The Kevin Miller Podcast

When a book came across my desk about the benefits of heat, my first thought was, “Really?” We’ve been in the age of cold plunges for quite a while, but now it’s heat? I also wondered, does it take an entire book to explain this? Then I saw the author was Bill Gifford. Bill is a veteran magazine writer and editor who writes about extraordinary athletes and cutting-edge health science. He is coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Outlive, which has sold more than two million copies, as well as the New York Times bestseller Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying). He is a longtime contributing editor at Outside, and his work has appeared in Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, Men’s Health, Bicycling, The Washington Post, and others, as well as in Best American Sportswriting. This latest book is called HOTWIRED: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, and in it he does like all the great journalist and shares his personal journey in experiencing heat therapy. What I initially intrigued myself with was Bill’s look into history where we routinely experienced long periods of high heat and air conditioning wasn’t normal until the 1950s and 1960s. We always had fire and the ability to heat up an environment, but when it was hot, for the span of our existence, we adapted to it. We discuss the issues around our seeming inability to deal with any discomfort, and how fragile we seem to be becoming in our culture. So while we can exist in temperature controlled environments almost entirely, and it may be comfortable, is this existence best for our overall health and well-being? Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I grew up believing we are only who we make ourselves to be. Nature vs Nurture and I was all about nurture. Then, I had seven biological children. Four boys and three girls. And they came out of the womb with specific propensities. Two of my sons are only 15 months apart, so their upbringing was nearly identical. And they could not be more different. As a culture we have gotten pretty enamored with personality profiles and ancestral data to help us “know who we are.” A well known profile is the Enneagram. My guest in this episode is Ian Morgan Cron. Ian is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, psychotherapist, and Enneagram teacher. He has a very popular podcast called Typology where he discusses aspects of the Enneagram. In this episode we talk about our personality and our propensities and reference one of Ian’s book, The Story of You: An Enneagram Journey to Becoming Your True Self. My interest was in honoring aspects of our natural selves while not being controlled by them. I’ll admit as time goes on I’m less clear on what about myself is natural and what is learned, and I actually don’t put too much stock in either, instead looking at what is giving me peace or not, and what is proving constructive to my life and others. You can connect with Ian at his website, typologyinstitute.com, and find him at his podcast, Typology. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think we’ve gotten to the point of defining hope as the expectation of something good happening in the future. But I’ve not found many, if any, people who I’d refer to as hopeful, who didn’t exude hope in the right here and now. A primary definition of hope is simply, a feeling of trust. My guest in this episode says, “Hope is the single best predictor of well-being compared to any other measure of trauma recovery.” So if hope includes having trust, then it’s relevant for us all to consider how trusting we feel in our lives. Not just in other people, but in life in general. My guest is Dr. Julia Garcia. Julia is a psychologist and author dedicated to empowering people through the science of mental health. Julia works with people facing life’s toughest moments—helping them overcome fear, doubt, and hopelessness to build lasting habits of healing and hope. She says her mission is to prove that hope isn’t just something you feel—it’s something you practice, one habit at a time. I find hope, trust, in short supply in our culture. And yet I find my own hope in the miracle of living, a constant fuel for my own peace and joy. Julia has written a book on her work, The 5 Habits of Hope: Stories and Strategies to Help You Find Your Way. We start off talking about the cultural concepts around hope, and then walk and talk through her five habits of hope. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have never wanted to give much credit to genetics or my upbringing. I wanted to feel, and really did, like I’m my own person. Until sometime in my 40s when I realized I kept repeating some patterns that weren’t helping me. Today I amaze myself at the impact our upbringing and family has on us. All of us. For better and worse, but as people so want to be their “authentic selves,” I wonder how fully authentic we can ever be. So…I have an expert. My guest and guide on this subject is Vienna Pharaon. She has a book called The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love. Vienna has been posting her insights, driven from thousands of patient encounters, on Instagram and has over 700k followers tuning in to find their authentic selves. Vienna Pharaon is a licensed marriage and family therapist and one of New York City’s most sought after relationship therapists. She has practiced therapy for almost 20 years and is the founder and owner of the group practice, Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy. Pharaon has been featured in The Economist, Netflix, Vice, and Motherly, and has led workshops for Peloton and Netflix, amongst others. Vienna has become a therapist that many other therapists look to for guidance. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cultural testimony is that while we are in more contact with people than ever, but we are also feeling more isolated, disconnected, and lonely than ever. That’s not a broad brush opinion but I continue to get the research and surveys to back this up. We seem to be a culture so hungry to be heard and understood and loved, and from this, we have become a culture working hard to tell. We tell our opinion and viewpoint and thoughts and feelings. And we ask fewer and fewer questions, and have fewer and fewer questions asked of us. But this isn’t a focus on simply asking more questions, but asking meaningful questions that foster true connection. My guest calls them “well constructed” questions. Topaz Adizes is an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and experience design architect. He is an Edmund Hillary fellow and Sundance/Skoll stories of change fellow. His works have been selected to Cannes, Sundance, IDFA, and SXSW; featured in New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times; and have garnered an Emmy for new approaches to documentary. He is currently the founder and executive director of the experience design studio The Skin Deep. If you go to YouTube and search for The Skin Deep you will find his channel with almost a million subscribers. On this channel you will find couples. They may be married, parent and child, best friends, or any pairing of two people desiring a close relationship, and they take turns answering questions that Topaz and his team have prepared. Questions that open each other up and connect. I fascinate myself. Topaz also has a new book that digs into the concepts, called 12 Questions for Love: A Guide to Intimate Conversations & Deeper Relationships. You can also find a lot of offerings for these well constructed questions at skindeep.com Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I recorded this episode three years ago. Before I’d experienced the greatest traumas of my life. I make different meaning from the message now. The idea of recovering from a trauma or tragedy is different. To recover seems like getting back to “normal.” Back to where you were. But with my experience now, this is impossible. It’s like having adult kids and wanting to get back to when they were little. Impossible. You must recover to a new existence. My guest is Dr Neeta Bhushan. When Neeta was 16 her mom died. When she was 17 her brother died. Then when she was 19 her Dad died and she became caregiver for her younger brother. She “recovered” and started a successful cosmetic dentist business. She married and then divorced from an abusive marriage. She finally found some real recovery and later founded the Global GRIT Institute and cofounded the Dharma Coaching Institute. She has a very large following and a popular podcast, The Brave Table, where people tune in to hear her guidance on dealing with the hardships of life. I met Neeta after she published her book, That Sucked. Now What?: How to Embrace the Joy in Chaos and Find Magic in the Mess. We cover deep territory in regards to what resilience and recovery really is and how it differs for each of us, depending on...a lot. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bill Burnett, director of Stanford’s Life Design Lab and former Apple designer, shares how to treat life as a design problem. He discusses design thinking for life decisions. He explains meaning as felt responses, how to access flow and wonder, identities that change over time, and why relationships and intentional choices shape a meaningful life.

I seldom give focus to money in this podcast, and this episode has nothing to do with making more or managing your money. It’s on how we make meaning of money, which may dictate more about your money situation than anything else. And to that degree we are looking at how you feel about your money, more than whatever your situation may be. We all likely know people with lots of money who stress about it far more than some with very little. My guest in this episode helped me reposition how I think about money. Long ago we exchanged goods and service with each other. Today we do the same thing, but the exchange happens through money instead of the direct product or service. But of greater focus we are looking at our attitude towards money. My guest in this episode is a self-help legend and celebrity in Japan where he's sold nearly 9 million books about this topic. Ken Honda is the author of Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money. But it's not money Ken is concerned about, it's your happy soul. This is why he has most of his own country following him, and now is claiming hearts around the world, including now, America. He joined me via Zoom from somewhere near Tokyo and we just had a super sweet time together. Ken ultimately endorsed my book, “What Drives You, for the Japanese market. I think you'll find a significant paradigm shift in your perspective on money and a new hope for feeling better about it. I did. Truly. There are products and services we don't want to spend money on. Such as, we don't want to give $1,000 to a car mechanic to fix something that went wrong on our car. So we give the mechanic money with sad feelings. Sad energy. And the mechanic is on the receiving end of getting sad money. Would you like to change this perspective, as the customer and the mechanic? Ken is going to help. We start off addressing the common negative feelings many people have towards money, and turn it on its head. It's not money we are upset with. It's really the work we don't like and aren't proud of, that we are doing to earn money. It's more about how we are earning our money than the money itself. I think you will be so stoked with this episode you'll want to share it with everyone you know. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think the cultural perspective on optimism has decreased, even to the point of it being naive. It seems in vogue to be pessimistic and even cynical. The definition of optimism is, hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something. So let’s consider the converse. In dealing with a challenge in your life, do you think your chances of being resilient and coming out with a best case scenario would be better served with a perspective and attitude of hopelessness and doubt? I thought of a surgeon. Would I rather my surgeon have hopefulness and confidence in my procedure, or hopelessness and doubt? Yes, we want them both to have skill. But I like this juxtaposition. My guest in this episode is Dr. Deepika Chopra. Deepika is a behavioral scientist and psychologist who specializes in what she has coined as, "evidence-based manifestation," which draws from behavioral science, emotional fitness, neuroscience, and ancient wisdom to build modern tools for resilience and joy. She holds a doctorate in clinical health psychology and completed a double postdoctoral fellowship at both the University of California at Los Angeles and Cedars Sinai Medical Center. She completed her formal dissertation on the topic of optimism, positive sensory visualization, and the connection to optimal well-being. She is a recurring guest on the TODAY Show, and her work has also been featured in Forbes, Harper's Bazaar, VOGUE, GOOP, Variety, E!, and more. She has led workshops for companies like Google, Amazon, and Amex, and has delivered keynotes at events including the Aspen Ideas Festival and The Atlantic’s In Pursuit of Happiness. But more than any of those accolades what I intrigued myself most with, is she has a sone with a severe chronic illness. An illness that is likely to see his life cut very short. When we first started our discussion I asked her how he was doing, and Deepika said he was doing ok. Today. She lives day by day with his very existence in the balance. And she has devoted herself to optimism. So much so that she’s now know as “The Optimism Dr.” Deepika has a brand new book titled, The Power of Real Optimism: A Practical, Science-Based Guide to Staying Resilient, Curious, and Open Even When Life Is Hard. Find her at thingsarelookingup.co Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Hyatt, business mentor and author known for leadership coaching, explores how perception and narrative shape satisfaction. He and Kevin probe how the brain crafts protective stories, how to identify and reimagine unhelpful narratives, and practical steps to test and rewire beliefs. Short, practical conversations on language, community, and daily mindset practice.