This week we’re talking about psychedelics — the consciousness altering substances, and the extraordinary moment they are having in our culture at this time. We explore the reasons that popular interest in psychedelics has risen dramatically in recent years — although certainly not for the first time — and we consider the historical and emerging scientific research that supports their use in a variety of applications. We also share our own range of lived experiences with psychedelics and why...

This week we're talking about Nutritious Movement, the brainchild of our brilliant friend, biomechanist, fitness expert, and best-selling author Katy Bowman. Katy's term "nutritious movement" refers to the type of movement that nourishes, educates, shapes, energizes, and repairs us in ways that support optimal health and vitality. And, as Katy explains during the conversation, that does not describe most conventional fitness approaches. So here, Pilar talks with Katy about a great many...

This week, we're talking about Pandemic Era Discoveries. Last winter, after two years spent in various forms of social isolation, Dallas and Pilar met up at an improvised San Diego studio to catch up live and in person. We compared notes about how we'd weathered the weirdness of COVID reality, where we're at now, and some of the most rewarding stuff we encountered along the way. From craniosacral therapy to cigars, from continuous glucose monitors to toe correctors, from garden plot puttering...

This week we’ve got a special guest episode with Brian Johnson, the creator of Optimize and the Founder + CEΦ of Heroic Public Benefit Corporation. Brian has spent half of the last twenty-five years as a Founder/CEO and the other half as a Philosopher, creating hundreds of his PhilosophersNotes summaries of all sorts of brilliant books worth reading. As a Founder/CEO, he’s built and sold two market-leading social platforms. As a Philosopher, he’s served tens of thousands of people from every...

This week, Pilar talks with special guests Leslie Salmon Jones and Jeff W. Jones, co-founders of Afro Flow Yoga. Leslie and Jeff created Afro Flow Yoga in 2008, fusing a new blend of expressive movement and rhythmic music from their own explorations of healing and their African-American and Caribbean heritage, in West Africa, Haiti and Jamaica. Leslie and Jeff describe Afro Flow Yoga as an embodied practice, integrating dance movements of the African Diaspora with meditative yoga and live...

This week Pilar talks to a special guest — James Beard award-winning journalist, author, and food legend Dorothy Kalins. Dorothy is the founding editor of Saveur magazine and Metropolitan Home. She's also a celebrated cookbook creator and the author of a terrific new book, The Kitchen Whisperers: Cooking with the Wisdom of Our Friends.

This week on The Living Experiment we bring you an episode that has been a very long time coming — a special guest episode with New York Times bestselling author John Zeratsky. John is the co-author — with Jake Knapp —  of two terrific books, Sprint (a popular business title from 2016) and Make Time: How to Focus On What Matters Every Day, which came out in the fall of 2018. In this episode, recorded in the fall of 2019, John and Pilar talk about both titles, and about the themes connecting...

This week on The Living Experiment, we're talking about the concept of the New Year — from meaningless consumer hype to contemplative pursuits that really can make a difference. We explore the potential pros and cons of leveraging the New Year as an opportunity for self-improvement, and we share the approaches we like best for pursuing change in our own lives. From expert theories of change to the awkward realities of working on a goal that eludes you, we take a thoughtful look at New...

This week on The Living Experiment, we're talking about Midlife — that fun and potentially funky moment when you realize you might well have fewer years ahead of you than you've already put behind you. It's a clarifying moment for many, and a moment of crisis for others. A moment when we realize that we may not have lived our own highest choices up until now — and that if we're going to make the rest of our lives more the way we'd like them to be, this is the time to make that happen. In the...

Life continues to be weird. So we are just rolling with it. This week on The Living Experiment, Pilar offers some updates and options for folks who want to stay connected and who are eager keep experimenting through the rest of 2020. Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/mini-update/

This week on The Living Experiment, Pilar interviews a special guest, hunter-gatherer and rewilding enthusiast Daniel Vitalis. Daniel is a well-recognized advocate for what's known as rewilding, a term that he points out means very different things to different people. To Daniel, and also to Pilar, it means reclaiming and reconnecting with aspects of our own wild-creature origins, and for getting into a closer, more intimate connection with our natural world. Daniel visited Pilar's family...

This week on The Living Experiment we're talking about Moving Forward in this unusual time in history. Thanks to COVID-19, we're still recording from a distance. Since we were last in the studio though, and even since the last time we did one of our COVID-edition Facebook Live episodes, so much has happened. We've seen new waves of conflict around the pandemic, as well as the murder of George Floyd and the historic calls for social and racial justice via the Black Lives Matter movement....

This week our guest is Terry Wahls, MD, a physician and scientific researcher best known for her groundbreaking work reversing autoimmune diseases — including her own disabling case of multiple sclerosis, which for a time had her confined to a wheelchair with very little hope of recovery. But recover she did, and what produced her recovery was an experimental, systems-based approach that Dr. Wahls developed for herself. It combined a specialized paleo-inspired nutrition program with other...

This week on The Living Experiment, our guest is Dr. Frank Lipman, one of the world's leading integrative physicians, a thought leader and innovator in the realm of disease reversal, and the author of a bunch of books, including his most recent, How to Be Well: The 6 Keys to a Happy and Healthy Life. Frank Lipman, MD, is best known for helping high-profile celebrity clients — like Gwyneth Paltrow — reverse stubborn and mysterious health problems. But his real passion is educating regular...

This week on The Living Experiment we have an extraordinary guest, functional medicine pioneer Dr. Jeffrey Bland. Dr. Bland is something of an international legend in functional medicine circles. A preeminent scientist dedicated to systems thinking, and a thought leader intent on transforming health care as we know it. Dr. Bland is a former biochemistry professor who once served as director of nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. He worked directly with...

This week on The Living Experiment, we’re talking about Dallas’s new book, The 4 Season Solution, which is now available in bookstores everywhere! In addition to recapping the central themes of the book, and hearing about the response it has gotten from early readers, we talk about the relevance of the book’s themes to the challenges so many of us are facing now. We explore the overall importance of seasonal living in relation to good health. And we also consider how incorporating...

This week on The Living Experiment we're talking about chronic disease reversal. Over the past decade there's been an emerging clinical awareness, with increasing research support, that many diseases we've been told are progressive and incurable can in fact often be turned around — or at least significantly ameliorated — through systems-based functional and lifestyle medicine strategies. So here, Dallas and Pilar explore the approaches that are proving most successful in interrupting the...

This week on The Living Experiment, we’re talking about biometric devices — the appeal these fascinating little gadgets hold and the distractions they can present. From Fitbits and Apple Watches to Muse Headbands and Oura Rings, we evaluate the ways knowing more about our own biomarkers and daily patterns can help us become better stewards of our bodies and minds. We explore how increasing use and dependence on these devices is affecting us all, and how their trending adoption is influencing...

This week on The Living Experiment, we're talking, once again, about trauma - this time with internationally renowned trauma expert Dr. James Gordon. Pilar talks with Dr. Gordon about his new book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma, about how we tend to get stuck in traumatic experiences of all sorts, and how we can get ourselves out. Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/trauma-2/

This week on The Living Experiment we’re talking about Love — the romance, the heartbreak, the profound sense of connection that most of us are after. Both our desire for love and our struggles to navigate it are some of the biggest opportunities we have for growth, and for stress, both of which can have huge impacts on our health and happiness. So in this episode, we talk about how our childhood experiences help form our adult romantic patterns, about the dramas of first love, and about what...

This week on The Living Experiment Pilar interviews a very special guest, clinical therapist and author Resmaa Menakem. We're talking about trauma, the effect it has on us as individuals, and also the impact it has on us in groups and as members of society. Resmaa's most recent book, My Grandmother's Hands, explores themes of ancestral and racialized trauma, topics informed by his personal and familial experiences, as well as his professional clinical expertise. Resmaa's insights are also...

Last week, after nearly a year away working on our books, Dallas and Pilar returned with a brand new "We're Back" episode of The Living Experiment. Soon, we'll be back again with a second new episode of the season. But in the meantime, by popular demand, we wanted to bring you a replay of our "Autumn" episode. This is the final installment in a series of episodes we’ve built around Dallas’s Seasonal Model of Health, which is also the topic of his forthcoming book, The 4 Season Solution. If...

This week on The Living Experiment, we return from a nearly one-year recording hiatus with a report from the outer limits of book writing and creative life. Dallas unpacks the contents of his forthcoming title, The 4 Season Solution. And Pilar reflects, with unexpected emotion, on both the final push to turn in her book, The Healthy Deviant AND one of her most intense years on record. We both share some of the insights and appreciations that have come to us while we’ve been away, and of...

Happy Spring, everybody! It's that time of year when our bodies come out of hiding, and when it seems like everybody has a plan for improving them. Bikini body workouts, beach-ready diets, perfect tan tips, the whole bit. So we thought that this might be a good time to roll out our "Healthy vs. Hot" episode. If you're at all inclined to feel like your body is not living up to external expectations, even when you feel healthy overall, we think you might find this one thought-provoking and...