Expand, Explore, And Experience Life To The Fullest with Dr. Chris Stout

And that aspect of feeling like you can be authentic, you can be vulnerable, you can be yourself, gives a very nice complement to equity and inclusion. Kinds of considerations and things for leaders.

Welcome to the Alchemist Lounge. What if you could hang out with high performing executives, entrepreneurs and leaders, ask them about how psychedelics have impacted their self improvement journeys. Then take an insight or two to guide your own growth. Each week, Alex Atwood takes an in depth look at how psychedelics can increase fulfillment, solve personal problems affecting your career, and help you gain the success you seek. Alex is an executive and psychedelics coach to high performers and his goal is to provide strategies to help you reduce conflict, bring awareness and balance your life through the use of psychedelics. Now here's Alex, everyone.

Welcome. Welcome to another episode of the Alchemist Lounge. And today in the lounge, we have a very, very special treat for you. We have Dr. Chris Stout. Now, if you've never heard of Dr. Chris Stout, well, you are in for something. First of all, he has done so much, such a wide range of accolades. We're talking about Invitation to TED Talks, Davos Renaissance Weekends, which I want to learn a lot more about. Chris is a licensed clinical psychologist. He's the founding director of the center for Initiatives, which is a top rated healthcare nonprofit. He's traveled to over a hundred countries. He's founded a kindergarten in Tanzania. And that's just some of it. And I went through, hi, Chris, good to see you. Yeah, I went through your list of articles and publications and it was almost like an endless scroll of things that you've been working on. So you're clearly someone who's curious about the world. You're clearly someone who just loves to learn, loves to continue to discover. So, just so stoked to have you on the show today. Let's start somewhere, because as I was going through here, you something this past Monday called the Weirdo Challenge. Can you tell us more about that?

You are up to date for a number of years for whatever reasons. There would be like these weird kinds of challenges that come across. My daughter kind of sent me one around. It was called the Everest Challenge. It was basically to make a climb of some sort. You could run it, you could ride a bike, you could walk it, you could hike it, you could do whatever. But to total 29,029ft. And I thought, well, that was kind of cool. And there's a hill near where I live. We were talking off mic before. I'm on a bluff here, so it was easy. I could just walk out my front door and go do that a number of times. And prior to that, there were just all these other kinds of weirdo challenges. You know, there's polar plunges and there's fire runs, and there's the classics. You know, there's marathons and 5Ks and those kinds of things. Back in the day, when I was in college, I was really into bicycling, and I was a licensed racer. So we had. There's a thing down in Bloomington, Indiana, called the Hilly Hundred, and it was is two days worth of riding the hills in Bloomington, and, you know, just all these kind of fun things that add a little bit more spice to kind of what's going on. I just read in Men's Health, A.J. abrams wrote this article about walking to the moon. So there's just a different way to keep track of your miles. I had a friend in high school who was probably going to be at the Olympics, and had we not boycotted it in 1980, and he would get bored with all of his swimming laps because that was his sport. And he started plotting it. If he were swimming the Mississippi river, how far would he get next week or the week week after that? So it's just kind of a fun way to add a little variety and interest. I just. The one I just finished was called, thanks to Tip of the hat to A.J. abrams tank curling. So you do barbell curls over time to the equal the amount of an Abrams tank, which is about 55 tons. So I started that, and it took me 41 days, and I started that back in early part of December and finished it up, which was kind of the cue to then write up that article. So those are my weirdo challenges just a little.

Yeah, I should have included thrill seeker in your introduction. And I'm sure your biceps must have gotten pretty, you know, pretty rock solid there.

Yeah, I went and ran today, so it was so much nicer to go run than it was to not have to touch a dumbbell.

Yeah. You know, you mentioned that being the spice of life, and I heard you say that your childhood, it sounds like, is where this sort of was seeded. Tell me about that. Tell me about your childhood. Where did all of this interest and curiosity and thrill seeking come from?

It probably from being denied it as a child. So my folks. I'm an only child. My folks got divorced before I was one, and I lived with a, you know, a very overprotective single working mom and her mother, my grandmother. And I mean, it was just. Oh, I had these orthopedic issues. So I had to Wear these clodhopper shoes. I was like knock kneed and stuff, as they called it back then. And so I didn't have a pair of running shoes or tennis shoes and stuff until I was like 12 years old. And my mom was terrified that I would get hit by a car if I had a bicycle. So I didn't bought a wrecked bicycle from a friend of mine in elementary school and put it together and stuff. And we never had any money, we didn't get to go on vacations and you know, it's just sort of like all these things I'd never done. I didn't stay in a hotel until I was like 18 years old. So it was just honestly pent up demand. All these things that I had wanted to do, didn't have much experience at, but just really, you know, Johnny Quested, you know, in my fantasy land of, you know, kind of what life could be like. And I read an article, it was in Life magazine. Oh gosh, I want to say probably published in 71, 72, something like that. I read it when I was about 13 years old. I should also say too, when by the time I was 13 years old I weighed about 20 pounds more than I weighed a day. And I was not 62 when I was 12 years old, so I was quite obese. I had a high BMI of 33 and being named Stout. And so all these things kind of, you know, catch up with you when you, when you don't run, you don't exercise, you don't do these things. You're kind of addicted to Oreos and stuff. So anyway, I'd read this article and this guy, John Goddard, had made this Life list of stuff that he wanted to do and, and the stuff he wanted to do was just like kind of everything. You know, go down the Amazon and climb this and study that and do whatever. It was really kind of cool. And I really sincerely took it to heart. So I kind of created my own list of stuff I wanted to do. I still curate it and cultivate it and add stuff to it and sometimes take stuff off because it's just like, okay, it just ain't gonna happen. But that's, that's also been just part of trying to have a, an adventuresome life. And maybe it gets back to the weirdo challenges of just things. That proverbial cliche, which I think is true at least for me and some others, is like writing down helps concretize it, helps you think about it, helps you deconstruct it and say, well If I wanted to do this, how would I go about doing it? You know, I'm not just going to think I'm going to run a marathon and go run one tomorrow, but I also call it kind of like stacking. I try to have two or three different kinds of things support one another. So that makes it a little bit easier of whatever the end goal is.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, what's. What's really inspiring about that is, you know, as a child, we have all of these sort of fantasies and these lists and these things that we want to do, and so often we lose sight of those things. And it feels like you've really kind of kept that thread going even here where you are, you know, you've accomplished so much, you know, in your career, and yet the seed of that, the inception of that, that thread of adventure, that list continues on. Tell me about what led you to psychology. Was that something early on that you became fascinated with, or was that something you sort of discovered as you went through school?

More so, kind of discovered accidentally? When I was. My grandparents on my father's side didn't even graduate high school. My parents, I was the first person in my family to go to college. So it wasn't that my parents were against it, but it's just they didn't have an experience in it. They supported it and they didn't have money for it. Fortunately, I was able to have jobs and scholarships to be able to get me through undergrad. And, you know, people. I didn't know what to take. I didn't know what to study. I didn't have counselors in high school and stuff. And they said, well, you minored in art and you were a math major and a science major. Maybe architecture would be your thing. It's like, oh, okay. I never took a drafting class in high school, but sure, what the heck. So got into the School of Engineering at Purdue and liked that, made some lifelong friends there and got to draw fun things and design fun things and took a science class, or, pardon me, a school of science class, which was psychology. And I just kind of fell in love with it. And actually, even before that, since I was a math major, I'd also been suggested I might want to be a math major and maybe look at these new things called computers back in the late 70s. And I tried that to programs and Fortran, which was just torture. And Alex, I could not see myself just saying, okay, for the rest of my life, my career, I'm going to be writing, you know, programs. And this was like on deck writers. We didn't have monitors. I mean, it was just like. We had punch cards and stuff, just like a step above an abacus. So, you know, it sampled that, and that was my cup of tea. But once I took this psych class, I fell in love with it. So I wound up. And again, fortunately, because computer science and math were also in the school of science, I had a lot of credits that overlapped. So I wound up graduating, I think with. I took about every psych course there was. I think it was probably like 52 credits in psychology alone, just because I just gobbled it up my last semester as a senior and everyone else is kind of coasting. I took 21 credit hours, all in psychology, just because I loved psychology. And then that was, you know, the classic of, what do you do with an undergrad degree in psychology? You apply to graduate school because there's not much else you can do. So applied to graduate school and thought I would wind up seeing outpatient adults and kind of channeling for those that might remember my inner Bob Newhart. But I wound up working with children and families, inpatient settings. So every, you know, I always had directions, but, man, sometimes those directions had roadblocks or scenic routes or whatever. So it's just really been kind of a. A Mr. Magoo patchwork of what my career's been.

Yeah. It's funny how life turns out that way. Right. The path just kind of. Kind of shows up.

Sure. Yeah.

You mentioned sort of accidentally finding it.

Right.

And one of the things that I noticed is a phrase that you use pretty often is accidental humanitarian. And that's an interesting phrase. Tell me about that. You know, did that show up early on in your academic career? Where did that start to take shape?

That's a great question, Alex. In some way, I think probably role modeled by my mom. The downside, I don't know if upside or downside, but the. Some side of being an only child with a mom who never wanted to. I never had a babysitter. I mean, sometimes it'd be my grandmother, but usually as I went along with my mom, whatever she did. And my mom was very active in her church, and she did a lot of volunteer work kind of where her heart was. And I got pulled along, or I tagged along with that and saw that it impacted other people and that she enjoyed doing it. And it was kind of, you know, it was interesting to me as a kid. I didn't quite exactly fully understand it as I do now as an adult. And then I was in A service fraternity where we were always doing things and part of food drives. And a lot of times there's, there's fun volunteer activities. You know, walkathons were a thing, you know, back in the 70s and whatnot. So it was kind of neat. Even today, you know, there's people like all the climbs. I do it as a sponsor sponsored thing to increase awareness for our kindergarten in Tanzania and help fundraise and things like that. So it seems like a, if you're going to do these kinds of things, maybe out of a personal desire to go climb or do whatever, if you can also then maybe get some double duty out of it by being helpful to other people. But to your point about the accidental part of it never was a, a specific idea or a specific, you know, I didn't take a class in humanitarian intervention or anything like that, but it's just really kind of been the coalescence or combination of all these different kinds of activities that have led to what I enjoy doing the most really is the humanitarian work and the work at the center. So it was all kind of by accident, not by any kind of grand design or anything else, but just sort of what I really, you know, get my most satisfying kinds of activities, my most intellectually challenging kinds of problem solving kinds of things around.

Yeah, well, if you look at the career path that you took in, you know, being a humanitarian is, I would say, vital in being able to really work with those specifically around psychology and psychological issues and things like that. What do you see now in terms of the most pressing needs or issues faced we can call humanity, or we can look at it from the lens of psychology. You've been doing this for quite some time. You've seen society has shifted quite a bit since the 70s. Tell me a little bit about that. Like what, in your opinion are the most pressing needs or issues faced right now? And how have things evolved?

I mean, it seems like certain problems, unfortunately, are sort of evergreen and they just sort of maintain themselves, but different levels of being problematic. You know, mental health issues have always been present as long as people have been around. And I think sort of ironically, I worked a lot with the American Psychological association as an advocate, and we would go to the Hill, and I did that for 12 years around Parrot, what was called parity of being able to have psychological services covered at the same level as traditional biological kinds of issues and problems. And I'll tell you, Alex, the thing that was probably the most, in spite of all, you know, all those efforts and all those, you know, lobbying the Hill, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that helped diminish the stigma the most around mental health issues was Covid. It helped create this empathy for people to realize these are real issues, that these impact work. I see a lot of that now on the listservs and things that I read that employers are taking it more seriously. They're taking a look at benefits. They're taking a look at how they can create wellness programs within their businesses to help with productivity and to help with recruiting and to help with diminishing attrition. And human resources is really working, you know, hard across a variety of different kinds of platforms and companies to be able to help deal with that. So I think that gives me some sense of optimism. Now, that's very much US Centric. That's not the way it is around the entire world. But at least, you know, in North America, I think that's been a benefit in a positive direction. I think also from the global health side of things, it's oftentimes been a issue of resources. I had a guy on my show last year, Charlie Bressler, who is part of. Worked with Peter Singer for a company or a nonprofit called the Life you can Save. And their aspect was looking also at global health and how much further, if you are a donor, to be able to have your dollar buy more when it's in Africa than it is than when it's in New York City, so to speak. So I think there's more channels and abilities and optimism for those kinds of resources to be able to be drawn and marshaled in that kind of area. But the plaguing problem. I also worked at the UN for a year, and one of the things with the Millennium Goals and things like that, I don't know if it's. It's certainly part and parcel, and I would argue that it's probably dramatically causal, is poverty and poverty alleviation. So haves and have nots equals wars. Have and have nots equals poor medical care. Have and have nots equals poor living conditions and. And human trafficking and abusive relationships and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, those kinds of aspects, too, I think are tougher nuts to crack. A sociological to a psychological to a political kind of sphere. So it's kind of a long winded answer to a very direct question. But it's a. It's a complicated kind of circumstance. I think, you know, strides have been made, but, you know, there's still a long way to go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that it is a very broad and deep topic. When you mentioned that pandemic shed so much light on well being and how being able to sort of work on what's happening on the inside is just so important, not just to sort of an individual's sense of self and self care and health, but also to organizations, as you mentioned. And I actually just wrapped up a course around organizational well being. And I'm curious, have you seen a shift? I mean, you have a really unique perspective because you're able to both work on the macro through your work with the UN and through your, you know, work in clinical psychology. But you've also done quite a bit of work with nonprofits and in the business world. Are there any specific things that you would, any guidance or any advice you would give to those, you know, business leaders or organizations that are now in this sort of post pandemic world where well being is so important? What are some steps or what are some things to really focus on for those that are in that position?

You have great questions. Alex. The proverbial magic wand, I suppose. I think maybe things, I'm guessing this, I would like to think this would scale. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're, you know, in the startup arena and you know, kind of small things or if you're IBM or Microsoft or Google or something, it would be a similar kind of thing. But having an appreciation in the sense of employee benefits, I mean, as mundane as that might sound, oftentimes historically I worked with employers when we do what was called direct contracting of providing psychological services, sort of just paid for by the employer rather than an insurance company. And we would go, you know, talk to some of these CEOs and the CEOs would say, well, none of my staff is crazy, so what do I need psychological services for? So again, it's sort of like that microaggression of saying, you know, and misunderstanding what mental health is. And looking at that, you know, there's a growing literature looking at wellness and productivity, psychological as well as physical, being healthy and what they called presenteeism that sometimes people look at it in the sense of sick days, but sometimes other people show up, have low levels of productivity because they're, you know, depressed, but they, you know, were able to at least make it out of bed and get into work. I want to say I believe maybe fact check me on this, but I believe Chicago or at least in Illinois, there is a, some legislation passed where people could take kids. I think it was maybe with schools. My memory's A little fuzzy on this, but there's some kind of legislation passed where people could, like, literally quote what used to be a cliche or a joke of mental health days that someone could claim that, you know, as a sick day kind of thing. So I think those are all progressive kinds of steps, but to realize, too, that by virtue of, you know, diversity and inclusion considerations, that people that have different kinds of whatever issues that they're dealing with oftentimes don't feel like the workplace is the place to talk about that. You know, it's none of my boss's business to know what's going on, you know, my mental status or my relationship with my partner or my problems I'm having with my children or, you know, those kinds of things. So I think it's a delicate balance of leadership of a CEO and the C suite and human resources to know and to respond, respect the boundaries that they should allow their employees to set. And then when the employee has that choice to say, you know, that the door is open that they can talk about, you know, hey, I'm having a hard time being able to get family therapy services for me and my kids. That's a more comfortable kind of conversation to be able to have with people. So I think, again, it gets back to the benefits. You and I both were involved in startups, and we've been, you know, we consult with leaders and things, and, and the aspect of it is the sense of, you know, you're always looking at, you know, how can I maximize my margin? How can I diminish costs and increase productivity? And then oftentimes, you know, one of the first places to get, you know, trimmed back are wellness programs, because they're hard to quantify and hard to measure. Are they really working? What's my ROI on that? When it becomes like. Like my. My bad joke before of what was actually said, you know, that people feel like, oh, we don't need mental health services, or we don't need that to directly contract for that, or we don't need big insurance coverage in these kinds of areas, because those are things that. Where we could maybe cut back and it wouldn't be problematic. And then all of a sudden, you know, the. The horse has left the barn and it's a little too late when you start to see attrition rates increase or productivity diminish and you're kind of scratching your head wondering what the problem was. And indeed, it might be by virtue of benefit structure or diminishing something that was actually helpful that people wouldn't Necessarily be cheerleaders about, but certainly would miss it when it's gone.

Yeah, I see that as a shift amongst business leaders that I work with and speak with and consult with that they're taking a different view of the way collaboration within their organizations is, you know, sort of works. And specifically, I think now people are starting to see the bottom line is.

Right.

Really impacted by the health of the organization. In other words, having, you know, what they call now, quote, unquote, a toxic work environment. But more importantly, company culture, which was something that was sort of almost like a throwaway. Right. It was almost something where, oh, we have a great company culture. You know, we do pizzas on Wednesdays and we do this and that and the other. But what was missing there, right, Is. Is allowing. Allowing for vulnerability in the workplace, allowing for sort of human connection, relatedness, all of those things. Self expression. I've consulted with so many different organizations where leadership claims to have a certain type of culture that they're cultivating. And it really doesn't go beyond pizzas on Wednesdays or happy hour on Friday. Friday. Right. And. Right. And when you're. And when you're not physically around each other, when you're not in the same physical space, well, that stuff doesn't count anymore. So now it really is the relationships. It really is those connections. It is, you know, a group coming together to make an impact, whatever that that impact is that I think now leaders are seeing is just so important, and being able to quantify that impact and being able to kind of move through and make it a. Not just a. That's a good thing to have, but something that's just a must in any company. Right?

Yeah, check.

Check.

Yeah, exactly.

You know.

Well, you know, it makes me think. Alex, there's a friend of mine, a professor at the Harvard School of Business, Amy Edmondson, and she kind of conceptualizes this as what she calls psychological safety. And that aspect of feeling like you can be authentic and you can be vulnerable, you can be yourself, which I think is a very nice compliment to, you know, equity and inclusion, kinds of considerations and things that, you know, are for leaders. But as you were saying that, you know, what it made me think of is that I think it is really. And I don't have an answer for this. Don't ask me this question. But it's like, I think it's particular. It's always hard. It's always been hard. I think now people have an awareness and try to work on it, but I don't know any magic bullets. Of how to do it. Now with hybrid work, the esprit de corps, I think was much more. It's always hard, but I think it was easier when everybody was all kind of around the same water cooler, you know, or those little interstitial conversations on the elevator when you were going up to work or when you walk to the parking garage or you know, those kinds of things that you just can't have in a. In a hybrid work environment where people are in other areas. And I work with a company right now where we will have these virtual periodically, like a virtual happy hour on a Friday or we'll have a virtual holiday party or something. And they're fun, they're cute, they're designed and orchestrated. There's usually some kind of interesting software engagement package that they have as that involvement. So it's nice, but it's still. There's this. The distance of not having that frequency of being able to be in the mothership, in the office and the branch, in the whatever that I think makes it really tough to be able to achieve what we've just now been talking about. That kind of authenticity, inclusion, being vulnerable because it's a face on a screen. It's someone that you've never actually met. My daughter is working hybrid right now in her position and they had their first physical get together where it was kind of like everybody and the biggest conversations were like, I didn't know you were that tall. Or just kind of the physicality of seeing someone in person for the first time, you know, versus just, you know, this much of a postage stamp size things thumbnail. So those are tough. And I know there's people way smarter than me that are working on those kinds of things and I look forward to reading and seeing what they're doing and you know, what kind of solutions that they've been able to achieve.

Yeah, I'm with you. I think there's big changes coming, big positive changes and I'm excited to see how things end up. And you know, you make an interesting point and sort of a counterpoint to that is when things started going remote, you didn't necessarily know how many pets people had. Right. You didn't necessarily know a lot of the times when people, before people forgot to figure out how the blur works on the video you'd see all sorts of stuff and so. And so it sort of force people to be more authentic. Right. And so it's interesting, you know, while, while I think that there was. There's definitely a loss when you're not in person There was an opening there. And so again, it's all happening in real time. Things are changing quickly. This kind of leads me into. Into self expression, which I love the, I love the theme of your, of your podcast, which is living a life in full. And it absolutely points back to the thread that, that, that seed in your childhood when you made that list of, you know, things that were exciting and, you know, you know, things that were thrilling, you know, it just gives you so much more texture to your life. Tell me about the podcast. Like what led you to start the podcast?

Well, you know, probably very similar reasons to the genesis of you and your show and desire. Part of it was on our website that I have like a kind of a cool Rolodex. You know, I have this opportunity, opportunity to Forrest Gump myself into a lot of circumstances and situations and get to meet and know some interesting people and sometimes get to work with them and sometimes, you know, just to be a Wayne's World and I'm not worthy kind of circumstance. But the company I was working for at the time also wanted to have a podcast. So I was like, okay, well, hey, here, let me pitch this idea. Kind of little intrapreneurship. And they liked it. And originally it was going to be sort of this combo pack of, I don't know, you were probably much more organized when you started yours and I was when we started ours. But the idea was we'd probably have maybe two to three episodes a month. We would have it interspersed between people that worked at the company that I was working at to kind of highlight them. There's a lot of really good, talented people where I was, and the work they were doing was very global and generalizable. Plus it was stuff that I was interested in. The first, I had two guests on my first show. They were both friends of mine and they were both into marathoning and ultra running. They're both doctors of physical therapy. And they could talk about, you know, preventing running injuries and coming back and recovering from running injuries and all things that go into the training of marathons to ultras. And I. It was great. It was great fun for me. I really enjoyed that. And then it was going to be interview some of the people that I knew. You know, I've got astronaut friends and I've got all sorts of folk journalists and authors and athletes and motorcycle, a lot of motorcycle folks and stuff. So. So I kind of interspersed with them and they also, you know, everybody, if, if anybody's familiar with the show, kind of a maybe two uniting threads is that most people are sort of polymaths. They're. They're accomplished in more than one area. They do a lot of interesting kinds of things in addition to whatever their proverbial day job is. And then also most of them have some kind of philanthropic or humanitarian or, you know, helpful kind of aspect, either in their personal life as hobbies, as donors, as. Or maybe sometimes their, you know, their. Their day job as well, too. So then that all kind of evolved, and then I just kind of got more support to, you know, bring in some more of these, you know, interesting folks as well, because that, you know, numbers, you live and die by your. Your audience, and that got, you know, more people interested. So the thought was, well, if we can get more people interested and more listeners, then the more that we hear people from our own company, that'll help elevate them. So it worked. It was nice. It did that for a long time. Once I left that company, I said, you know, can I keep doing this just independently as myself? And they were like, sure, absolutely. We don't have any plans on, you know, keeping it or owning it or, or redoing it or rebranding it or anything. So then I really got to lean into my creative side and, you know, picking out who I wanted to talk to and part of it, too. Alex, I don't know if you've had this experience, but some of my guests were good friends of mine, but I kind of gotten colleagues, but I'd kind of gotten to this point in our relationship where there were certain things about them that I really always wanted to know, but I'd known them for like four or five years now, and. And it just seemed weird for me to like, to bring up, oh, hey, by the way, what. How did you do? Blah, blah, blah. You know, it's just like, out of. Out of the blue, but it's always kind of these things. I probably had a dozen or so guests that that was kind of a fit for as well, too. So it gave me this public opportunity to, like, ask these questions that have just been, you know, irking me or bugging me for the longest. So it's. It's been just really an opportunity. It's creative to give voice to a lot of people that do. Everybody's amazing that's been on the show and that, you know, some folks are more. More well known and household brands. Other folks are on their way to being that way. And it's a fun, you know, conversation, and we joke around a lot and laugh a lot, no matter who, who the guest is. And yeah, everybody's cool folks, you know, just, just like you and a lot of the guests that you've had.

Yeah, it's something else because you've been able to reach a pretty significant audience with your show. And it just goes to show that full self expression, living a life in full, being able to hear others who are just like you. I mean, ultimately we're all going through pretty much the same life experience with a few different colors here and there. And to be able to sort of connect to that, to relate to that and to get to capture an audience really is inspiring. And when you have these conversations and you learn about what it was really like to be able to achieve or what it's like to have a life that is filled with authenticity and self expression and texture really just resonate to audiences. And it is really something else to be able to uncover that in a conversation. I had a question, right, Yeah, I had a question, was a portfolio career. I saw that you had listed that in a LinkedIn article. Tell me, what's a portfolio career? What is that?

It's not anything that I coined. I think I started off, off that article with like a Merriam Webster dictionary definition of it. But basically the long and the short of it and kind of the way that I conceptualized it was that there's a variety of different kinds of aspects of things. And by this point in the conversation, audience members won't be surprised but that, you know, I've done a variety of different kinds of things. And I have felt that sometimes it's kind of like trying something on, seeing if it fits, seeing if it, you know, works and, and if it doesn't, then it's like, okay, well, I still learned something from this. You know, I, I don't want to do this as a career. I don't want to program in Fortran. I wound up doing some other programming later on, oddly enough. But you know, I at least had like some exposure to some, some, some something. So. And maybe I didn't want to spend all my life doing it, or maybe I didn't want to spend every day doing it, but every so often I could still work on a project or what have you. So the portfolio aspects aspect of it means there's a variety in your, of your experiences. Some might be totally not career related, but nevertheless helpful in terms of designing things or writing or what have you. So it's just basically sort of the, the variety pack, the hodgepodge, if you will, of those different kinds of activities. That it's not just been a straight. Everything's all psychology, everything's all clinical psychology, everything's all academia, everything's all this or that, but they're all this kind of combination that I. I have felt that just about even stuff that I didn't particularly enjoy doing, I still learned from and still informs maybe later on another project. Like, you know, when you've been with a. A failed startup, you learn real quickly of what not to do in the next startup so that even if they're not, you know, base hits or home runs, when the strikeouts happen, you still learn from those as well. Yeah.

What, what brilliant advice that is. There's been so many people that I've spoken with who assume that it's a. It's a very linear path. Everybody goes on. Right. And they end up somewhere because of so many years of working through and understanding something, and it's actually quite different. I had an interview a few months ago with someone who's in the fashion and men's. Men's fashion and has been doing this for a while. And I had assumed that, you know, he'd gone to, you know, fashion school or something like that. No, no, no. This person had a corporate career for years.

He was.

I think he's in his late 50s. And three years ago, he had an inspiration and just taught himself the fashion industry, and now he has his own brand. And I said, wow, you know, had I not asked you that question, I would not have known that. And that is exactly what it sounds like you're talking about with a portfolio career to put yourself in a container. Hey, I am a psychologist. Well, you're being a psychologist, but you, you can also be a thrill seeker, and you can also be a musician. You can also be so many other things. Possibilities are endless. The possibilities are only as limited to as what you declare that they are limited to. And everything else is open. And so that's what I hear when I hear portfolio career. So thank you for that. I guess the last thing that I'd like to chat about, and here in the Alchemist Lounge, we tend to. To learn a little bit about certain rituals or certain methods that guests will use in order to find balance. I've heard you say on some of your podcasts that you work with the WIM HOF method and you do some other things, maybe some physical, somatic type of practices. So my question to you is, do you have anything that you would either recommend to listeners or maybe something that you yourself use to find balance, to find stability in all that you're doing. And I'd love to hear that.

Sure. I have my clipboard, my lab coat on all the time. You know, I'm kind of experimenting with stuff and you know, doubling down on what seems to work and backing off or trying something else if it doesn't work. And I just maybe part of that, to answer your question and just, I would recommend for people to have a philosophy of that. I just started the. What's his name, Boss? Root. Rootin. I'm probably mispronouncing his last name, but he has also this breath technique. He's like a MMA former champion guy and stuff. And he's real into breathing and the whole Wim Hof and when Wim was on my show and stuff, he and I kind of had a little tussle and stuff. Although I'm a big Wim Hof fan. But it was just sort of like I like to have. And he does have science behind what it is that he does. There's a lot of woo woo stuff out there. But I'm a big fan of, you know, randomized controlled trials and published studies and peer reviewed journals and thing. So having said that, that always helps me get started to make sure that I'm not kind of wasting my time on something that's, you know, just kind of silly. I'll give you a kind of a off the top of my head laundry list. I'm real into sauna, very much enjoy that. I think that's helpful for me in a variety of ways of the. I meditate oftentimes if I can. During that I've got a recording of a binaural theta wave that I just love. So. So that in a sauna is just heaven for me. I mean, I just, I float out, you know, after hour, 45 minutes of that. And now where we've, we've moved to, it's very much super nature. There's forest preserves, there's like 18 forest preserves up here, three state parks. You can kind of, you know, what's called silent sports. You know, I'm a runner and a cyclist, so I can go run or I can go ride or I can go hike or I can and you know, kind of do all that and just be out in nature in three minutes time type of thing. And I found that has been very therapeutic for me also, I would say I pay attention to relationships, friendships. Since we've moved, we've been making new friends. The relationship I have with my wife, We've been married 37 years. We have two adult children. Closeness that I have with them and the contact that I have with them, I find is very grounding as well, well as sometimes challenging. We have very frank discussions with each other about all sorts of things from movies to politics to whatever else, kind of balancing the intellectual, the big fan of sleep. We've got a chili pad on our bed, a big fan of chili pad. So we'll try out these different kinds of things. And advice is very difficult. What works for me this year may not work for me four years from now. And so people just always, again, back to the lab coat and clipboard, you know, try things on, try things out. See what works for you as your life changes and evolves. Tweak that and evolve with it. But that's, you know, just having the, the experimentalist mindset, if you will, and seeing, you know, and looking at, think about, well, what's the result I'm looking for? Is it a better night's sleep? Is it losing 5 pounds? Is it a faster mile time on my 10k? What are the goals? And that also to me, back to the list. You know, it helps motivate me, it helps keep me accountable and helps keep me on focus and, you know, not just the next sparkly, bright thing, but also to commit to something and to commit to it, you know, full throatedly and full heartedly and to get to the end of it if it's a tank curling or whatever else it might be.

Chris, thank you so much. You've expressed such a vigor around just experiencing life to its fullest and it's really inspiring to hear that common theme. Just try it out, right? Just try out what it is that you're curious about and don't put limitations on what's possible because there's just so much possible in your life. You've clearly lived that. And so thank you for sharing. Is there anything else you wanted to cover before we wrapped up today?

No, this has been great. And you know, and again, Alex, kind of, it takes one to know one. I mean, the bit that I know about you and the episodes that I've listened to of your show, I mean, you, you walk the talk. You have a great authenticity with what you do. You have a great generosity with what you do as well. So it's been fun to have this kind of a conversation. I've been very much looking forward to it and it's, it's been great fun for me.

Thank you so much for the acknowledgement. This was awesome. And I know that our listeners, I'm sure They've learned a lot. Should they be interested in learning more about. About you? They can opt, obviously. Go check out the Living a Life in Full podcast and, you know, you have some books published there on Amazon. Anything else you'd like to share with our listeners if they're. If they want to learn more?

Sure, people can reach out. I do actually a fair amount of mentoring as well. Usually that's with early career people or people just getting out of college, my alma mater, with the School of Science students there. But yeah, check me out on LinkedIn. I'm fairly prolific on that. I'm what used to be called an influencer. Now they call it a top voice. So similar to where you've read that stuff, Alex, that's, that's the content that I produce and put out out there. But I'm on all the socials, so feel free. We have a newsletter, actually, I should also plug that a monthly newsletter on LinkedIn as well called Tools for Change. We just broke 150,000 subscribers to that, so I'm tickled and over the moon with that. So our next issue will come out. They come out the first Wednesday of every month. So we've got one coming out soon. So people can. Everything's always free all the time. We don't have any paywalls on anything. We're on. Good Lord. I think the podcast is on like 36 different streaming platforms, so any way that I can be of help, you know, just reach out and ping me. So it's. And then our nonprofit, if you're interested in global health, we have a million different kinds of lectures and downloadable books and quite a few languages and stuff there too. All free, all the time. And that's centerforglobalinitiatives.org so give me a holler, ping me something I can do to be of help. Be happy to try and see if I can.

Thank you so much, Chris. You are absolutely fascinating. I appreciate everything that you've. That you've shared with us here on the podcast and I have a lot more to talk to you about. So hopefully we'll be able to bring you back on again soon and see if we can talk through some more of the challenges and successes in the world. Thanks, Chris.

Thanks for listening in to the Alchemist Lounge. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review on Apple itunes. To catch all the latest from Alex Atwood, you can check out his website at Alexatwood Co. Thanks again, and we'll catch you next time at the Alchemist Lounge.

Sam.