of all I'm not like a trained writer

I don't I don't so thank God thank God right like I read a lot when I was writing and there were pieces that I liked and of course as you read you start to emulate the reading that you're that you're doing and then and it took I think a year and a half before I was like oh this is me this is this is my voice and it is idiosyncratic and some people will probably hate it and that's okay but I liked the sensor the sense memory kind of idea I just felt that it was

more honest to what was happening inside I was trying to write what was in my not the experience way it's the way memory works you don't remember everything about what that hotel room looked like you only remember that one thing that was on the bedside table or what have you ex you remember the curtain for some reason that imprinted so yeah I mean well I'm happy you enjoyed it and I also um I think what I want people to get from this is right way you said right at the first is like you you see

me but more more important is that you feel seen that's that's what I want people to get I want people to go oh wow I think differently about my brother with bipolar or I think differently about you know mental health as a whole or I think differently about my role as a man or a woman in but but more like I just feel seen I feel somehow more whole like I'm not alone in this even if the the like you say the the the experiences are different the mhm the internal texture is really similar well

I felt less alone reading it and even more less alone spending the afternoon with you so thanks buddy thanks great I appreciate it yeah it's a real accomplishment it's a work of art it's an act of service uh it's a beautiful offering that you've created and you should be very proud thanks man Cheers Cheers peace [Music] that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find

the entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra voicing change and the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. ral.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review Andor comment this show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free to check out all their amazing offers head to Rich roll.com sponsors and sharing the show or

your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very help and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason ciolo the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davey Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel siss and thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management

and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry matys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plance namaste [Music] [Music]