The School of Greatness

The questions you ask on autopilot might be the reason you feel lonely in a room full of people.

Vanessa Van Edwards, a behavioral researcher who has studied master conversationalists for two decades, sat down with Lewis to talk about why so much of our talking leaves us empty. One in six people worldwide are affected by loneliness, and she believes the way we talk to AI is quietly changing the way we talk to each other.

In her book Conversation, she lays out three levels of connection, from basic facts all the way up...

Every stage you never took is the only real failure. The rest is just data.

Jo Koy, the comedian who has sold out SoFi Stadium and won Showtime at the Apollo, sat down with Lewis and told the story of driving Vegas to LA with a broken taillight for a $40 set, getting a ticket both ways. He rode a Greyhound nine hours home from an unpaid audition. He walked to the front of a line wrapped around a building with a fake resume and a headshot his dad took, and asked a promoter for five minutes she...

You already know where to start. What scares you is finding out you might not be good enough once you do.

Lewis goes solo here on the fear that hides inside preparation. He read every page of a 500-page book before his first Tony Robbins interview and still walked in nervous, and that nervousness never actually went away.

Then there was Kobe Bryant. A 5pm phone call the night before, an interview the next morning, 20 minutes, a publicist handing over a list of banned topics, other crews waiting in the hallway. With almost no prep...

What if your body is already telling you the work you do every day is wrong for you?

Jonathan Fields, founder of Good Life Project and a former securities lawyer, sat down with Lewis to answer the question so many of us carry around: what should I do with my life? He shares how 100 hour weeks at a big law firm ended with an infection eating a hole through his intestine and a trip to emergency surgery.

From there you hear why burnout keeps climbing, why an existential crisis is really a crisis of meaning...

There are seven quiet signals that show up in your life long before the money does, and most of them feel like losing.

In this solo episode, Lewis walks you through the money mindset shifts he lived from his sister's couch to a life where his investing runs on autopilot. He tells you about the networking event where he stuffed cheese and crackers into his pockets with a full arm cast on, because he had no idea where his next meal was coming from.

Then comes the number that stops you cold: 48% of people earning...

What if the grind you think makes you successful is the very thing keeping you broke and exhausted?

Codie Sanchez, a former Goldman Sachs employee who has run 1,621 businesses through her company’s systems, sat down with Lewis to talk about money, freedom, and why most entrepreneurs across the US earn less than California’s $78,000 minimum wage. Her book Own or Be Owned is built on one uncomfortable question: do you own a business, or does it own you?

She tells the story of walking into a bank for a loan and finding the account she...

You have been trained to reach for your phone the second you get bored, and it is quietly costing you the ability to think.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor and the author of Deep Work, sat down with Lewis and explained why he has never once had a social media account. He also wrote Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, and to test the idea he ran a 30-day declutter with about 1,600 readers who sent back reports on what happened when they stepped away.

The results are hard to shake...

You can have every fact, every plan, and still quit by Thursday, because the story underneath never changed.

Dr. Kim Foster, a family physician who practiced for twenty years, sat down with Lewis after a patient with rising blood pressure told her, “I'm just not an exercise person.” That one line reframed everything: behavior change is an identity problem wearing an information costume. Her book, Redesigning You, turns that into a three-step method of recognizing the old story, redesigning it, and then going out to collect proof.

She talks about the bridge identity, the small beli...

You're not stuck with money because you're lazy or bad with numbers. You're running a program you never chose. 

You inherited it. It got set by what your family earned, what went quiet at the dinner table, what your friends made, what that first good job paid you. Nobody sat you down and taught you to fear money. You absorbed it and built a ceiling out of it. 

In this solo episode Lewis walks through the five money beliefs that keep almost everyone stuck, and gives you a specific assignment for each one. It's the wo...

Your pain will keep pushing you until a bigger vision starts pulling you instead. Not the vague, hopeful kind either, but the gut-level knowing that there’s more waiting for you than the life you’ve been tolerating. Most people never feel that pull until the pain gets loud enough to force it.

Michael Beckwith knows that shift intimately. Long before he became the founder of Agape International Spiritual Center, the global spiritual community he’s led since its first Sunday service in 1986, he was an agnostic revolutionary who spent his early twenties trying to talk Christians out of...

You get good at whatever you practice, and most of us have quietly mastered waiting.

Kier Gaines knows what that waiting costs. He's a licensed therapist who grew up in a rough DC neighborhood never expecting to see 21, and now spends his sessions untangling why people freeze right before the moment they've prepared for actually arrives.

He walks you through the difference between blame and responsibility, and why anger can feel like armor until it quietly becomes the thing holding you back. You'll hear why self-victimization can feel like the safest story to tell yourself...

Angela Duckworth, the psychologist who made “grit” a household word, sat down with Lewis and confessed something her research almost missed. Effort alone doesn’t build a great life. The situation you’re in does, and no one shapes that situation more than the person you marry. She traces it back to her own mother, a gifted painter who gave up her art for fifty years married to a man who walked past her paintings without a word.

Then Angela goes further, into a marriage crisis she and her husband Jason never talked about publicly. Both of them wer...

80% of people feel stuck in their own lives right now, and it has nothing to do with willpower.

Dr. Katy Milkman, author of How to Change and professor at Wharton, breaks down why status quo bias and sunk cost thinking keep us glued to relationships, jobs, and habits that stopped working long ago. She explains the fresh start effect, why moments like Mondays, birthdays, and new zip codes actually rewire our motivation, and why waiting for a bigger breakdown might be costing you years.

You will hear how she turned a dreaded gym habit into...

The version of you who thinks debt is the enemy has never heard it explained this way.

Sharran Srivatsaa went from dumpster-diving for food his first week of college to running Acquisition.com alongside Alex and Layla Hormozi, and the money rules he lives by now would sound insane to the kid who once got mugged for $100 within seven hours of landing in America. He talks about the ratchet clause that quietly shrank a $47 million payout down to under $5 million, and why that single contract mistake sent him to business school and Wall Street to learn the...

That chest pain you can't explain, that anger that fires before you can think, that heart you've quietly sealed off since someone broke it. There might be a reason it's still there.

Dr. Bradley Nelson spent 38 years as a chiropractor before realizing something wild: about 90% of the physical pain he saw in patients traced back to emotions they never fully processed. Anger, grief, and guilt don't just disappear when we bury them, he says. They get trapped in the body, distort its energy, and quietly run the show.

He talks about the “heart wall,” an invi...

Your body is talking to your brain constantly, telling it either 'I'm safe' or 'I'm not safe.' The posture you default to when no one's watching might be the thing keeping you stuck.

Amy Cuddy, the social psychologist behind one of the most-watched TED Talks ever, sat down to unpack what actually builds confidence when the world feels unstable. She talks about the difference between faking it and becoming it, why imposter syndrome hits 75-85% of people, and why the bullies who came after her post-TED fame taught her more about personal power than the research...

That feeling when a small comment ruins your entire day? There's actually a name for it, and it's not a character flaw.

Dr. Sasha Hamdani is a board certified psychiatrist and ADHD specialist who spent years thinking something was fundamentally wrong with her before she connected the dots between her emotions and her ability to function. She was diagnosed with ADHD in fourth grade but her parents never told her, calling her medication a “vitamin” until she found out by accident in medical school, mid breakdown, after a grade crash she couldn't explain.

In this conv...

You can't manifest a new life while you're still living inside an old identity.

Transformational coach and hypnotherapist Jim Curtis has worked with entrepreneurs and public figures on the pattern behind their stuck points. He calls it release, align, become, a framework built to break the subconscious programming running your life.

It starts with forgiveness. Not the version where you forgive everyone else. The version where you look yourself in the mirror and say I'm sorry first.

Your subconscious can't build a life it doesn't believe you deserve. Chase the money or the...

The reason your kid melts down over a puzzle has nothing to do with the puzzle. It's about whether they've ever been shown that frustration is survivable instead of something to run from.

Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist who spent years teaching parents the textbook model built on timeouts and sticker charts, once stopped mid-session with a paying couple and told them she no longer believed what she was teaching them. That moment of honesty became the seed of Good Inside.

She walks through the three lines she leans on with her own kids...

There's one reason your new habits never stick, and it has nothing to do with willpower.

Peter Crone has spent decades coaching PGA Tour golfers, Major League Baseball athletes, and top executives on the subconscious wiring behind their results, and he breaks down why force can override a habit but never an identity.

He explains why most relationships start as attachment and codependency instead of real love, why hatred is a wound you carry inside yourself, and why the story you keep telling about your pain is the thing keeping you stuck in it.

You could hand two people a million dollars and one of them would be broke again within a year. The other builds a legacy. The difference has nothing to do with luck.

Anthony O'Neal, author of Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck, walks through the five phases that took him from borrowing money for car speakers to building a real estate portfolio he pays for in cash. He breaks down why 48% of people earning over $250,000 are still living check to check, and why your credit score might be lying to you about your actual wealth.

This...

You've been taught that YES means you won. Chris Voss says it's usually the moment you get played.

The former lead FBI international kidnapping negotiator built a career proving the opposite of what most of us believe about persuasion. NO isn't rejection. It's the moment the real conversation starts. YES, more often than not, is a counterfeit answer people give just to get you off the phone.

Voss is the founder of The Black Swan Group and the author of Never Split the Difference, and in this conversation he breaks down the exact language that...

You've been running on a program installed before you could even talk, and you had no say in writing it.

Cell biologist and former medical school professor Bruce Lipton spent his career studying epigenetics and quantum biology, and he says your subconscious recorded almost everything about how to live before age seven. That program runs 95% of your day on autopilot, and you're the one person who can't see it while it's playing.

Stress hormones don't just make you anxious. They shut down your immune system and reroute blood away from your gut, which is why...

Your grief is not the thing keeping you stuck. Running from it is.

David Kessler spent years working alongside Elisabeth Kubler-Ross before everything he taught got tested against his own life, when his son died unexpectedly and the grief expert became the one who needed help.

He talks about sitting in a grief group with his own books on the table and still not being able to say the words out loud. About discovering there is a stage past acceptance, one built on meaning instead of just getting through it.

You will hear...

Some feelings get labeled good. Others get labeled bad. That single belief might be running your entire life.

You'll hear why chasing happiness on command wears you down instead of building you up, and why the fastest path to resilience runs straight through the emotions you've been avoiding. Susan David, the psychologist and researcher behind the book Emotional Agility, has spent over two decades studying why some people bend under pressure and others don't.

She breaks down the difference between having an emotion and being owned by it, using a simple image you'll carry into...

He slept in his socks on a garage floor because it was too filthy to touch. That was Jesse Cole eight years ago, broke, sleeping on an air mattress, betting everything on a wooden bat baseball team nobody wanted.

Jesse is the founder of Fans First Entertainment and the man behind the Savannah Bananas, the "Find Your Yellow Tux" author who turned a dying college summer league into a movement that now plays in front of millions.

He explains the moment he realized baseball itself was broken and why he studies Walt Disney more than...

A calm, healthy relationship can feel more dangerous to you than the chaos you grew up in.

That's hypervigilance. It hates the absence of a threat, so it manufactures one, even when you're finally safe. Patrick Teahan, a clinical social worker and childhood trauma educator, breaks down why your body still reacts like it's protecting a nine year old.

You're not overreacting. You're replaying. Teahan explains how most people experience the present entirely through the lens of childhood, filtering every text and every silence through wounds that happened decades ago.

This episode gets...

A clinical hypnotist told him the problem in one sentence. You don't believe, at a subconscious level, that you were meant to be successful.

That was Rob Dyrdek in his twenties, long before the professional skateboarder turned MTV star turned venture studio founder built a portfolio of brands and walked away from a run of exits. He tracks every minute of his day. He rates his life, his work, and his health on a scale of zero to ten, every single night.

What the data told him is not what you would expect. The discipline...

You're manifesting every single day. You're just doing it the wrong way.

That's according to Dr. James Doty, a Stanford neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who has spent decades studying what actually happens in your brain when you set an intention. His new book, Mind Magic, breaks down the neuroscience most manifestation advice leaves out completely.

Here's the block nobody talks about. It's not a lack of belief. It's fear. It's shame. It's insecurity running your nervous system without your permission, and it's keeping you stuck in survival mode instead of the state where real change actually...

There's one childhood question that's secretly running your whole adult life.

Aaron Doughty asks it straight: who did you have to be as a kid to receive Mom or Dad's love? Whoever that was became the role you're still performing, the pattern you keep mistaking for your identity.

Aaron built a YouTube following of over a million people teaching exactly this kind of subconscious pattern work, and in this conversation he walks through his SHIFT framework for breaking free of people pleasing, self reliance, and the need to be liked.

You'll hear why...

Your body can't tell the difference between anxiety and excitement. The only difference is the story you tell yourself.

Kelly McGonigal has spent her career at Stanford studying that story, and how the way you think about stress can quite literally change your biology, your relationships, and how long you live.

She will show you why the fear of stress may be more dangerous than stress itself, and why one built in instinct can stop you from burning out completely once you know how to trigger it.

You will learn why depression lies...

What if the story you keep telling about yourself is the only thing standing between you and everything you want?

You will hear the real difference between fortune and luck, and why one of them is completely in your control. Dr. Tina Seelig, a Stanford professor and neuroscientist, breaks down the framework from her book What I Wish I Knew About Luck and explains why the wind of opportunity might be blowing right past you.

Tina grew up terrified of things most people never think twice about. She rebuilt her entire risk profile from scratch...

Your body might be blocking the money you say you want.

Jamie Sea walked away from two seven-figure businesses and rebuilt everything from scratch. Now she runs an eight-figure company teaching people how to actually receive the abundance they keep chasing.

She calls it the Wealth Container. Five hidden layers decide what your nervous system will actually let you hold onto, and most people are stuck between the same two without even realizing it.

This conversation gets into why a simple compliment can feel unbearable, why women might be wired for financial abundance...

He turned down $14.5 million because a 3 a.m. truth wouldn't let him go.

Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey walked away from Hollywood for 20 months. No calls, no offers, no plan B. He talks about the exact moment that decision landed, and why turning down the money changed how the industry saw him.

At 20 years old he wrote 10 goals in a notebook, signed his name, and never looked at the list again. Thirty years later he found it while writing his memoir Greenlights. He'd hit all 10.

He also opens up about a solo trip...

The gap between what you want and where you are isn't bad luck. It's a belief you made as a kid.

David Bayer, author of A Changed Mind, calls it the Golden Equation: desire plus non-resistance equals your result. The block isn't the wanting. It's the meaning you attach to not having it yet.

Somewhere between 40 and 60, the exact strategy that made you successful starts to suffocate you. Bayer calls it the Core Program, the compensation you built around a childhood wound that's finally asking to be healed.

He spent years numbing himself...

The best in the world don't have high self-esteem. They have none at all. That single idea changes how you think about confidence, pressure, and every story you tell yourself before something hard begins.

This conversation features Dr. Mark McLaughlin, a neurosurgeon who has performed over 1,000 brain surgeries and 8,000 spine surgeries and is the author of Cognitive Dominance: A Brain Surgeon's Quest to Outthink Fear. He built a protocol for dismantling fear in the exact moment it shows up, tested across two and a half decades of operating on the human brain.

He walks through...

Most breakups have one thing in common, and it's never who you think it is. You can point to the fight, the distance, the way things quietly went cold. But the real story starts years earlier, in the exact moment you stopped noticing the shift.

Gary John Bishop, author of Love Unf*cked: Getting Your Relationship Sh!t Together, has spent decades studying why people stay stuck in relationships long after they know something is wrong. He built a career teaching people how to spot the moment they started tolerating what should have ended.

This...

You don't need money to start a business. You need to let go of your ego and find one customer, even if you don’t charge them anything.

Chris Koerner has built dozens of businesses from nothing, and he hosts The Koerner Office podcast where he shares new low cost business ideas every day. He says most people fail before they even begin because they play business instead of doing business.

He breaks down the barbell method for picking what to build next, why distribution beats the idea every time, and the year he spent le...

What if everything you were taught about wealth was designed to keep you stuck?

Lewis Howes spent his mid twenties broke, sleeping on his sister's couch with no degree and no plan. He turned that into The School of Greatness, a podcast nearing 2,000 episodes, and three New York Times bestselling books. He says the real block between you and wealth was never effort.

He walks you through the shift from trading hours for income to building systems that pay you while you sleep, plus the exact kind of room you need to sit in if...

There's a reservoir of untapped potential inside you right now. The only question is whether you'll reach it.

Colin O'Brady is the first person in history to cross Antarctica solo, completely unsupported and unaided, covering nearly 1,000 miles alone in 54 days while pulling a 375-pound sled through temperatures reaching minus 80 degrees wind chill. He's also a world record holder for the Explorers Grand Slam, having completed all Seven Summits and expeditions to both poles in 139 consecutive days -- a project he called The Impossible First.

Before any of that, he was a 22-year-old backpacker in Thailand...