Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
External markers of achievement — awards, applause, Oscars — are fleeting dopamine hits that don't nourish your soul. Riz Ahmed is chasing something else entirely: that moment when you forget yourself. Not the milestone. The feeling of losing yourself in the journey.
Where this was said
At 14:40 · chapter starts 11:42
Jay asks what Riz Ahmed's dream looks like now that he has ticked boxes others only fantasise about — Oxford PPE, Hollywood stardom, an Oscar. Riz's answer is revelatory: he doesn't experience his journey as 'living the dream.' The award, the round of applause, these dopamine hits — they feel good but they're fleeting, and they don't nourish you on a soul level. [1] — Riz Ahmed "External markers of achievement — awards, applause, Oscars — are fleeting dopamine hits that don't nourish your soul. Riz Ahmed is chasing …" 14:40 What he is actually chasing is flow — the state of forgetting yourself, feeling connected to all things, losing self-consciousness entirely. He uses the image of a child fascinated by the Velcro on a shoe as the ideal state. The destination is only worth setting so you experience the journey, he says; the joy of Bait came not from its reception but from the act of reaching inside a vulnerable place and offering something up. He cites a sample from J. Cole's 'The Climb Back' — drawn from The Tao of Leadership — asking the defining question: is it to get, or is it to let go?
Anxiety is not fear. Fear has an object — a wolf, a threat. Anxiety is the vertigo of standing at the edge of infinite possibility and knowing that choosing any one thing closes off all the others. Kierkegaard argued that the depth of your anxiety is proportional to the depth of your potential.
AI nailed Andrew Huberman's vertigo-vs-low-blood-pressure diagnosis because that pattern has been reported millions of times. But every patient's liver is different and data on liver surgeries is scarce worldwide — making solo robot surgery dangerous. The rule is simple: data abundance means AI can help; data scarcity means keep the human in the loop.
Fei-Fei Li's father had liver surgery performed by a da Vinci robot guided by a surgeon. The result: 10 times less blood loss than a typical procedure. This isn't replacement — it's the gold standard of human-machine collaboration, where the human's judgment and the robot's precision combine.
US drug overdose deaths fell from 110,000 to roughly 70,000 — the biggest CDC-recorded single-year drop ever. Men's rates fell 27% in one year, and the steepest decline of all was among 15–24-year-olds, down 37%. The crisis narrative around young men needs to make room for signs of genuine progress.
Kessler thought his grief expertise would protect him. It didn't. When his son David died unexpectedly, he found himself on the floor — and eventually realized that acceptance alone wasn't enough. That unmet need became the sixth stage: finding meaning.
Grief isn't just death — it's any unwanted change. Kessler lectured at Coca-Cola and General Mills not because they had lots of funerals, but because change management is grief management. People who grieve well live well.
Witnessing someone's grief isn't just emotional support — it's an essential act of healing. Kessler argues grief is a severance and connection heals it. But real witnessing has two steps: seeing the pain AND affirming the person's capacity to recover.
Avoiding grief isn't free — it's exhausting. Kessler's beach ball metaphor nails it: pushing a small balloon down is easy, but holding a massive beach ball underwater takes constant, draining energy. Unattended feelings don't disappear; they just consume you.
Most people try to control their environment to avoid triggers. Kessler flips this entirely: triggers aren't problems to manage around — they're a detailed map to your pain and your healing. Every trigger points directly to what needs attention.
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