The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes

People with psychopathy still feel, just differently from everyone around them.Dr. Patric Gagne, a diagnosed sociopath who went on to earn a doctorate and work as a therapist, sat down with Lewis and told the story she tells in Sociopath: A Memoir. As a kid she learned that saying “I don't care” out loud got her in trouble, so she lied, and lying made her feel safe.She talks about the pressure she called a vice, which she relieved by breaking into homes just to sit in the quiet, and the first grade day she stabbed a classmate with a pencil. Then she explains why secondary psychopathy, which may touch 5% of people, is treatable when kids get caught early.You will hear why a therapist who doesn't absorb your pain can be the best container for it, and why stopping someone from crying can stop the brain from healing. She also gets into the shame under people pleasing and narcissism, and the question she asks her own kids: how does it feel when you feel?You may come away a little gentler with the people you never

What if your anxiety is a smoke alarm, and your body is working perfectly?Dr. John Delony, a mental health expert with two PhDs, sat down with Lewis and said the thing most of us dodge: if you are awake at 2:30 in the morning, something in your life is on fire. Numbing it with a drink or a screen is like duct taping a pillow over the alarm while the house burns around you.Then he got personal. While he was writing Building a Non-Anxious Life, his wife walked into his basement gym and told him, “I'm watching my husband die,” and then, “John, we have enough.” His little girl would not hug him, and in counseling he could not put a fist to his chest and say “I love this guy.”Back then he would have rated himself a zero out of ten on being enough. Now he says nine, and his daughter uses him as a jungle gym. He and Lewis also talk about why “me over us” hurts so many relationships and how paying off debt let him grieve a cousin without a single worry about money.You'll finish this one wanting to put your phone down

You keep making the same mistake because you haven't failed enough yet. That sounds harsh until you hear the reasoning, and then it feels like relief.Shi Heng Yi, a 35th generation Shaolin master who has practiced kung fu since age four, sat down with Lewis and explained why manifestation stalls for most people. You can touch the hot plate five times and it still hurts, he says, and one day you simply stop. Lewis admits he touched it about 100 times across 15 to 20 years of relationships before he changed.Then he gets practical. He walks through RAIN, his four step method for a restless or doubting mind: recognize it, accept it, investigate it, and stop identifying with it. He also teaches you to build a skill in focused cycles, 7 days for skin and 30 days for muscle, with more time the deeper the change goes.The cup is the part that stays with you: you arrive empty, and then your parents and your teachers pour their ideas in until you are chasing a life that never came from you. His mindset advice is simple:

Stress can give you a real heart attack even when your arteries are perfectly healthy. Doctors call it broken heart syndrome, and it can follow losing someone you love or even winning the lottery.Dr. Tara Narula, a board certified cardiologist and chief medical correspondent for ABC News, sat down with Lewis and shared what her patients say when she asks how they are. Almost nobody mentions blood pressure. They tell her they are overwhelmed, and many of them cry.She knows that fear from the inside. At 22, in medical school, she lost vision in part of her right eye and spent the first weeks reading every stumble as proof of something worse. A note card from her mom with the Serenity Prayer pulled her out of the spiral.In The Healing Power of Resilience she lays out eight tools, and she walks Lewis through acceptance and flexible thinking, then makes the case for purpose and real social connection. She also explains why burnout is the final phase of chronic stress, and why a study across 52 countries found chro

A marriage can end over a bag of granola, a full year before anyone says the word divorce.James Sexton, a divorce lawyer for over two decades, sat down with Lewis and told the story of a client whose husband always quietly restocked her favorite granola. One day the bag ran out and he never noticed. She knew right then that it was over.He calls marriage a technology that fails about 53% of the time, and says most couples put more thought into the wedding cake than into what they are signing. In his book If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together, he shares what works: send the hard email while the hurt is still small, and get a prenup even when you feel certain. He also explains why infidelity usually starts with lost connection long before anyone cheats.The line I keep repeating to people: the opposite of love is indifference. And he still believes in marriage. He compares it to the lottery, where the prize is so good that it is worth buying a ticket.You will

People tell you the truth when they feel safe, and one raised eyebrow can shut them down.Brad Beeler, who spent 25 years as a US Secret Service agent and polygraph examiner, sat down with Lewis and explained how he got a couple thousand people to open up about the worst things they had ever done. His rule is simple: never punish the disclosure. He once watched a suspect go silent the second a flash of contempt crossed his face.You will hear why a neutral face reads as a threat in first impressions and why lie detection is close to a coin flip, with people getting it right only 54% of the time. Brad watches your feet to see how comfortable you are, and he treats every cue as a check engine light to follow up on later. He also shares the cases he got wrong, including the day he fixated on a 6 foot 4 biker while the quiet man in front of him kept saying “that's not it.”His book, Tell Me Everything, grew out of those mistakes, and the lessons carry straight into your relationships and your parenting. Swap “why di

You can win four Super Bowls and still spend every game afraid of losing.Terry Bradshaw, a Pro Football Hall of Famer and longtime host of Fox NFL Sunday, sat down with Lewis and admitted he was never confident as an NFL quarterback. Fear cost him his throwing motion, and he completed just 51.9% of his passes. Underneath it all were his mother’s words when he was eight: you’ll never amount to anything.He talks openly about depression and ADHD, which he didn’t learn about until after football. He also talks about three divorces, and the moment it hit him that the common factor was him. Three years of counseling and a hard look in the mirror later, he married his best friend, a woman who makes him talk about what he’d rather bury.In his memoir Looking for Terry, and in this conversation, he explains why he sobbed over his dog but not his mother, and how his wife taught him to say no. He also shares how his faith held through cancer twice in one year, and why he cares more about kindness than greatness.You’ll co

Four out of ten people can't put their hands on $400 in an emergency, and almost none of them know why.David Bach, who spent nine years at Morgan Stanley and co-founded an advisory firm with more than $7 billion on its platform, sat down with Lewis and made the case that budgets fail everyone while automation quietly works. His book The Latte Factor tells the story through a broke travel editor in Brooklyn who works 70 hours a week and never goes anywhere. He also explains the Rule of 72, why a new car payment eats three months of your year, and how selling a home you live in can hand you a quarter million dollars the government never touches.The part that will stay with you has nothing to do with money. His grandmother was broke at 30, saved 50 cents a week in a coffee can, and helped him buy his first share of McDonald's stock when he was seven. On her deathbed at 86, he asked her about regrets. Every single one was a fork in the road where she chose the safe path.Then Lewis puts his own finances on the tab

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