Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The inner critic can drive you to extraordinary success. Then it can kill you. Riz Ahmed and Jay Shetty discuss how elite athletes toggle between the critic — who makes every point feel like everything — and the cheerleader, who can release that point immediately after it's over.
Where this was said
At 1:03:20 · chapter starts 1:01:55
Jay articulates a philosophy he has come to live by: he is not searching for a favourite place, he is searching for favourite people — the ones who take him back to the heart of himself, who calm his nervous system and switch off the active mind. Riz responds by confessing he has carried a lazy narrative about disliking LA for years — a cliché about driving and sprawl and disconnection. But on the morning of this very interview, surrounded by his wife, child, and visiting family, the house full and alive, he woke up loving the city. It was the same feeling as being a child surrounded by clapping aunties. Home is the people. The place is immaterial. He was confronted with the realisation that the lazy narrative had been wrong all along.
Our brains subjectively experience 50% of our entire lifetime between ages 0 and 8. That's why a single day felt enormous as a child and why years blur past now. The antidote, both Riz and Jay agree, is play — and protecting time for the Velcro-on-the-shoe moments.
Our brains subjectively experience 50% of our entire lifetime between ages 0 and 8, which is why time feels to accelerate as we age.
Jay Shetty listened to Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech every single day for 9 months, calling it the best speech ever given because Jobs knew he was going to die.
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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