In this episode — Stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton, who brought the word “epigenetics” into the mainstream, returns for a second conversation with Richard. They open on a warning about civilizational collapse, then work through how the first seven years of life program roughly 95% of adult behavior — including the program for how you’re “supposed” to age, which is why Richard says “acting your age is dangerous.” They close on the argument at the heart of Bruce’s forthcoming book, Beyond Darwin — that cooperation, not competition, is evolution’s real survival strategy.

Guest: Bruce H. Lipton, PhD—stem cell biologist; author of The Biology of Belief (Hay House, 10th Anniversary Edition) and the forthcoming Beyond Darwin: How Epigenetics, Quantum Science, and Cooperation Shape Humanity’s Future (BenBella Books, August 2026, co-written with Patricia King).

Chapters

00:00 — The ten-to-twenty-year collapse warning

00:42 — Welcome back, and how “epigenetics” went mainstream

04:04 — What epigenetics actually means

06:53 — The mind as architect: thought into chemistry into genes

11:13 — The subconscious computer: programmed before birth through age seven

15:38 — Why the conscious mind loses the wheel

19:59 — “We are all Bill”: the programs you can’t see in yourself

24:43 — Two terminal diagnoses, five years later

27:05 — Bruce’s tongue cancer, and the book he’d been avoiding

31:59 — Beyond Darwin: what Darwin missed

34:53 — Placebo, belief, and Ellen Langer’s counterclockwise study

36:34 — Why acting your age is dangerous

40:44 — From the caves to civilization: how domination got wired in

50:16 — The garden is not a battleground

56:31 — Did humanity inherit a dysfunctional childhood?

59:12 — Close

Diana Richardson, who has studied human sexuality, intimacy, and couples’ relationships with sex for fifty years, returns to the program (her first appearance, “The Power of Slow Sex,” aired March 2022). She and Richard trace how sexual mores have shifted over the last century — more premarital sex, then a modern pullback into isolation, pornography, and falling fertility rates — and why Diana thinks the real problem isn’t how much sex people are having but the mechanical, goal-driven way we’ve been taught to have it. They get into the language attached to sex (“achieving” an orgasm, “premature” orgasm) and what it does to performance pressure, especially for men, and Diana answers Richard’s question about pleasure and connection without an erection.

Guest: Diana Richardson — researcher and teacher of conscious sexuality; author of eight books including Tantric Sex for Lovers (the Slow Sex / Tantric Sex for Men / Tantric Orgasm for Women collection, Destiny Books) and The Heart of Tantric Sex (John Hunt Publishing/O Books, 2003). With her partner Michael Richardson, she has run the week-long Making Love Retreat in Europe for over 30 years, with more than 15,000 couples attending. Site and online course: rekindle.love.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: sensitivity vs. sensation

00:39 — Welcome to Mind Body Health and Politics

01:30 — Welcome back: Diana Richardson

02:17 — Fifty years of change in the sexual field

06:33 — A hundred years of premarital sex, and the 60s revolution

07:48 — Pizza, porn, and the retreat from dating

08:29 — The epidemic of isolation, alienation, and loneliness

09:42 — It’s not the amount of sex, it’s the how

11:23 — Falling fertility rates

12:55 — Writing The Heart of Tantric Sex

14:06 — What “tantra” actually means

15:03 — Conventional sex vs. tantric sex

19:40 — Words that hurt: “achieving” an orgasm

23:38 — Eight books, and how the Making Love Retreat began

26:11 — Thirty years, fifteen thousand couples

28:06 — Bringing the retreat online

28:44 — Pleasure and connection without an erection

32:34 — What could bring young people back to each other

33:34 — Where to find Diana: rekindle.love

Joshua White left a decade-long career as a San Francisco city attorney to found Fireside Project, a free, anonymous peer-support line for anyone in a psychedelic crisis or working through one from the past. He and Richard, an advisor to Fireside Project, talk about the four gaps Joshua set out to close in the field, what it takes to be a “loving rock” for a stranger mid-trip, reframing the bad trip as a challenging one, the burnout that nearly broke him, and Lucy, a training simulator built from tens of thousands of anonymized calls now used at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin study.

Guest: Joshua White — founder and executive director of Fireside Project; former Deputy City Attorney, San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. Volunteer alumnus of the Zendo Project and Safe & Sound’s parental stress line before founding Fireside in 2021. Fireside’s free peer-support app is available on iOS and Google Play; the training tool Lucy is at fireside.training; donate at firesideproject.org/donate.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: reach out and call somebody

02:25 — Welcome: Joshua White

02:48 — Green smoothies and egg whites

03:41 — From city attorney to psychedelic support

04:42 — Psychedelics, therapy, and the decision to leave the law

07:04 — Testing the waters: the Zendo Project and a parental stress line

08:01 — The four gaps in psychedelic support

10:10 — Fireside Project launches, April 2021

10:22 — Anonymity, legality, and why people call

12:43 — Who answers the phone: the “loving rock” question

17:20 — Reframing the bad trip

18:55 — From bad trip to challenging trip

20:34 — Finding volunteers, finding the public

22:43 — The nonprofit fundraising treadmill

25:34 — Burnout, Ibogaine, and “ten out of ten”

26:37 — Richard’s advisor disclosure: take a vacation

27:28 — The patient who taught Richard about self-care

30:31 — Introducing Lucy and how she trains therapists

35:08 — Forty thousand calls and counting

36:24 — Why there’s no AI avatar yet

37:40 — An ethical data model, by contrast

41:04 — The pitch: why Fireside needs your support

41:35 — How to donate, volunteer, and spread the word

41:55 — Close

British historian Charlie Harris spent years living with his sources in Mendocino County to write Mendo, the first full history of how a logged-out fishing-and-timber county became the cannabis capital of the Americas. He and Richard — a Mendocino resident since 1975 who watched much of it happen — trace the whole arc: the Back to the Land migration, weed as currency, the homestead wars that united hippies and loggers against the government, Reagan’s helicopter raids and the invention of asset forfeiture, the genetics that made California weed famous, and what legalization actually did to prices, potency, and the people who built the industry.

Guest: Charlie Harris — historian and writer; eight years with Oxford University’s Global History of Capitalism Project; author of Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop (Counterpoint Press, June 2026). Available from Counterpoint, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore — Charlie asks you to try the indie first.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: stories that were never written down

00:31 — Welcome: what happened in Mendocino County

02:24 — Picked up hitchhiking, dropped on a pot farm

06:33 — From trimmer to Oxford historian

08:47 — “Get these stories written down before they disappear”

11:42 — Logging, fishing, and the collapse that emptied the land

14:28 — Back to the Land: the largest urban-to-rural migration in history

17:47 — “We couldn’t grow gasoline”: weed becomes currency

20:21 — The homesteading wars: red tags and a common enemy

22:47 — Hippies, rednecks, and the hipnecks

27:46 — Reagan sends in the helicopters: CAMP, 1983

30:40 — Asset forfeiture is invented in Mendocino County

32:01 — “The campaign to aid marijuana prices”

33:19 — Indica genetics: California weed gets good

35:30 — Traffic reports for police convoys

37:30 — Medical marijuana, 1996: everything changes

40:27 — Overproduction and the price collapse

44:24 — Hedge funds, Flow Kana, and the economics of legalization

48:36 — “Nobody wants stronger weed”: the THC arms race

53:04 — What they smoke in England

56:44 — The book: Mendo

58:07 — “I have a lot of hope for America”: gratitude and close

Journalist Abbie Rosner spent several years interviewing thirty-six older adults, most in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, about psychedelic experiences they had quietly, outside the clinic. She and Richard talk about elderhood, conscious aging, what changes when these medicines meet a long life rather than a young one, a disagreement over when "elder" begins, and her pilot vision for small, committed cohorts of older adults growing old together on purpose.

Guest: Abbie Rosner, journalist. Author of Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, 2026, foreword by Dr. Julie Holland). Writes The ELDEREVOLUTION on Substack and a Next Avenue column. abbierosner.com

00:00 The epidemic of isolation

01:45 Conscious aging, what's on Abbie's mind

05:28 What aging actually is, body vs. spirit

10:14 The opportunity of older life, going inward

12:24 The fragility question, screening older adults

15:34 How older adults approach psychedelics today

20:00 Who is drawn to this work, seekers

21:20 Am I an elder at 60, the Julie Holland exchange

27:04 Inside the book, 36 interviews and a book tour

33:11 Elder Vision Circles

38:44 Close

Dr. Jud Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and Yale-trained addiction psychiatrist, joins Richard to lay out a habit-loop model of anxiety. From his own residency panic attacks to the smoking-cessation work that produced five times the standard quit rate, to a randomized trial of his anxiety program, the throughline is one mechanism: pay attention to what a behavior actually does, and the brain stops finding it rewarding. We close on a thirty-second practice for the next time anxiety shows up.

Guest: Dr. Jud Brewer, Director of Research and Innovation at the Brown University Mindfulness Center. Author of The Craving Mind (2017), Unwinding Anxiety (2021, NYT bestseller), and The Hunger Habit (2024). drjud.com

00:00 Opening, the epidemic of anxiety and depression

01:56 Jud's own anxiety story

06:46 Choosing mindfulness as a career in 2006

11:38 Coke Enders and the academic hazing pattern

15:10 Reinforcement learning, pay attention as you smoke

20:28 The anxiety habit loop

23:28 The default mode network and the posterior cingulate cortex

25:49 The mind is a tool, not the boss

29:46 Richard's Vipassana origin with Goldstein and Kornfield

31:07 Conscious breathing and five-finger breathing

32:42 Anxiety travels in clusters

34:40 If these tools work, why are we prescribing

36:42 Could this be taught in high schools

38:19 Going Beyond Anxiety, the AI-paired digital therapeutic

41:52 Mid-episode break

43:32 Curiosity will conquer fear, flip the NO to WHAT

45:27 Feelings are just feelings

47:15 Off-air closing

In this episode — Carl Honoré, the journalist whose 2004 book In Praise of Slow named the global Slow Movement, returns with the thesis sharpened. He and Richard work through what “slow” actually means, why busyness has become a measurable chemical addiction, the myth of multitasking, loneliness as a mortality risk, the acceleration that precedes burnout, and the four prescriptions any of us can start today.

Guest: Carl Honoré — journalist and author of In Praise of Slow (2004), Under Pressure (2008), The Slow Fix (2013), and Bolder (2018). His TED talk has more than 3 million views. He writes Tempo on Substack. More at carlhonore.com.

Chapters

[00:00] The case for connection

[02:34] What slow is, and what it isn’t

[04:28] The cost of a speed-driven culture

[07:31] Where the drive to speed comes from

[12:29] Busyness as addiction

[15:59] The digital detox

[19:12] What young people are getting right

[27:21] The multitasking myth

[30:09] Loneliness, longevity, and connection

[34:22] Burnout and the last burst of speed

[42:20] Carl’s four prescriptions

[51:58] Two quotes to close

In this episode—Dr. Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist who has studied mindfulness and mind-body unity for nearly fifty years, joins Richard to explain why mindfulness is not meditation, what the counterclockwise study revealed about aging, why the placebo is our strongest medicine, and how a diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Richard shares his own recovery from two terminal diagnoses at 82.

Guest: Dr. Ellen Langer—Professor of Psychology at Harvard (the first woman tenured in the department), author of Mindfulness, Counterclockwise, and The Mindful Body. More at ellenlanger.com.

Chapters

[00:00] The mission—connection as antidote to isolation

[02:23] Welcome, Dr. Ellen Langer

[03:03] Mindfulness is not meditation

[04:30] The horse and the hot dog—everything I knew could be wrong

[06:00] How to become mindful: notice three new things

[10:00] Noticing makes others feel cared for—and it’s enlivening

[17:50] Mind-body unity since 1977

[20:15] The counterclockwise study

[30:01] Imagined exercise builds real muscle

[31:21] The borderline effect—69 vs. 70

[35:18] ADHD, labels, and pharmaceutical collusion

[40:05] Placebo, sham surgery, and “you’re making yourself well”

[45:40] Richard’s two terminal diagnoses—and recovery

[52:30] Add life to your years

[55:20] Make the decision right, not the right decision