The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes

You already know sleep matters. What you don't know is why you keep waking up at 2 AM, why your tracker is probably lying to you, and why the rules you've been following may not be meant for you. Dr. Michael Breus is one of the world's leading sleep doctors - not just a sleep expert, but a clinical psychologist who actually treats patients and pressure-tests every theory in real life. The difference matters. The rule saying you need a pitch-black, 65-degree room with no TV and no partner? He sleeps with two French bulldogs and a big screen on. His point isn't that sleep hygiene doesn't matter. It's that it has to work for your actual life. One thing that might reshape how you think about your body: every human on earth wakes up between 1 and 3 AM. It's biology. Your core body temperature drops to prevent hypothermia, and your body briefly surfaces. Most people roll over and go back to sleep. If you don't, the fix isn't pills - it's understanding what's happening and using tools like 4-7-8 breathing to lower y

Your effort isn't the problem. Your programming is. Lewis Howes spent years outworking everyone around him, and it still wasn't enough. He had the discipline, the results, even the New York Times bestseller. But inside he still felt like that broke kid on the couch who wasn't enough. That gap between outer success and inner peace is where this episode begins. Most people are running a mental operating system they never chose. The beliefs you hold about money, love, and what you deserve weren't decisions you made. They were copied and pasted from your past, reinforced by your environment, and mistaken for facts. If you don't question that program, you'll keep repeating it for the next 10, 20, 30 years. This episode walks you through five specific steps to change that. Not just a mindset shift. A full identity shift. Because people don't fail for lack of effort. They fail because they try to change their behavior without changing who they believe they are. And your identity always wins. You can't build a new mi

Every diet you've ever tried has failed you for one reason: it never told you when to eat. Your body runs on two energy systems. One burns sugar. The other burns fat. Most people never spend a single day in the second one. Around eight to ten hours without food, the switch flips. Ketones flood your brain. Hunger quiets. Mental clarity hits. Healing turns on. This is what fasting expert Dr. Mindy Pelz has been teaching for over 25 years, and what her book Fast Like a Girl made impossible to ignore. For women, timing is everything. Day 1 to 10, fast longer and lift heavier. Day 11 to 15, testosterone surges and libido climbs. Day 16 to 19 is for deeper fasts. After day 20, progesterone needs you to back off and rest. Fast like a man during the back half of your cycle and you'll tank the very hormones keeping you calm and regular. Underneath all of it sits the hormonal hierarchy. Oxytocin at the top. Cortisol below it. Then insulin. Then sex hormones. When you feel safe and connected, the whole stack works. When

Your money beliefs were locked in by the time you were seven years old. The patterns showing up in your bank account right now started somewhere in your childhood. And most of the financial advice you have been given is aimed at the wrong target. Financial educator Haley Sacks, a.k.a. Mrs. Dow Jones, author of Future Rich Person: The New Rules for Building Wealth, breaks down why obsessing over lattes and pre-chopped vegetables is a waste of your financial energy. Negotiating your salary, understanding compound interest, learning to earn more. That is what actually moves the needle. There's a real difference between looking rich and being rich. Looking rich is the designer logo, the signal, the illusion. Being rich is driving a Jeep, buying back your time, and not needing anyone to notice. Haley shares how she blew her first $3,000 windfall on an oversized fake Louis Vuitton bag on eBay and couldn't make rent that month. The bag is still on her shelf as a reminder. Haley calls it learned financial helplessnes

Most people don't realize they have a ceiling on their success. Not a skill ceiling. A preference ceiling. Brendon Burchard calls it the complexity ceiling, and it's the invisible line where your comfort wins over your vision. The highest performers in the world share one non-negotiable: their preferences never outrank their aspirational self. They don't wait to feel ready. They generate the feeling they need and act from that place. Brendon introduces his FREE framework (Feeling, Responsibility, Expression, Expansion), a four-part system for creating your internal state on purpose, every day, regardless of what's hitting you from the outside. It's the methodology he breaks down fully in High Performance Habits. Lewis and Brendon also go deep on what happens when you succeed beyond what you believed was possible, and why that moment can trigger imposter syndrome or total emptiness if your belief never caught up to your achievement. This one is about becoming the person your future self already is. It starts w

Graham Stephan was relentless about one thing before he had anything else: not spending money he did not have to spend. He calculated the gas cost of visiting a friend and decided it was not worth it. Most people would call that extreme. He calls it the foundation. The habits he built early, consistency, focus, and ruthless saving, did not feel heroic in the moment. They felt boring. But boring done every single day is what compounded into real estate commissions, YouTube income, and an investment portfolio split evenly between property, index funds, and cash. What he did not do was wait until he felt ready. He held off on starting his YouTube channel for years because he did not have a Lamborghini like the other guys. When he finally started, none of that mattered. The deeper conversation here is about what money actually means once you have enough of it. Graham is not chasing a bigger number. He wants to buy back his time, to read a book on a Tuesday if he feels like it. That shift from accumulation to free

Anita Moorjani did everything right. She ate organic, avoided sugar, studied cancer prevention obsessively. She still got lymphoma. That contradiction is the entire point. Growing up as an Indian woman in Hong Kong, caught between British culture and a community that valued sons over daughters, Anita learned one thing above all else: make yourself small and keep everyone happy. That lesson followed her for 40 years, through a canceled arranged marriage, a cancer diagnosis, and a four-year deterioration that ended with her in a coma, 85 pounds, and organs failing. Then she left her body. In that expanded state, she saw clearly for the first time: it wasn't the cancer that had been killing her. It was the fear. When she came back, every trace of cancer was gone within three weeks. Doctors flew in from the US just to study her case. None of them could explain it. What Anita brought back is a message she's been sharing for 20 years: you don't need to earn your place in the world, you already are what you've been

Kevin Love has an NBA championship ring, five All-Star selections, and an Olympic gold medal. He also had a panic attack that changed everything. In this conversation, he gets radically honest about what it means to carry anxiety, rage, and childhood wounds into a life that looks like success from the outside. He talks about nine years of estrangement from his parents, the reconciliation that came just before his father died, and what becoming a father himself has taught him about what it means to finally become a man. What comes through most is this: the things you don't say will find a way out. Kevin built a career on channeling pain into performance, and now he's doing the harder thing; learning to actually heal. His Kevin Love Fund is bringing emotional language into classrooms so the next generation of kids doesn't have to wait until their 30s to learn what they're feeling.   This is a conversation about athletic mortality, grief, fatherhood, and what it looks like to build a life that matches the work y

Dr. Edith Eger was 16 years old when she danced for Josef Mengele at Auschwitz the same night her mother was sent to the gas chamber. She survived. And then she spent decades running from what happened until she finally turned around and walked straight back into it. What she found there changed everything. Edith teaches that freedom is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose. Again and again. By becoming your own good parent, facing what you have been carrying, and giving yourself permission to let go. Anger is not the primary emotion, she says. Underneath it is always fear. And underneath fear is a little child who just needs someone to show up. This conversation will rearrange something inside you. It is not about forgetting. It is not about overcoming. It is about learning to cherish the wound, and using it to become more alive. Dr. Edith’s website Dr. Edith on Instagram Dr. Edith’s courses Dr. Edith’s books: The Choice: Embrace the Possible The Gift: 14 Lessons to Save Your Life

Chloe Kim won her first Olympic gold at 17, became the most dominant athlete in her sport, and then quietly started questioning whether any of it made her feel the way she expected it to. She reveals that the greatest pressure she ever felt came not from the crowd or the competition but from internalizing the belief that first place was simply where she was supposed to be, making every win feel expected and every loss feel like failure. That belief quietly ate at her for over a decade, and unpacking it took therapy, an ADHD diagnosis at 26, and the brutal test of entering her third Olympics on eight days of snow training after a serious shoulder injury. What she discovered is something any high achiever will recognize: the version of yourself that performs at the highest level and the version that knows how to rest, feel, and connect are often two very different people, and you have to build the second one on purpose. This conversation gives you a real look at what it takes to stop measuring your worth by you

Ryan Leak spent the last day of his twenties at a speaking event where a woman told him his documentary had pulled a young man off the floor of a crack house and back into life, and that single moment changed how he decided to spend the next decade of his career. What makes this conversation surprising is how openly Ryan admits he is still working through his own lies, like the belief that the only value he brings to the world is what people see on a stage or a screen. He talks directly to anyone who has ever burned energy on relationships that were never really friendships, anyone who has reacted to a difficult person and become someone they did not recognize in the process, and anyone who keeps saying yes when everything inside them is asking them to pause. Ryan lays out a practical case for why becoming proactive instead of reactive is the only real solution to handling difficult people, and why the most generous thing you can give someone is not money but a path to make their own. The episode closes with

Pastor Michael Todd reveals something most high achievers refuse to admit: the drive fueling their rise is often rooted in a wound they have never faced. He shares the moment he realized his obsession with greatness traced back to a 12-year-old boy sitting on a maroon chair, told he wasn't good enough to play drums in the big church, and how that single unprocessed moment shaped decades of his life. That pattern lives in so many of us: we build careers, relationships, and whole identities on top of old damage without ever treating the root. Michael breaks down why people struggle to love and be loved, how unhealed trauma quietly transfers to the people closest to you, and what it actually means to bring your full self to a relationship instead of a defended version. Whether you're healing inside a committed relationship or doing the work alone, this conversation gives you language and tools to start going to the root. So what you build from here can actually last. Michael’s books: Damaged but Not Destroyed

Amy Purdy walked into an operating room at 19 about to lose both legs, and instead of collapsing into fear, she gave herself three goals before the anesthesia took hold. You know that feeling when life pulls the ground out from under you and every identity you had disappears overnight? Amy has lived that more than once, and what she discovered is that the challenges you most want to escape are actually moving you closer to your purpose, not away from it. The key is learning to lean into problems rather than run, to find the smallest sliver of possibility and let it grow. In this conversation, you will walk away with practical tools for building a new identity after loss, understanding why your struggles are not obstacles but doorways, and discovering how staying present transforms the way you compete, create, and connect. Amy’s books: Bounce Forward: 21 Tools to Live a Life Beyond Limits On My Own Two Feet Amy on Instagram In this episode you will: Learn how to set a north star in the middle of crisis s

Dr Joe Dispenza drops a finding that most people are not ready for: a seven-day meditation retreat produces measurably greater healing than most pharmaceutical drugs, with 80% of participants expressing the same healing genes by the end. If you have ever tried to think positive and felt nothing shift, Dr Joe explains why that happens and what your body is actually doing instead. Most of us are unknowingly running 95% of our lives from subconscious programs rooted in the past, and our bodies quite literally cannot accept thoughts that contradict what they have already been conditioned to feel. The path forward is not more willpower or better affirmations. It is learning to match your thoughts with a new feeling so completely that your biology has no choice but to change. The Greatness Playbook: The Future Self Edition Dr Joe’s books: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself Becoming Supernatural You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind Dr Joe’s website

Michael Pollan cuts through nutrition confusion and exposes the uncomfortable truth: ultra processed foods now make up more than 60% of the American diet, and they're engineered to manipulate your body and brain. Most foods you think are healthy, like plant-based burgers with 21 synthetic ingredients and diet sodas that trick your metabolism, are actually sabotaging your health and creating cravings that trap you in a cycle of poor eating. Your gut microbiome holds the key to everything from your weight to your mental health, and it's starving without the 30 different plants per week it needs to thrive. By understanding how food companies exploit your evolutionary instincts for sweetness and fat, you can reclaim control and use Pollan's seven-word mantra to make choices that honor both pleasure and nutrition. The transformation begins when you stop lying to your body about what you're eating and start thinking of food as medicine rather than entertainment. Michael’s books: This Is Your Mind on Plants How t

WARNING: This episode includes sensitive discussions that may be distressing for some listeners. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available anytime by calling or texting the number 988. Most people see Dan Martell's highlight reel: the private jet, the millions, the AI mastery. But they don't know about the angry, ashamed teenager who felt worthless and unlovable, who attempted suicide and spent time in jail. In this episode, Lewis goes deep into Dan's journey from rock bottom to extraordinary success, unpacking the exact moment he decided not to take his own life and what shifted in his mind to make him believe he deserved love and greatness. You'll discover that redemption isn't about forgetting your past, it's about extracting the lesson and becoming someone new. Dan shares his journey of transformation, explaining that his foundation is built on faith and how he moved from repeating errors to making new ones. He emphasizes the core principle that the pain one endures ultimately shapes

Emma Grede's most surprising confession is that she never saw her childhood in East London as a disadvantage. While raising her younger sisters, skipping school, and watching Oprah to find her blueprint for life, she was quietly building the belief that she was more capable than anyone around her. That unshakable self-trust is the thread running through everything she has built, from Good American to SKIMS to the Obama Foundation board. For anyone who has ever let fear, self-doubt, or the weight of other people's opinions keep them stuck, Emma's story is a direct challenge to reconsider what is actually holding you back. This conversation will show you how to stop measuring yourself against everyone else's standards, put money at the center of your plan without shame, manage your emotions like a skill rather than a sentence, and build a life that is entirely your own design. The Greatness Playbook: The Self-Led Success Edition Emma’s book: Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life Emma's Instagram

Dr. Andrew Weil drops a counterintuitive truth right out of the gate: avoiding head trauma and quitting smoking are the two most powerful things you can do to prevent cognitive decline, yet almost no one talks about them in the brain health conversation. Most of us are chasing the latest supplement or biohack while ignoring the chronic stress quietly flooding our brains with cortisol and damaging the very region responsible for memory and emotion. Dr. Weil connects the dots between what you eat, how you breathe, who you spend time with, and how long your brain stays sharp. His 4-7-8 breathing technique alone has generated millions of views worldwide and outperforms anxiety medication in his clinical experience. More than any single protocol, though, he returns again and again to one root cause behind poor relationships, chronic illness, and unfulfilled potential: not yet learning how to genuinely love yourself. Dr. Weil’s books: Mind Over Meds Fast Food, Good Food True Food Spontaneous Happiness Why Our

Dean Graziosi, New York Times bestselling author and business partner of Tony Robbins, reveals the one thing he believes most people get backwards: confidence does not come first, courage does, and until you get in the game, you will never feel ready. So many people are paralyzed right now by the speed of change, whether that is AI, the economy, or shifting opportunity, and Dean lays out exactly why that paralysis is costing them more than any risk ever would. He breaks down how to find what truly drives you, build an unstoppable inner operating system, and stop tying your self-worth to your bank account. You will also hear how Dean thinks about raising driven kids in an age of abundance, what Tony Robbins taught him about effective versus efficient leadership, and how to use AI not as a tech trend but as a tool to buy back your time. This conversation will challenge how you define readiness and push you to take the one courageous step you have been putting off. AI Advantage Summit Dean’s books: Millionaire

Myron Golden drops a revelation early in this conversation that stops you in your tracks: if you are broke, you are not spiritually bankrupt, you are spiritually deceived. Most people carry a hidden belief that money is evil and that having it requires doing something wrong, a lie so deeply embedded that it quietly sabotages every financial decision they make.  Myron connects that deception to universal struggles around worthiness, fear of success, and the painful tension between faith and financial ambition. He then lays out the practical path forward: awareness is the first move, because you cannot change what you cannot see, and most people are blind to the abundance already surrounding them. Whether you are stuck at your first dollar or trying to break from six figures to seven, Myron shows you that the ceiling is never a money problem, it is always an identity problem, and the shift starts with how you complete the sentence "I am..." The Greatness Playbook: The Value Creation Edition Myron’s books: Fro