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 to the private story you tell yourself about yourself. She explains why “Been busy?” is the single worst question in small talk, and why asking for stories beats asking for facts every time.The most honest moment comes when Lewis asks what she still struggles with. Her answer is charging for her own work, a belief she traces back to her early twenties, and you get to hear a level three conversation happen live.You will walk into your next dinner or team call ready to say “tell me more” and actuall

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 did not have to give him.She gave it to him anyway. Three weeks after crawling through a curtain as an unannounced warm-up act at Def Comedy Jam, he won the Apollo. Years later, when Netflix passed on him, he paid for the special himself, shot it, and brought it back to them. They bought it, and then he broke Mariah Carey's attendance record in Hawaii with 22,000 tickets.He still prints flyers. Ten thousand of them, for sold-out shows, put on windshields by hand. He talks about his mom rolling lumpia to sell at work durin

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 time, it became one of the best conversations Lewis has ever recorded, because he stopped performing his homework and just stayed present and curious.He gets honest about launching The School of Greatness with an iPhone and no idea what he was doing, asking questions he thought were basic and dumb. Confidence came after the action, never before it. Perfectionism and procrastination wear the same costume, and self-trust only gets built by surviving the attempt.Ask yourself the uncomfort

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, and how collapsed boundaries between home and work make it worse. Lewis opens up about eczema that cleared within days once he stopped abandoning himself in his relationships and career.Jonathan walks through the ideas in his book Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work That Makes You Come Alive, and Lewis learns he is a Maven who hates Essentialist work. You also get Jonathan’s blunt question for finding purpose: what should I just stop doing entirely?You will finish this one ready to take the free Spar

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 over $250,000 a year are still living paycheck to paycheck. A raise was never the answer. Lewis walks through why rich is a number and free is a length of time, and why saying no to a $20,000 sponsorship or a $10,000 coaching call felt like losing his mind right up until it felt like peace.You will hear how one conversation at a salsa club sent him to Toastmasters and rewired what he could charge, and how he bought a life insurance policy in his twenties for a wife and kids who did not exist yet.By the en

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 thought held a million dollars almost empty. That night she sat in the dark and called her dad, who told her you are not really in the game until you have had a night like that. She never ran a business without systems again.The fixes she shares are simpler than you expect. Most businesses are underpriced by 30 to 300 percent, fewer than a third have recurring revenue, and hard work has almost nothing to do with how much money you make. She also explains why more than 80 percent of k

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. Roughly half found no real value in social media and dropped it for good. Of the half who did find value, like visual artists who needed Instagram to see other people's work, about 95% moved it off their phones entirely and onto a scheduled desktop session, sometimes twenty minutes on a Sunday night. Cal also points to college mental health centers that saw anxiety cases jump around fivefold the same year students started arriving on campus with smartphones.Lewis tells his own story here too. Fifteen

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 believable stretch your brain will actually accept instead of a mirror affirmation it answers with, “Interesting. Based on what?” Habit stacking is the app. Identity is the operating system, and glitchy apps on an old system crash on the hard days.Then she tells on herself. She walked into the woods behind her clinic after stitching a patient's hand, realized she never wanted to go back, wrote her resignation letter, and then stayed throug

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 work at the center of his New York Times bestselling book Make Money Easy, stripped down to what you can actually do this week. Your mind will defend that ceiling like it's protecting you. Every time you climb above it something pulls you back down and you call it bad luck. It isn't luck. It's a thermostat. These beliefs only survive because nobody ever says them out loud. Four numbers, thirty days, and one uncomfortable conversation is where the whole thing breaks.Make Money EasyTh

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 their faith. Then came a dream where three men held him down and drove a knife into his heart, and he woke up inside a wave of presence and love so overwhelming he spent the next four decades trying to help other people find their way back to it. These days he’s walking through his own separation, from a marriage that began in 2000, and he refuses to call either of his marriages a failure. He calls them both successful, because lo

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, even when it's the one keeping you stuck.His new book, “It All Starts When You Do,” pushes back on the idea that healing has a finish line. He talks about interrogating his own beliefs instead of protecting them, and why letting his daughters struggle a little now and then might be the most loving thing he does as a father.By the end, you'll be sitting with his simplest, hardest question: how much is actually enough, and what would it feel l

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 were try-harder people who worked themselves into misery during the 2008 crash, until Angela told him on a walk that she cried every night and didn’t want to be married anymore. What saved them wasn’t more grit. It was therapy, three therapists between two people, and a willingness to change the situation instead of just pushing through it.Lewis matches her story with his own, requiring therapy before he’d even commit to dating Martha, because every past relationship had o

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 something she craved just by pairing it with Harry Potter audiobooks, and why a Google experiment on exercise proved that flexible backup plans beat rigid discipline every single time. She also gets honest about her own struggle with work life balance, choosing late night work over time with her five year old, and what she is doing to change that pattern right now. If you have ever broken a promise to yourself and felt the confidence drain out of you a little more each time,

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 language money is actually written in. You will hear why he thinks money loves speed but wealth loves time, why every goal needs an actual plan instead of a wish, and why the four money monsters (inflation, taxes, interruption, fees) are quietly eating your future more than any bad investment ever could. He also gets honest about losing a million dollars to a con artist who vanished three days after cashing his check, and the four questions he now asks before t

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 18 years as a chiropractor, and what kept showing up led him to a wild realization: about 90% of the physical pain he saw traced back to emotions his patients 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. About a decade in, he started building a method around what he was seeing: The Emotion Code — and has spent the last 20 years certifying more than 17,000 practitioners in 108 countries. He talks about the “heart wall,” an invisible barrier that around 93% of people build without knowing it, and how taking it down has helped people fall in love, heal from depression, and let go of pain they'd carried for decades. Lewis shares his own story too, a years-long ache in his chest that

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 ever did. You'll hear about the exact breathing pattern she uses before high-stakes moments, the simple writing exercise that beats any pep talk, and why she thinks reframing anxiety as excitement changes everything. There's also a story about a nurse named Alex Wubbels who got thrown against a wall for doing the right thing, and what that taught Amy about the kind of bravery that has no glory attached to it. This conversation will make you rethink every

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 conversation she breaks down why ADHD is genetic rather than trauma driven, why women are diagnosed on average at 35 instead of childhood, and why so many get handed antidepressant after antidepressant for the wrong diagnosis. She also opens up about rejection sensitive dysphoria, the moment her father's sudden death taught her that unregulated emotion can shut down your whole life, and the years she spent secretly dating her now husband while terrified

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 relationship hard enough without changing the belief underneath it, and it finds a way to hand it back. This episode gets into imposter syndrome in high achievers, the Three Gs of grounding, giving, and gratitude, and the exact prayer Jim uses to settle his own fear. You'll want a mirror by the end of it. Pre-order Jim's New Book: The Book of Possibility The Stimulati Experience: 9 Skills for Getting Past Pain, Setbacks, and Trauma to Ignite

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 in almost any hard moment, starting with letting them know she's glad they came to her at all. It sounds small, but she says it might be the single most healing thing a parent can offer a kid who's struggling. Boundaries come up too, and she reframes them completely. A boundary isn't a threat or a punishment, it's what lets a kid feel like someone calm is actually flying the plane, even while they're the one melting down in the back. By the end you'll understand why s

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'll hear why the mind isn't the brain, why you can't heal from the same level of consciousness that created the problem, and why chasing certainty is the exact thing keeping you anxious. This conversation will change how you see the parts of yourself you've spent your whole life trying to fix. Sign Up For Peter's Mastermind: Website Peter on Instagram Peter on Facebook In this episode you will: Discover why willpower fails to create lasting change and what actuall