Embark on an enlightening journey with Mike Richards, meditation instructor to The Houses of Parliament and author of "The Travelling Ape," as he leads us through the intricate landscapes of the mind and the world alike. This episode isn't just another conversation; it's a voyage across the serene lifestyles of Bhutan, the community-driven life in Borneo, and the respect-imbued culture of Japan. Mike, with his first-hand experiences, unfolds the unexpected benefits of meditation, the profound insights of dark tourism, and the paradoxical appeal of communism, offering an eye-opening perspective on the diverse ways people seek happiness and contentment across the globe.
Prepare to be captivated as Mike delves into how meditation can release trauma and elevate one's baseline happiness, challenging the notion that Western prescriptions for mental health may foster passivity towards societal issues. Our discussion takes a turn towards the controversial yet rewarding realms of dark tourism, exploring destinations that echo with tragedy, and how these experiences can foster understanding and empathy beyond media portrayals. The conversation also sheds light on the complex tapestry of global population dynamics, geopolitical shifts, and find out which countries Mike thinks are going to thrive in the next century.
Closing the episode, we tackle the enduring impact of delayed gratification, considering the legendary marshmallow test and how meditation has the power to amplify focus and productivity. Mike shares his insights on the importance of appreciating achievements before plunging into new endeavors, teasing his upcoming work on personal development. Listeners are left with a profound quote from Mike's book, emphasizing the essence of growth and happiness, ensuring this episode not only informs but also inspires a reevaluation of one's approach to life's many adventures.
The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of Mike Richards and not the views of any of the companies works for or has been affiliated with.
Psychedelics are illegal in many places around the world and should only be taken under the guidance of an appropriately trained and licensed facilitator where it is legal to do so.
Find us on Instagram
Richard @The_Breath_Geek
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_gOq4wzRjwkwdjYycAeng
Webiste - www.TheBreathGeek.com
Please leave us a review, like and subscribe.
Embark on an enlightening journey with Mike Richards, meditation instructor to The Houses of Parliament and author of "The Travelling Ape," as he leads us through the intricate landscapes of the mind and the world alike. This episode isn't just another conversation; it's a voyage across the serene lifestyles of Bhutan, the community-driven life in Borneo, and the respect-imbued culture of Japan. Mike, with his first-hand experiences, unfolds the unexpected benefits of meditation, the profound insights of dark tourism, and the paradoxical appeal of communism, offering an eye-opening perspective on the diverse ways people seek happiness and contentment across the globe.
Prepare to be captivated as Mike delves into how meditation can release trauma and elevate one's baseline happiness, challenging the notion that Western prescriptions for mental health may foster passivity towards societal issues. Our discussion takes a turn towards the controversial yet rewarding realms of dark tourism, exploring destinations that echo with tragedy, and how these experiences can foster understanding and empathy beyond media portrayals. The conversation also sheds light on the complex tapestry of global population dynamics, geopolitical shifts, and find out which countries Mike thinks are going to thrive in the next century.
Closing the episode, we tackle the enduring impact of delayed gratification, considering the legendary marshmallow test and how meditation has the power to amplify focus and productivity. Mike shares his insights on the importance of appreciating achievements before plunging into new endeavors, teasing his upcoming work on personal development. Listeners are left with a profound quote from Mike's book, emphasizing the essence of growth and happiness, ensuring this episode not only informs but also inspires a reevaluation of one's approach to life's many adventures.
The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of Mike Richards and not the views of any of the companies works for or has been affiliated with.
Psychedelics are illegal in many places around the world and should only be taken under the guidance of an appropriately trained and licensed facilitator where it is legal to do so.
Find us on Instagram
Richard @The_Breath_Geek
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_gOq4wzRjwkwdjYycAeng
Webiste - www.TheBreathGeek.com
Please leave us a review, like and subscribe.
Hello and welcome to Laughing Through the Pain. Navigating Wellness Got it right this time with me Richard L Blake, my co-host, andrew Esam, and today we've got another friend of mine, an old friend from school. His name's Mike Richards. He is a meditation teacher, a geopolitical risk analyst, the author of the recently published book the Travelling Ape, and he has travelled to nearly every country in the world and we are going to be talking to him today about those things what he's learnt from travelling, as well as meditation and geopolitical risks. So welcome, mike.
Mike Richards:Thanks, it's great to be here.
Richard L Blake:Yes, and how's it going, andy?
Andy Esam:Yeah, all good. Thank you very much. Yeah, mike, I really enjoyed your book. I have to say it was very witty as well as informative, and I even read the epilogue, which I think is a first for me. So, yeah, good job on the book.
Mike Richards:It's great, thank you. That means a lot, so get a good sign that you managed to get to the end, and I think the hope was that it wouldn't be as dry and potentially serious as most books that you read on politics, economics and things like that.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, I think it was quite really what's the word? Relieving that it was good, because you know like sometimes your mates do things yeah, yeah, well done, really enjoyed that thing you did. Yeah, thankfully, yours was actually good, so I can actually say well done without having to lie, basically. So thanks, mike.
Mike Richards:Well, that's great because I think in the original sort of process of writing the book, you get friends and family to read it and they are going to be more supportive than the average person. So what's been really rewarding has actually been the books been released for three or four months now and getting lots of feedback from people that have bought the book from all over the world and from my followers on Instagram, and, yeah, that's kind of meant a bit more in some ways, than sort of my mum telling me the book was good, which we should have done anyway, I'm sure.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, nice. So the podcast is aimed at both lay people like Andy and experts like yourself, mike, meditation teachers, practitioners and things like that. So we do need to cover the basics as well as some of the more in depth stuff. So first question as a meditation teacher why should people meditate?
Mike Richards:Why should people meditate?
Mike Richards:I think for me, it is a tool, or the best tool that I think we have to reduce stress and make you calmer, and I think these are the first kind of benefits that people get when they start to practice. I think, for me, when I started to pick it up 10 years ago, I was like most people I was distracted the whole time. I was anxious most of the time, not not severely anxious, but just always worrying about something. And I remember trying one of the apps, headspace, and just couldn't believe that this tool existed, where, for 10 minutes a day, for 20 minutes a day, you could just slow down the mind, slow down the pace of your thoughts, and there was definitely early stress relief. I felt calmer, a little bit more present, and so I think this is the early introduction as to why someone might meditate. It can make you calmer, a little bit less stressed and a bit happier. But I think, as most people learn, as they continue to practice, this is really kind of the tip of the iceberg. So to hook people in, I would say that stress relief is a great way to start. It's a great thing to drag people into the world of meditation, but if you continue to practice consistently, day after day, week after week, into the months and years, that's when you start to have more sort of radical and profound transformations in your happiness and how you are in the world and your ability to enjoy life and it can improve your relationship.
Mike Richards:So it's a tool that can seem quite subtle at first, which is why some people, I think, do it for a week or two in this and well, I tried it a little bit, didn't make too much of a difference and what I say to them is that actually you have to give it a real shot.
Mike Richards:So do it for a month every day, twice a day, for 10 minutes. And if you can do that and get to a month and build up the consistency of practice I don't know almost anyone who's done that and hasn't continued to do it, but it's people that maybe you try it here, you try it there and maybe you feel a little bit different and then just like, well, you know, maybe this isn't for me, so it's sometimes a little bit difficult to convince people to continue. But if you build up that consistency of practice, the sort of stress relief, feeling calmer, then starts to have all these other kind of benefits that spread into the rest of your life. And for me, you know I've been practicing for 10 years and it's been the most. The most important thing I've ever done in my life was learning to, to meditate 100%.
Andy Esam:Mike, one of the things I enjoyed reading about in the book was your meditation retreats, and I think the thing that I was most surprised by, I think, was also the physical effects of meditation in terms of physically removing trauma. Can you talk a bit more about that and those benefits?
Mike Richards:Yeah, this is the sort of stuff that I was absolutely allergic to before I started to meditate and sort of a context. I was like a lot of people before I learned to practice. I viewed anyone that meditated as kind of a hippie, new age weirdo and was quite scathing about it and that kind of world. And then I tried it and it was like, okay, well, this, this is kind of working, so there must be something to it. And people were talking about probably continued practice. You get into these calmer states where the nervous system is relaxed, the body and the mind is relaxed and kind of unhealed trauma can sort of emerge from the subconscious. When people told me that like that sounds like absolute nonsense, whatever. And people say, okay, well, you know, this is all about experiencing things directly, don't need to believe anything. And people said, you know, you've gone to meditation retreat where you're meditating for you know, 10 to 15 hours a day when you really have the chance to go deep.
Mike Richards:This is what will happen to almost anyone that starts to practice, and for me it was often a feeling of tightness in my shoulders, like I always had tight shoulders, to the point that I used to wear this ridiculous kind of like sling thing under my shirt at work which held my back sort of straight and it didn't really do anything. And actually it's meditation which over time has helped me to release all of this kind of stress and tension in my shoulders. And how it would feel is if you're practicing and you notice discomfort in shoulder, your knee or wherever it may be, the teacher would encourage you to actually lean into that pain, explore it sort of explore what it feels like, what's the shape of it, what's the temperature of it? Is there a kind of vibrational quality to it? And the more that you can just sit with the discomfort it starts to kind of untangle itself and it can be subtle.
Mike Richards:Sometimes you just feel like there's a bit of a release energetically, and other times it can be and I hate using the word energy, you know from back back then as well, I thought anyone that used the word energy was a bit mad, but I think it's unfortunately the best word we have to describe what, what's going on. And sometimes it can be really powerful, like you feel a big crick or a click in your shoulder as this is released, and at times this can be accompanied with a memory and an emotional release. So you know it might be accompanied by tears and you know pain from the past and other times, you know, maybe there isn't a thought that accompanies it, but you know that, it's all. You know it's all helping and I would say that you know, meditation retreat is really the best place for stuff like this to happen, just because to get that deep, often you do need to be practicing for hours and hours a day without distraction and, yeah, this is the best, best area to kind of have those experiences.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, I think meditation is definitely useful for many, many people. And you did mention the word trauma. My trauma is one of my sort of like buzzwords that sends me into right. I mean, I have to say something about it Because, yeah, I've said it in quite a few Instagram videos. You know, trauma has become this sort of completely overused pop psychology thing that now doesn't mean anything.
Richard L Blake:And some people say trauma. There's capital T trauma, which is, you know, the horrific shock trauma witnessing a bomb going off, car crashes, that kind of thing and then there's lowercase trauma, which I think is the one that you'd be talking about more, mike, and what a lot of people refer to as trauma. But I still say that, you know, if everyone has trauma, then no one has trauma like it has to be something that's that's, you know, out of an ordinary. But yeah, one thing I you mentioned that energy thing, and it comes on to the, the work of trauma specialists like Bessel van de Kolk in his his book, the where the body keeps the score, you know, and then also into Peter Levine's work he wrote he's the founder of somatic experiencing, which is this kind of trauma release, exercise type thing, and I think you use the word energy there. I much prefer his word of survival processes. It's truncated survival processes that get trapped in the nervous system. So he would explain it like, let's say you, you see a deer running, running across the road, it narrowly misses being hit by a car and then it's, it's terrified and it shakes off that energy and that would be a survival process liberate. Liberated that survival energy to escape the car. And then it shakes off that energy with, with the shaking there. And I think that humans have that, supposedly mammals all have the same process for liberating trapped survival energy. So yeah, it sounds like you're experiencing survival energy there.
Richard L Blake:But also, you know meditation. There's so many different like points of view and I think some people say that they do meditation and then they do it so that you don't have to do it. So it's like I tried meditation for a week and it did nothing for me. So yeah, it doesn't work. That frustrates me. But then there are actually people with capital T, severe trauma, who can't do meditation. Their internal state is so dysregulated, they get emotionally flooded and things like James Dowler's breath work we had him on last week, I think James Dowler's kind of nervous system regulation breath work where it's much more active than passive is particularly good for for capital T trauma type of people. But anyway, mike, oh Andy, you want to say something.
Andy Esam:I was just going to say yeah, but just to cut in as a relative novice and as my usual role as the antidote to wellness knowledge we are presumably talking about, there are many, many different types of meditation, so when you're, it seems like you're both talking on the same type. What are we talking about there?
Mike Richards:It really depends, and there are actually just so many different types that you know be hard to cover them all in just a short kind of session. I would say that this particular style of meditation that you do on repeat retreats, called insight meditation or the pastana, this one is taught by a guy called SN Goenko. He died 10 years ago, but it's they use video recordings of him and it's essentially body scans rather than most meditation is focusing on the breath usually, and it's usually focusing on the breath watching it come in and out, naturally. But there are other styles of meditation which are a bit more active, perhaps a bit more like you know talking about well, with the breath work. There's this kind of breathing styles where you can down regulate your nervous system, so exhaling for longer than you inhale. You have visualization exercises, which can encompass a whole host of different things, but the one that I found is best for this kind of energetic release is the body scan, and that's because you actually spend day upon day of scanning every single part of your body and when you actually find a point of discomfort, that's when you know you need to go and investigate this further rather than to kind of ignore it, as it were.
Mike Richards:I think one of the most interesting things that can happen on a meditation retreat is the relationship that you have with pain, and I think a lot of people think that meditating for like. When I tell people I'm going on a retreat, they're like oh, that sounds lovely, that's really nice. You know, you're just going to be like in the lotus, you know. You see all the pictures of you Google meditation. It's everyone in the lotus position, leaning back, list out, and it's actually. It's really difficult and really painful. Sitting for 15 hours a day. Your back hurts, your knee hurts, the mind doesn't want to play ball and it can be very, very difficult and very painful. But what you can do is actually, let's say you have a pain in your knee. The teacher will say don't avoid it, lean into this pain, see if you can kind of sit with it, see if you can be comfortable with this discomfort, and what will happen is the pain won't necessarily go away. But when you remove the mental suffering, which is just to say the mind going, this is all for I want this to stop, when is the pain going to stop? How a lot of the suffering comes from that when you can actually say, okay, this is, this is what's happening. I have a strong sensation in the knee. I'm going to sit with it. It can sort of lessen over time and there are times where it can actually transform and become almost pleasurable as odd as it is, is to say.
Mike Richards:But I think one of the biggest insights you get from going on a retreat like that is it shows you how much of your suffering is created by by the mind, ultimately. And then when you really slow down, really remove all distraction and you realize how out of control really most of our minds are. Really that is the realization. People go and expect to be like blitzing out, having these transcendent, transcendent experiences which happen every now and then. But it's not the reason why you do it.
Mike Richards:But most people go and say, wow, my mind is completely out of control. I never realized. I've just been so distracted, so identified with the thought patterns in my mind that I didn't even realize that it was happening. And then when you sit back and you can just see the mind having conversations with itself and picking flaws with absolutely anything and everything, worrying about what happened last year, worrying about what happened yesterday, planning for the future, you just like, wow, and that's, and that's the realization that, I think for a lot of people, convinces them that you know continuing to meditate and understanding their own minds more is a worthwhile thing to do.
Andy Esam:I wanted to turn a bit more to the, the traveling, if I may. I'm sure we'll leave background to meditation in terms of the overall things you took away from traveling, but I was struck by a phrase dark tourism which sounded equally as daunting as your meditation retreats. I wonder if you could just explain that and why people do it and the benefits you get from that.
Mike Richards:Yeah, so this is a phrase that's appeared in the last kind of 10 years and I guess it's the idea of visiting places that would be the lowest places down on everyone else's list of going to holiday. So it'd be like places like North Korea or Iraq, which are two places I've been to, and then for some people going to Chernobyl in Ukraine, where they had the nuclear reactor melt melt down 30, 40 years ago, and it's a bit of a peculiar kind of subsect of people that want to see these sites and see these things. But actually for me, some of the most rewarding travel experiences have been in going to places that people wouldn't necessarily want to go to. For starters, you often find there's no tourist in these places, so you have a slightly more authentic experience of seeing how people live in different parts of the world, and North Korea, I think, is probably the best example of this. A lot of people told me also friends of. Well, firstly, people like why the hell are you going to North Korea? That's stupid, which you know in retrospect, you know there was certainly some risks involved, but actually my view was that like 25 million people live in North Korea. Like that's the same amount of people that live in Australia and they are trapped there. Ultimately they can't leave, borders are closed and they will stay in this regime for the rest of their lives.
Mike Richards:And actually having the opportunity to even get a glimpse of how people live is, I mean, from a selfish perspective gives you perspective on your own life. I think when you go to someone like that you realize how fortunate you are to live in. You know, I got bought up like you in the UK, which is country with flaws, sure, but actually you go somewhere like North Korea and you're like whoa one big in the life lottery from going somewhere, like you know, when you go somewhere like this. But I would say that going there you also just get a bit of an appreciation curve. I know empathy for the people that live in places that sometimes people assume are kind of evil. So like North Korea and Iraq are two good examples of countries which in the media looks like oh well, it's North Korea, isn't it? So that's like quite an evil place because they've got a nasty dictator in charge, iraq as well because of the Iraq war.
Mike Richards:And you actually go to these places and you realize that people are very similar, despite the kind of cultural differences. Despite differences in the way people dress, the way that societies may be structured, most people want exactly the same things. It's family, socializing, connection, and it would make sense because we're obviously the same animal. It shouldn't be a big surprise. It's like, oh my God, isn't it amazing that you go abroad and people in different countries are the same? But that is a surprise to some people because we build up these nationalist barriers in our minds, and I think the media has a big role to play in this.
Mike Richards:So I think there's no better way to see the world than to see it, to see it yourself and to really thrust yourself into places that maybe make you uncomfortable, and I think those are the ones that you learn the most. It's great going on holiday to Spain. It's great going on holiday to Florida. You'll have a really nice time, but maybe you won't learn as much. But you want to learn about the world. You want to learn about humanity, maybe about yourself and your privileged position in the world, and I think this is where dark tourism can be quite useful.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, I think reading about the communist countries was really interesting to me because there are quite a few communists around in San Francisco and the college, the people who really think that is the way to go. So you're used to write for the economist and you write for someone else. Now who do you write for?
Mike Richards:So yeah, I write for the research arm of the Economist magazine to this day, and I also write for a company called Fitch and then a handful of other research houses.
Richard L Blake:Okay, so you are an expert, for sure. So, and you're also interested in psychology, of course. Why do you think countries sign up for communism when every outcome has always been so catastrophic for the people?
Mike Richards:I don't think people really sign up for it in some ways. So you look at what happened in Russia and China it was revolutions that got them there and so there wasn't necessarily large scale support for it. Usually what happens you'll have a country which is very poor and people are desperate and there's sort of promised, this utopia where everyone's going to be equal, everyone's going to have a good stand of living, and obviously what happens reliably in every single communist experiment it goes disastrously wrong, in millions of people's star and poverty gets worse. And I think the best example is North Korea. North Korea and South Korea were the same country until the 1950s and it was a country that at a time had a GDP of less than a garter, so it was one of the poorest countries in the world. And in the last 70 years there's been an experiment.
Mike Richards:The north of the country has done the communist experiment and it's one of the poorest countries in the world with the least personal freedoms, and it's an awful place to be completely honest with you. And then you go to the capitalist south and it's one of the richest countries in the world and one of the richest countries in the world and it's shocking. I went to Seoul the week before I went to North Korea and it was like being in the future. It's like skyscrapers everywhere, technology everywhere, and in North Korea there's not many cars, there's not much electricity, people are malnourished. People are actually shorter in North Korea on average about a couple of inches than in the south. So it kind of bothers me when I think people without the real knowledge of the outcomes of this it sounds like a nice thing, doesn't it? Wouldn't it be great if everyone was just equal and the sound of living was good for everyone? But every experiment China was a disaster, russia was a disaster, and then you go to the only countries which are still flirting with these systems today, and they're all the worst places in the world. North Korea is an absolute disaster of a place Venezuela as well which has had hard left governments for some time now, used to be one of the richest countries in South America until in the 1950s and it's now a failed state. Cuba, again, could be a really dynamic place and it's a beautiful place and lovely people. But again they're attached to this ideology which essentially has been proven, to keep everyone destitute and poor, except for the people at the top who have a monopoly on power.
Mike Richards:So when you say, why do people choose these systems? Maybe at the beginning there is an uprising, but then, once you decide to give all vested authority to this elite and you don't have democracy, they tend not to want to give the power back. And you know, in the case of North Korea, for example, the state controls absolutely everything the TV, the education system, you know what you can eat, what you can read. Everything is controlled by the state. So how can you overthrow a system like that? And people know that if they try and escape, their families might be killed. If they speak up, they can get chucked in a gulag. And certain regimes like this is really hard to see a way out, and so I don't think people do choose it.
Mike Richards:Maybe at the beginning there was a bit of a feeling towards it, but then once you decide, let's give the state all power and then sort of any checks and balances, this is what happens.
Mike Richards:It's why, actually, one of the big lessons for me, traveling as much as I had, is actually the utility of democracy, for all of its flaws and for all of the difficult things that it brings into our societies. It's the most incredible invention which has only really existed for 150 years or so. We had all of human history run by kings and queens and state kind of grip on everything. And this is this recent experiment and I think it's the most important and vital thing in the modern world. And it scares me, I think, particularly when you see the youth, their approach to democracy and the way that they feel that the states should control what you think, what you say, and they're really happy to give over that power, because I think they just don't know and I think for people that live in San Francisco, they are communists. I would say to them please go on holiday it's a North Korea and then see if it changes your mind. I think it will.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, and there's that saying remember which side people were trying to escape on in the Berlin Wall. It was like no one's trying to escape into Sofia, russia, everyone was trying to get into the West. And yeah, people say, like, marx was a genius, he had an amazing diagnosis but his prescription was just absolutely terrible. But yeah, one argument is that the Northern European countries that you mentioned have particularly high, the most advanced economies in the world. I think is what you said. They're fairly left leaning up there. So what are they getting right?
Mike Richards:I think this is sort of Scandinavian countries that you're talking about Sweden, denmark, iceland, norway and Finland. I mean, they're left leaning within a capitalist framework. These are not communist societies by any means. I think what they're getting right is they have an educated workforce. Education is really important and I think another thing going for them the bizarrely is actually the bad weather. If you plot weather in Europe against average incomes, there's an inverse correlation. So in warmer countries the average earnings are the lowest, whereas the earnings in Europe the higher up you go. Generally speaking, there are a few operations in terms of countries. They get wealthier, and I think part of the reason is actually there's not a lot to do in the winter, when the weather is terrible, and actually to enjoy a good quality of life in a cold country. I think money is more important in some way, so having a nice warm house to live in, having the money to go out for dinner and to do activities, whereas if you live in Spain or Greece, for example, you have the weather, you have the beaches which are free, and I think that affords your quality of life. That maybe reduces the need to strive. So I think that's part of it. And then there's a couple of more specific kind of things like.
Mike Richards:Norway has always held up as this amazing example of like a socialist country that's doing very well and I wouldn't call it socialist, I would say it's sort of a center-left country, it's a oil, it's a hydra, an oil-powered state. It has a sovereign wealth fund worth trillion dollars, which works out, as I think, about 200,000 euros or so per citizen. So there, essentially, they can have fantastic public services because they have this, all of this money from oil. So that's why Norway actually was lagging all of these other countries until the last sort of 50 or 60 years where oil really took off. But in the other ones it's educated workforces, a hike in a working drive, and they have managed to get, I suppose, get the balance between taxing people enough so that public services are good, but not so much that it deters overall economic growth and investments.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, I think Guns, germs and Steel was a book you recommended to me that Jared Diamond, and yeah, he explains a lot of this kind of thing like living closer to the equator, you just don't have to work as hard to create food and farm and things like that, whereas further north you have to be far, much more innovative, which creates a culture of innovation, and that leads to many, many of the benefits I was going to say it's an interesting question of you know, I think at work when I've been focusing on European countries, there is a sort of a view in the northern European countries is like, oh, southern Europe, it's a bit lazy and you wouldn't be better if they were a bit more like that.
Mike Richards:And then you actually go to places like Spain or Italy where they have pretty bad economic challenges. But the data, what the economic data doesn't pick up, is the boost to their quality of life from living in these beautiful countries all the time. And you know Finland, norway and all these countries are some of the richest countries in the world, the most advanced countries in the world and on most happiness surveys are said to be the most happiest countries in the world. But they have some of the highest suicide rate in the world and I think you know when it's dark all the time in winter. I don't think much you can do can compensate for that really.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, sad life, yeah yeah.
Andy Esam:I'm sure it's got pages and pages of things you can do. Yeah, because I was really interested in your examination of happiness and I think you mentioned some time spent in a village in Borneo, the name of which I've forgotten, and you were talking about the inverse correlation between wealth as not necessarily a prediction to happiness, and I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that.
Mike Richards:Yeah. So you know I don't want to be glib about it and it's something you know. It's easy to say, coming from a country like the UK where you know we are a wealthy country. But I know a lot of other people have traveled extensively, have come to the same conclusion. Where you've gone to places that are economically less developed and you expect. For example, this is in Borneo.
Mike Richards:I spent three months on the island and then about six weeks of that in a village called Tampa Sack. It was an eight hour drive from the capital of Borneo, but it was about four hours away from the main road, in the middle of the jungle, and I was expecting to see you know, naively I guess unhappy people struggling and suffering and we were going in there to help and I was just blown away by the community spirit. It had a population of about 200 people. Everyone knew each other. The whole system there works on a basis of favours, so you would have a sort of team of construction workers who'd work on someone's house and someone else's house and someone else's house. All the kids were basically like, whatever age, pretty much as soon as they could walk, they were just roam free in bands of kids, like messing around, playing football, laughing Melod decisions. I think it was going there that just made me think the benefit they get from having this proper community where I think families are staying together, friends live. You know, everyone knows each other in the village and unfortunately what's happened in the West is the richer countries get, the lonelier we get. So there's almost again a direct correlation between the rising incomes and the increase in single person households.
Mike Richards:And I think in America it's sort of particularly acute. Maybe in Australia as well, just in societies that are being built around cars, it's like the physical distance from everyone. You know people commute to work in their cars and they might not have any friends that live close by anymore. And I know that. You know I live in London, a city of 10 million people, and I have a couple of friends that live quite close to me, which is actually really really rare.
Mike Richards:And in these places where actually you know everyone that lives on the street and all your kids know each other, it's not to say that you know they're happier than us I wouldn't necessarily say they are, but they're much happier than you would expect, I think because of the balance given to them by their sort of social connections and their community. But on the other hand, when I was there I could see the impacts of the lack of economic development in that part of the world. There were about three funerals in the time that we were there. Some of the people that died for quite young. There wasn't a hospital very close by and the best hospital still wasn't a particularly fantastic one and they had a sort of lack of opportunities if they wanted to branch out. But you know, did I leave feeling sorry for them? No, and actually I left feeling you know they have some things that you know we really don't.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, I've been having a little bit of a argument with an old friend of ours, mike and Anthony Irwin Mollie, and I said I'm going to do this podcast at him because that's what you can do with a podcast. You can do podcasts at people. So this is done at him. But he's kind of saying he lives in China now. He has three kids, he has maybe one friend in China and I think me, everyone else is his family member or things like that, and he just says he doesn't want friends. And I try to tell him, like all these studies, like you know, people are, you know, happier when they have more friends.
Richard L Blake:Longevity is linked to social connections and you know he's a bit of a bio hacker himself now. He's very into keeping fit, doing ice bars and stuff, but he's completely neglecting the social side of things. And one of the reasons he gives for this is just like I just can't rely on people, like I want to go on a hike with my kids, and then my wife will say, oh, why don't we all invite this, this friend, this group of families and stuff, and when he does, they'll arrive late or they'll he'll want to eat at one restaurant because he's healthy and they'll want to have something really unhealthy. And then they'll, they'll mess up something and they'll forget something, and then they'll, they'll, they'll do something that just drives him mental. So he just says I'm just much happier with my kids and my wife where I'm in charge, and so what would you say to them?
Mike Richards:Like, well, I would say that I suppose his family is his kind of direct social kind of connection. So I think that that that would that would be part of it. And actually what's happening in wealthy societies as well, as we're having less, less kids. You know, birth rates basically in the richest countries in the world are really shockingly low. I mean, it's below replacement level in pretty much every country in Europe. I think in some places in South Korea the fertility rate is one woman, one baby per woman, and it needs to be two to you know. So their population is going to collapse.
Mike Richards:Japan, the population is collapsing, and so as we get wealthier and sort of, I guess you know, people told the careers cannot for you salvation, in some way they're saying, well, I'm not going to have a family, I'm not going to have kids and I'm going to get my fulfillment that way.
Mike Richards:And I'm sure it cannot be filmed in many ways, but actually in these other places where you have friends, if you don't have friends, you have, you know what Moli has three, three kids and wife.
Mike Richards:You know that is that's your own little unit, I suppose, and so that can probably compensate.
Mike Richards:But I think in some of the Nordic countries now it's like 40 over 40% of people are living, living alone, and you know, you go to most of you know the rest of the world outside the West essentially, and you know people are living with their friends on the same street or they're living with their kids and their kids live, you know, live in the next village, whereas, again, what's happening in the West is because I guess we have the ability to move to other places, as people spend 20 years raising a kid and then they move to America or they move to Australia, and so again, it's all of these luxuries essentially that I think have been afforded to us in many ways enrich our lives, but definitely I do think that in the West that's the reason, what part of the reason, why our happiness has not increased as much as it should have, given the incredible improvements to standards of living in the last 150, 200 years.
Mike Richards:Like it is hard to fathom how much better the world is now than 150 years ago, but like people like super happy about it in the West.
Mike Richards:It's like I don't think they are yeah.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, I think this is kind of three points. I want to touch on there. What you said there about the expectations, as well as declining populations populations collapse will come back to that but then also just want to say about socializing. I think where one of the theories for why our decline in social connections has led to increase in happiness this is Sebastian Younger and Tribe.
Richard L Blake:I think that book has been mentioned in the men's group that I used to be a part of in the UK, called Struggle Well and basically the theory is, as people get richer, they can buy themselves out of situations, whereas poorer people in poorer nations need to rely on their friends. So if you say you need someone to look after your dog, for me I send him to Camp Balwell and they looked after by professionals there, but in poorer countries you'd have to ask your neighbor. Or if you couldn't look after your kids, you send them to daycare here, whereas in Tampa Sack the kids are just looked after by each other in that way and, yeah, it's led to people having more independence but less happiness. But yeah, andy, did you want to say something?
Andy Esam:I was just going to say, yeah, I was going to actually widen the topic and say I'm kind of broadly aware of what the UK's views on wellness is and what goes on in the USA. But I was just wondering if you could touch on the other countries that are sort of perhaps most dialed into wellness or even have the luxury to even consider things like this.
Mike Richards:Well, it's interesting, I think, in terms of wellness in the modern sense. I think it's places like the West Coast of America, sydney, australia, london and in the back. Lisbon and Bali. I would say Bali probably. You know, I was just there, actually a few weeks ago, and I would say the average kind of person there was, sort of a spiritual influencer, is how I described them, and I was quite mocking about them to my fiancee, sophie, before she pointed out that I like all of the things that they're there in Bali for which is like yoga and meditation and nice food and the sunshine and things like that.
Mike Richards:So they have. You know, these places have come up in the modern modern world and I suppose quite recently, but in, I guess, in the more like structural sense that have been around for you know, many years. I would say the approach to happiness and someone like butan is quite interesting and this is a Buddhist country in Himalayas and community is a big part of life there. But they actually have gross national happiness as their main development measure instead of gross domestic product.
Mike Richards:I talk about in the book how actually you know this isn't necessarily the best way to go, but it's just an interesting insight into, you know, they view happiness and they view the sort of preservation, the environment and their culture as their most important national sort of benchmarks. And given that it's surrounded on both sides, I think it's right next to India, for example, which has, I think, more poverty, you know, quite significant margin. You cross the border into butan and there is this incredible sense of serenity and calm and people drive really carefully and really slowly and that to me, is something I was quite enjoyed. Actually getting in a car when you're abroad is often the most dangerous thing that you can do. So I think in someone like butan that was like an approach to happiness that felt was slightly different.
Mike Richards:And then I suppose, places like Japan as well, where they don't necessarily have, you know, a religion per se, but I like the way that their cultural traditions have held up over the generations and I don't know why they've been to Japan before, but it's the only Western country in the sense of one that's, you know, as rich as Western countries, which is completely kind of said. We're not. We'll have your, you know some of your technology and we'll make it better, and we don't know your culture. You know it's fine. You do what you do, you will do us, and for that reason I think they have a lot more respect towards elders, which seems like almost the opposite that we have.
Mike Richards:It's like elder people are revered for the wisdom that they have and you're supposed to respect people that are older than you, and there is this sense of politeness and a sense of dignity in the work that you do. So whatever you do as your job, you sort of everyone, everyone acts as if it's the most important thing in the world. They're going to do the best of their abilities and so it's so. It's why it's like a place like Tokyo, which is 40 million people, four times the size of London no Park, snowgreen space, the buildings are all ugly because it was, you know, level during World War Two, so on paper your like it's a dystopian nightmare. But it's probably one of my favorite cities in the world because the people there are so polite and calm and they have such an attention to detail everywhere.
Andy Esam:Yeah, the emphasis of on happiness, on happiness in butan a family, fascinating, and you mentioned something really kind of captured me. My imagination was the base level of happiness. Can you talk a bit about that, what that means?
Mike Richards:Again, this is I suppose this is my experience and my view, and also it's shared by some people in the Buddhist world, or some at least and it's the idea that there's a kind of base level of happiness that we have, that we're all kind of we arrive on this earth with, or it's socialized, and when you're an adult you know it's where some people seem to have a positive disposition and some people have a negative disposition, and I think that has been researched in the past that has suggested that actually, depending on life events, a really positive thing can happen or a really negative thing can happen. But actually over time you will revert back to kind of the level that you your natural, natural state. And I think the famous study is between lottery when rich, I'm sure you'll know, is it lottery winners and amputees.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, there's definitely some research done on lottery winners and how. Yeah, they don't get much of it. They get an initial boost in happiness and it reverts back to exactly what they had before. But I don't know the one about amputees.
Mike Richards:So I think it's like it's the idea almost of the hedonic treadmill, which is a bit like economic development as you become wealthier, for example, or as your life improves. So let's say, you get a promotion, you have a bit more money and you move into the house you've already dreamed, you've always dreamed of, and you're like, if I live in this house, I'm going to be happy and it's going to be amazing, and over time it just becomes normal and it just becomes something you expect and you actually then just need to expect more to be happy and if you lose those things, you're likely to be less happy. And so, kind of bringing the theme back to meditation, I think meditation along with you know various other modalities that are out there, but something for me, meditation is the one thing I think has been able to kind of lift the baseline happiness level, making it slightly less dependent on external events in my life. And I would say that maybe before I started meditating I was on like a five or a six, which is okay. So, on every measure, I've had a really incredibly privileged life and I had a great family growing up and friends and went to good schools and went to good. You know I live in a safe country in the West there were all of these things that were telling me oh, you've got it, you've got it all, so you should be happy. And I wasn't necessarily unhappy, but certainly I wasn't happy all the time. And actually when I faced a difficult year in my life really which was the first kind of year this ever happened to me when I was about 21, my parents' marriage unexpectedly came to an end. My girlfriend of seven years at the time broke up with me. Our family pet dog, who was beloved, died all in about six months. And you know these are not, you know, there are people who suffered vastly larger sort of difficulties in their life but, having not really suffered from them before, they completely flawed me. You know, for about a year or two they completely flawed me.
Mike Richards:I was at university and I could kind of mask it with partying and drinking and sort of managed to muddle my way through, but it was when I kept, when university finished, I came back home to London, that I had to kind of face up to things and I had a sort of six month to a year period where I was, you know, extremely anxious, probably depressed. I think I had post-traumatic stress disorder and that was what really sort of drove me to try and find things that could. I didn't ever want to feel like I did like that again. I remember thinking I don't want to ever feel like this again. What can I do about it? And that's when I started reading more and that's when I found, in the end, meditation.
Mike Richards:And I think this is something that can just offer you stability and a bit of a ballast in your life, regardless of what happens. And it's not foolproof. I think some people think, oh, I meditate and I'm going to be happy all the time. I'm not going to feel sad. It's like, no, that's sadly not how it works.
Mike Richards:But maybe, if you're feeling anxious, if you have a practice like meditation, you have the tools to reduce the anxiousness by percentage points, and if you've been practicing for a short amount of time, maybe it's 10%, after a few years it could be 20%, then maybe after 10 years it can be 50%. It's not perfect, but actually being half as anxious as you would otherwise be is can make really profound improvements to your life, and so I think that's why it's one of the tools that can actually you know, I think it's lifted my baseline happiness level from a five or a six up to maybe a seven or an eight, which is a, I think, a big, a big change. And I think a lot of people who practice rapidly do do kind of say that it's. You know, learning to practice was the moment that their life they didn't realize at the time, but it was the that their life maybe start to turn around a little bit.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, yeah, for sure, I think meditation can do so much. I can remember when I've done a lot of meditation as well, you know, done for the past now I've also done, well, I think, when I was doing a ayahuasca apprenticeship and yeah, we had a little downtime there. I can remember just practicing meditation, just seeing what it would be like to try and change my mood, cause I was in the middle of nowhere, no phone service for a month, nothing to do really, apart from meditating, fast and talk to the local people. But you really can cultivate the emotional state you want. Like when I was feeling like down and hungry cause we were fasting for a long time, I went into just visualizing happiness and then a few minutes later I would be happy. Nothing had changed. I didn't win the lottery, I had not. My circumstances were exactly the same and I realized, wow, if I really want to, if I really practice, I can choose how I feel at any given moment. And I think that's such like a hugely powerful and reassuring thing to carry around with you.
Mike Richards:Yeah, I think just jumping in there. I completely agree. And it's stuff as simple as and this is what I tell people I work with is smiling when you practice, which seems completely stupid. You're like it's going to feel stupid, it's going to feel forced and it's going to feel fake. Just put a spot on your lips when you practice and it can have staggering impacts on how you feel when you are meditating.
Mike Richards:And that's the kind of low level way of, I guess, hacking your internal state.
Mike Richards:But the higher end, you can practice these things called jhanas, which are meditative absorptions, where you deliberately focus on the most positive sensation that you can feel in your body and then really focus on it and almost encourage it to grow.
Mike Richards:And what will happen sometimes is you'll start to feel something a bit positive and the mind starts playing ball as well, saying, okay, this is feeling good, and then actually the positive sensation can grow and you can get into these positive feedback loops where eventually you let go of all effort but you're left in a state of, I guess, bliss, serenity, peace, which are it's not the point that you practice necessarily, but it shows how powerful it can be as a practice and actually can give you moments in your day reliably that you feel serene, which is someone like me who has a naturally very busy, quite an anxious mind. I know that in the morning you know practice, usually for about an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening. I know that for that morning in the hour, whatever happens, I can usually get to a state where I do feel good and then afterwards I feel better. So, yeah, I think it's a very powerful modality.
Andy Esam:Moving away from meditation, mike, I was very interested. At the end you talk about I think you term it seven key precepts which help you become happier, and without giving too much away, because everyone should read the book. I wanted to touch on the last two which I found really interesting. One was number six was let go of the past, and you mentioned breathwork in there, which obviously shows you've been funded by rich and some capacity. But also you mentioned the use of psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, and I wondered if you could talk about the role that's played for you and the role that could potentially play for others.
Mike Richards:Yeah, so I think you know Rich is more of the more an expert than me when it comes to psychedelics, but definitely psychedelics have played a big role in yeah, thanks for that, cheers yeah.
Mike Richards:I wasn't funded by rich, but I think rich. I have done several sessions, breathwork sessions with Rich, which have all been great, to be honest. So I guess at some point I've realized in the process I've done therapy at different points and I don't want to say you know, say it's not useful. I think it's a very important thing to do, but at some point, once you start to realize that actually stuff is kind of trapped in the body and needs to be released, like breathwork and psychedelics are kind of like the express lane to get there I think Sam Harris talks about it. He's like, if meditation is like raising a sail on a boat, psychedelics is like getting on a rocket ship to the moon. So it's sort of it can take you straight to the point, to the most difficult memories in your life. That can take you to the things in your past that you still maybe haven't resolved. And yeah, I think for me it was getting over stuff like my parents' marriage ending, I found, which is super surprising, and this is actually when we did I asked to go together in the Netherlands, rich. I cried like a baby for six hours just absolutely uncontrollably, wailing, which was difficult, but actually felt incredibly chaotic and it was all about being.
Mike Richards:I was bullied when I was maybe seven, for a couple of years at school and it's something that I completely locked away. I had not thought about it for like 20 years and what it taught me was actually that so much of my behaviors to that day I was, I guess about four or five years ago were still being driven by this fear of, one day, I guess, being bullied. So the protection mechanisms were I won't be bullied if I'm in the sports team. So I realized, like I need to be good at sport. You know it was rugby. Yeah, I wasn't into rugby and then went to a school where rugby because if you were in the first team you were popular. So it's like, okay, I need to be really good at rugby. So that's what I try to do, and if you're good at stuff and if you achieve stuff, then you'll be liked. And so I think I realized that a lot of the patterns of my behavior since that point were ultimately driven by this thing. That happened years ago.
Mike Richards:And so I think this is what psychedelics and breathwork which can get you into non-ordinary states of consciousness where you really are forced to let go. It's sometimes the only time really that you have to just surrender to what happens. And it's when you do that or at least in my experience is when I've been able to surrender that I've been able to let go the most of this baggage, whereas I think for meditation it's a bit harder to get to these. You know, telling someone to go on a 10 day meditation retreat, which is super difficult, it's a harder sell sometimes than saying, you know, go and do breathwork for an hour or go and do you know, a psychedelic experience or therapy session for five or six. You can get there in the end, but it takes a lot of effort. No-transcript, you know you still have the ability to duck out if something's too difficult.
Mike Richards:So if you're dealing with something that's coming up from the past and you decide actually like I don't feel like going there, actually you can kind of you can jump, you can escape it, whereas I found with breathwork and meditation, almost it's something that just sorry, breathworks and psychedelics it's something that just happens to you and you kind of you get to a point where you have to surrender to it and I think, yeah, it's been incredibly valuable in letting go things that have happened in the past and, yeah, it has ultimately helped me be happier.
Mike Richards:But I think a caveat would be that you know these things are certainly not, and particularly psychedelics are not for, not for everyone, and I know that it's now we're getting to the point where it's. It's such a it's a like geisty thing that people maybe do it frivolously. And if people ask me, like, should you do psychedelics? It's like, actually you should really really think hard about you know why you're doing it, what you want to achieve from it, whether you've done enough work on yourself. Like, if you've done actually no work on yourself and you take a bunch of mushrooms without any idea what what you're doing, you might even do more harm than good. So I think it's worth pointing out that Rich, again, is much more clued up.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, and one of my. You know another one of the things I could go on a rant about is, yeah, people abusing psychedelics, people doing them too frequently, people lying to themselves saying I'm doing therapy on myself when actually they're just, it's just hedonism. You know, they may as well go do a line of cocaine. If you want to go do mushrooms at a festival, fine, but don't lie to yourself, it's better for you than cocaine. And he's like maybe it's marginally better, but still, yeah, you know, I know that you don't get the dendrite growth in the brain if your eyes are open and that's supposedly, supposedly a lot of the reasons for the mental health benefits. So, you know, set and setting, doing it with a guy doing it with you know a licensed practitioner, which at the moment is it's pretty hard to find because it's illegal in most places. But I think that's fine, wait until it's legal, don't just go out and do it with you know some shame. And bro in barley who's telling you he knows, he knows the secret to to life.
Richard L Blake:But yeah, so there are a lot of dark sides of psychedelics and I know we'll have some psychedelic experts coming on. But I'm not excited of meditation. This is something that I spoke about in my. I did a PhD presentation on this. But so there are some people who you know conspiracy theorists yeah, we love the conspiracy theorists here, but they think that one of the reasons why governments are pushing meditation these days because in the UK you can prescribe meditation, doctors are now able to to give that offer that to people with anxiety and depression is because it can make you so passive that you become able to ignore abuses and you can ignore oppression and you'd be like, oh yeah, I can see that person suffering over there. I'm not going to stand up and do anything about it, I'm just going to go and meditate that pain away. So what about the dark sides, mike?
Mike Richards:Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think for some people they're you know you have. If you had really severe mental health issues, then going on a meditation retreat would be, I think, something that's not advisable. And so, a bit like all of these things, you need to approach it, I think, gently and carefully and build your way up. You don't want to just be jumping in at the deep end of meditating for hours a day. It's like see how you go with five or 10 minutes a day, do that for a few months and then maybe increase the time you can do it, just to just to feel your way into it In terms of your one thing about, I guess, becoming apathetic. I think, maybe for some people, that that does happen. But in my experience, in terms of being and I think this is what a lot of other people say it's like, despite the fact that it's quite a relaxing and passive activity, it makes you more productive but also gives you more energy to try and achieve the things that you want to. And so, in my experience at least, despite the fact that you know I'm spending an hour and an hour meditating a day, people are like, well, firstly, how do you find the time and then like, where do you fit and work? But it makes you so much more efficient and focused when you are actually working and can do so much more of a drive and a mission. I feel that actually it has the opposite impact. So I think for me it's the thing that has most boosted, in some ways, my, my sort of drive to acts and to sort of pursue the things that I love.
Mike Richards:But going back to the kind of contractions I would say for some people, if you have really significant mental health disorders, things like schizophrenia, I think you would potentially do well to just you know, if you want, if you think you can try it, that's fine, but do a couple of minutes and see how you find it.
Mike Richards:And if you ever meditate and there are some people, for a lot of people, for most people, I think or benefits, but there are some people actually being with their busy mind, being with their busy thoughts, is almost too distressing and for them meditation wouldn't be the right thing to do. So it's like all of these things. I think the hype can sometimes become a bit too too much in some ways. So people expect everything to be solved when they meditate and expect it to be beneficial for everyone. I would say that for the vast majority of people it will have benefits for them, but everyone is different and for some people it won't, and so if you're doing it and you're finding you're actually feeling worse and it's making you more anxious or less happy, then obviously it's not. It's not the thing for you. So you really have to listen to yourself.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, oh yeah. I think there's so many sort of spillover benefits, like the benefit you get from meditation just helps whatever it is you're struggling with If you struggle to stay asleep, meditation. If you struggle to get work done, meditation. If you struggle to get through a difficult workout, meditation it just has influence, positive influence, on almost anything you can do. So, yeah, I think the that dark side piece I think is going to be a very small minority of people who become so apathetic. And also, touching on that point earlier that you made about people think that they want to just be happy all the time. Meditation will make you happy all the time.
Richard L Blake:I really want to dispel that myth that a good life is one where you're happy all the time. A good life is a life well lived is feeling, experiencing the full variety of emotions, like if your mother dies or someone beloved, your dog. You don't want to be happy, then you want to be sad, like if I die. I don't want you guys to be happy, I want you to be sad for a bit because, I want you to grieve for me and, yeah, I want people to be angry when something happens.
Richard L Blake:If I got punched in the face by someone, I want you to be angry and maybe stand up for me. Like it is the ability to navigate our emotions and you know this is again a big part of my PhD thesis is about maladaptive emotion regulation strategies Like we want to be able to experience our emotions without completely losing ourself or without avoiding our emotions or without suppressing them or repressing them, and then they come out later in the wrong time. So, yeah, learning to navigate emotions, I think is so key.
Andy Esam:Well, now might be time to mention my other sort of standout. Of your seven key presets might kind of stuck out for me was the final one, and it doesn't sound like something that's very easy to do, and certainly it's something I've never really thought of, and it's to make death your best friend, and so I wonder if you could just talk about that.
Mike Richards:Yeah, so this is kind of inspired by, I suppose, what Buddhists has been doing for a couple of millennia, stoic philosophers from Greece and Rome have been doing for a couple of millennia as well, and it's the idea that actually considering death and considering your own death is something that can make you appreciate life more, and it's quite easy for us to believe that we aren't going to die to the extent that you know, you see something on the news about other people dying and you're like God, isn't that awful? No, never happened to me, though, and you really you just think that you know, maybe you're going to be eternal, or like we just do everything that we can to not think about it, and I have found in my experience, actually, at the end of my meditation practice, I spend a couple of minutes just considering the fact that this could, could be my last day on earth. We don't know how. We assume we'll live to an all day, but we don't know.
Mike Richards:I get hit by cars, I walk across the street, so spending a couple of minutes actually imagining the dissolution of my body and the end of my life and the end of my experience here on on earth For me has been a way of, you know, taking taking the joy out of life and actually making the most out of each day that we have. And I would say there is there's a balance to be had. It's not easy, because there are times where, if I'm having a bad day, I'm like you're going to be dead one day. Is this really something to be worried about, and it can definitely boost your mood, but there's other times where it's it's quite, quite a sad feeling, it's like shit. This is, you know, life is.
Andy Esam:I love my life.
Mike Richards:Life is great.
Andy Esam:I, you know, I want to live.
Mike Richards:And it's like no, you know, you've got a a finite time to deal with. And there's a sense of sadness and a sense of yes, still a sense of fear. But I think, the more that you acquaint yourself with the stuff when you're a bit younger, hopefully it's not such a surprise when it does happen or when people that you love it happens to, and I think it's it's. The best way to feel gratitude in difficult times is just to remember that actually, you know, one day all of this will be gone.
Mike Richards:If you're in a queue and you're stuck in traffic and you're just like this is really rubbish I'm having, this is so boring, you'd be like I just sometimes think, you know, would you rather have this experience or be dead? And usually you're like oh, actually, like, if I actually consider what's happening, you know I'm in my car in traffic, but I'm actually on this planet, spinning around the sun, in this universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies and stars, and I appeared from nowhere made of 50 trillion cells, like in even the most mundane moments, it's actually a simple fact of existing and being alive. I think can be the most amazing and wonderful thing to think about, and I think that's why it can sound morose and quite dark. But actually I think, considering your mortality, a lot of people have found is one way to actually to make you feel more grateful for the simple fact that you are, you are here and that you have the chance to live at all.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, going back to that point off of meditation, I did say I wanted to know more about geopolitics and the decline in the global population. So supposedly that China's population is set to half in 50 years and a lot of the Asian countries are worried. So you know, I live in San Francisco. At the moment I'm in the US. I may not be here forever. Which country is going to be the best place for me to live? Yeah, kind of answer that.
Richard L Blake:But yeah who are going to be the big players in the next 10, 20, 50 years? You think?
Mike Richards:Well, I think, in terms of the population decline thing, the population decline is happening everywhere, apart from Africa and the Middle East, essentially, and so you're going to see population declines all over the world. China is the big one. Their population is going to absolutely collapse and, in my view, despite all of the problems that you see in America and all of the division like right America off at its peril, and the one advantage that America has or many advantages I believe America has over China, is that it's somewhere that people want to live. You know, everywhere all over the world, you know most migrants want to move to America, and what this means is actually America's population will continue to grow. It will continue attracting the brightest minds in the world, I think you know, for the next 20, 30, 40 years yes, like you, rich, exactly, and so that will help it remain innovative. It will help the simple fact that there's more consumers around to purchase stuff which helps the economy, whereas China is going to face this really precipitous decline where they have a massively declining population and then they only have one working age person for two old people, which is their parents. That means they have to pay more tax to pay for their health care and there's signs that the average age of a country determines how innovative the country is. So someone like Japan was quite a young country in the 90s and they everyone thought it was going to overtake America at once. It was the big star power and because its population has declined and been sort of stagnant, they've actually. Their economy has kind of tailed off and they're one of the oldest societies in the world. So actually, despite the fact that you know China definitely is going to be tussling with the United States, I think that'll be the big power play over the next 50 years. I would still hedge my bets on America. And after all, I think there's more foreign born people living in the city of Sydney, where I'm currently recording this, and all of China.
Mike Richards:And so, despite all of the things that China's done, not only people in the world want to move to China, and I think the reasons for that is it's not a free place. The economy is obviously developed very well, but actually, you know, most people want to move to. I think it's like 70% of the migrants in the world want to move to the United States, the UK, canada, australia, either the English speaking country, the world, and I think it's the language necessarily is also because they have this democratic and Western view of the world which I think we are criticizing so much and self-flagellating ourselves so much over maybe past wrongs, over the way that our societies aren't perfect, that we fail to realize actually that you know Western countries are still, I think, the best place is to live in the world and we have more freedom than any other societies in human history. We have more freedom than most people in the entire world do. And I think the difficulty is unless you actually go and see the world for yourself and see these other societies, and all you do is look at TikTok and get your news from there. Yet you think America is terrible and, by the way, you know you're using TikTok. No, it's owned by China's Chinese own company and all Chinese companies are looked over by the state, and is it anyone that they're fermenting? You know unrest and discord in Western countries with this. You know tool that everyone's spending hours a day on. So we read the media, we go on social media and we just flooded with this negative information about the Western world, about how terrible it is and all these things. You know that are wrong and what you actually see is if you go and visit other countries, you'll realize that actually, yeah, america's got problems, but it's a pretty great place overall, and so I would say that America will still be the big power player in. You know, in 50 years time China will still be there, I think.
Mike Richards:If you want the one that's going to really come up, I think it's going to be India, and that's a combination of the fact that it's still got quite a young population, it's got a lot of catch up potential because it's still poorer than China. And I think actually, you know, the modern government at the moment is not perfect by any means. It's a bit nationalist. But what I prefer India to be a sort of ballast to the Chinese influence in the world yes, I would, because it's also a country of 1.5 billion people. It's the largest democracy in the world. I think its view on the world is more aligned, I think, towards freedom and democracy than China's.
Mike Richards:And, yeah, I don't like China's system of putting them in the state ahead of the individual. And even if they have kind of improved people's quality of life, I think they're going to use AI and surveillance to absolutely crack the whip on their own populations, if they aren't doing that already. And I would actually say one final thing on population decline. Population decline could actually be a good thing if it managed carefully. If we assume, that is, that AI is gonna take all our jobs anyway, I think this could be the one thing that saves us actually. If our population is growing and the amount of jobs available for everyone goes down, that is a massive, massive problem. And the one thing that could save us maybe not in our age group, but maybe for people in our kids generation or whatever would be that actually, if the population is declining and there's less jobs, then there's gonna be less of a mismatch, because I think that is one of the things that, I have to say, does scare me about future, potentially.
Andy Esam:One of the things I found interesting in your book, mike, about the USA, because it's somewhere I've sort of considered moving myself, not least to be with my beautiful podcast co-host, but it was this sort of. It goes back to a point about connections and relationships, and I think two statistics that were in your book was the percentage of Americans who say they have zero friends has risen from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021. And another one was the percentage of people in the US living alone has doubled 13% to 26% between 1960 and 2018. Is that kind of unique to the States or is that something that's happening kind of all over the world? Because that sounds pretty worrying.
Mike Richards:Yeah, I think it's not unique to the States. I think this is happening everywhere ultimately, I think, certainly in the more developed countries of the world, as I kind of mentioned previously, this is something that's happening. And then I also think it's just the influence of, you know, social media. Ultimately and I know this will be appearing on the social media and I use social media myself but you'd have to say that, of all of the technological advancement we've had, has TikTok and Instagram made the world and Twitter made the world a better place? You would have to say that absolutely not is the answer to that question. I think all it's done is essentially disunited and what were once quite united societies.
Mike Richards:You look at America 30, 40 years ago and the divergence between people who voted Republican and Democrat. There were tons of floating voters and there was no idea that like couldn't be friend with a Republican or you couldn't be friends with Democrat. Now it's a very sad thing in America where, like I've been to 47 of the 50 states in America or something like that, I've been to America tons of times, been to the coasts where you know it's typically Democrats, been to the deep South and in New York. If I told people. I was doing a road trip and I'm about to go through like Texas or somewhere, it was as if I was, you know, going to get about to go and kill their dog or something and you just say, you know these people, they're in the same country from you and actually when you go through the deep South, you realize that actually most people are really nice and actually really friendly and just because they vote a certain way doesn't mean they're like a bad person.
Mike Richards:And I think it's really sad that we've got to the point where it's like oh, you have a different opinion to me about a political thing, so therefore we can't be friends, we can't talk to each other, and I do actually blame, you know, I think, mark Zuckerberg and you know Twitter and all of these social media websites for doing that to us. And I'm not really sure what the. If you look at the internet usage by Gen Z, I think it's even worse than us. So I don't know what hope we have there in kind of bridging that to the height.
Richard L Blake:I do think the problem is much worse in the US in terms of divisiveness. I think the UK is far more balanced. Spain, it seems far more balanced. You know between left and right, you know you have groups of friends who are definitely voting different ways and that's okay, Whereas out here, you know you don't really see that, but you didn't mention the UK. In terms of population collapse, how do you see the future for the UK?
Mike Richards:UK. I think the outlook is still relatively positive and, again, this is largely because it's an attractive place to live and that's sort of relatively high rates of migration and basically one of the biggest predictors of how well that country will perform is expected population increase or decrease. Populations that decrease, innovation falls, economic growth falls and usually those societies stagnate. I think the UK but like Canada, a bit like America, will have the ability to attract some of the best people abroad and actually our race of fertility rate isn't quite as bad as other places, like it's higher than in Germany, higher than in France and in Italy, so we won't suffer quite as much from those problems. I think the UK has had a pretty tumultuous sort of 10 years. I think beginning at the sort of the high point in being British, I think was watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics in 2012. We had this amazing, amazing time where the country was so united, and then obviously, we have Brexit and then the sort of political turmoil that followed and I do actually think we're now coming out the other end of that. So four years ago, the sort of or, pardon me, it was a 2021 election where you had the choice between Boris Johnson and sort of everyone knows Boris Johnson, quite chaotic Trumpian figure on the one side, and then Jeremy Corbyn, who essentially is a communist and a Marxist, on the other, and it was such a pathetic choice facing a country which is quite centrist.
Mike Richards:What I'm pleased about is now that the two leaders of the party I feel a sensible, intelligent, moderate people.
Mike Richards:So Rishi Sennacher, I think, is on the left of his party and Kirsten Stammer is on the right of his party, and I'm a person that actually believes that most revolutions and quick changes in society his top history tells us rarely ever end well. And so people demanding extreme change from the left or extreme change from the right, really I think their voices that we want to avoid really getting power. Cause if you just look at history, anytime it happens, far left, far right, you know this is when you have genocide, masturbation, societal kind of collapse and actually incremental change. I think from the center is where the most sort of positive changes has happened, which is an unpopular view in many places in, I think in America probably, you tell people you're a centrist or not aligned to one's thoughts, depending on who you speak to. That's gonna upset you. And back home, if I tell people I'm centrist. Some people think that some it's a cop out and they have their own view.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, this reminds me that the Keats quote the best lack of conviction while the worst of passionate intensity. It's like this vocal minority are calling for things and, yeah, it doesn't really represent what most people want.
Mike Richards:And the world. The world is incredibly complex and it's really simple and easy for people to regurgitate like 10 bullet points on the far left and the far right. So they each have like 10 bullet points that you could meet someone and you would know that they would adhere to every single point and you actually just think you haven't actually thought about this, have you? You haven't really thought on every single big issue. You sit with a party line and it's just a bit like a religion. It's like it gives you meaning. It probably helps you make connections with people who have the same views as you.
Mike Richards:You have an in group to favor. You have an out group to dislike and hate and say evil. So it feels maybe this whole that I think in America, maybe what's happening. It's filling the hole that religion has sort of left and I actually just for someone who's an atheist and I talk in the book about how religion has had, I think, a very negative impact on global affairs in terms of the geopolitics between nations. I look at the internal dynamics of countries that religion has disappeared completely and actually removing that ballast, I think in some cases has had quite a negative impact in some way and I think we're still working out in the West what replaces it. So most of the countries, the societies we live in now in the West, particularly the UK, where atheist societies and lots of people are throwing different kind of belief systems that are now to replace them, a lot on political ideologies and I think that's a bit dangerous, to be honest. Yes, couldn't agree more that.
Richard L Blake:GK Chesterton quote another quote when a man stops believing in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in anything. It's just become quite gullible. I feel like that's the case with any sort of spiritual but not religious person in Bali probably.
Mike Richards:Yeah, exactly, and I think on the political front, people just believe that this idea of utopia is possible. If only our team, if only our political party was in charge, then everything would get better. And actually you really understood how complex a society is. You realised that the people in charge have a bit of influence over what happens. But really blaming the prime minister directly for loads of stuff is like they don't really know what's going on. It's just one person really, and they're like have really limited access to information, incomplete data and they only have a few levers that they can pull a bit. And people always vote someone in there like, oh, it's the Messiah, everything's gonna be amazing now. And it's like, oh, my life is still the same, what the hell? It's all this political party's fault. And it's like actually we should stop looking to politicians to fill holes in our lives really.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, well, on that note, I want to teach meditation to the Houses of Parliament. How was that?
Mike Richards:Yeah, yeah, that's a good experience. It's something I've been doing recently and I hope to do a bit more of. It's just a Zoom call, with members that appear on the call talk about too much about who attends, but I think it's just a sign of how much meditation has become mainstream that politicians would actually consider even doing it, and what I'm finding I now work with in the corporate and businesses as well is that it's almost pastiche. Everyone knows about it. They're like oh yeah, mindfulness meditation. Of course A lot of companies already have that right and in-house meditation teachers, whereas five years ago or 10 years ago it was a question of like, oh, is that the hippie? Kind of woo, woo nonsense.
Mike Richards:And actually my job when I work with him is I come in and try to explain that actually you don't need to believe anything to meditate.
Mike Richards:You can feel less stressed. It's really not the best reason to start doing it, but it will make you better at your job. It will make you more productive. You might get a promotion if you are working harder, and this is not the reason I think people should meditate. But if that's the way that it can hook people in, that will then realize that actually it's a much bigger thing and it can start to impact positively your relationships, give you a sense of meaning in your life, and it can be so much more than that. But I think it's just a sign of how far it's come. It's a bit like yoga maybe 20, 30 years ago, when that was like a kind of out there thing and our yoga is like the most standard, normal thing in a Western country that you can do, and my hope is that meditation is already getting there and hopefully it sort of moves more in that direction in the coming years.
Andy Esam:Can you at least tell us whether they wear suits and ties to practice or?
Richard L Blake:play around to. They wear beads, mandalas and a tie.
Mike Richards:Well, it's in the morning, so I don't think they're kind of dressed up so, and it's not in the actual house of commons or anything. It's in the, just in their private rooms, which might be in the house of commons, but it's on Zoom. So Interesting.
Richard L Blake:Yeah well, I mean what you were saying about getting a promotion. I think one of the most you know, the best predictor of a person's success in life is delayed gratification. You can argue what the best is, but you know there is that famous marshmallow test where you know they took kids and put them in a room with one marshmallow and said, if you don't have this one marshmallow, we will give you another one in 10 minutes. But you have to wait there for 10 minutes. And the kids that waited for 10 minutes, you know, had infinitely better outcomes in every area of their life better relationships, better jobs, better health, better everything. And I think if you want to be successful, you need to be able to delay gratification, you need to not be a slave to your desires, whatever that desire may be. You know, going to the kitchen to get a marshmallow, or to watch Netflix, or to go on social media or check your phone or do anything that you are not supposed to be doing. I find meditation has helped me so much.
Mike Richards:Just get things done, get the things I want to do done without so much resistance from myself 100% and I think another way is just a sense of being able to focus and concentration and productivity.
Mike Richards:And so I work remotely and after my meditation in the morning, the first thing I do is I open my laptop and do about three hours usually of writing, and I can actually measure the impact that meditation has had on me in terms of how many words I write in a day, and I would say that you know I meditate every day, so it's hard to gauge, but there are almost an experiment on there is that I'm not going to do it and see what happens, and it's I would say I write almost 30%, 40% more when I've done a long meditation session, and that's just because it's like it's like taking a focus pill or something you find whatever you're doing more interesting and exciting and you're just more engaged and because you're not as minded to look at your phone or check emails.
Mike Richards:It's the best thing that you can do the platform to have a proper space for deep work, which I think is so often kind of you. Look at modern workplaces now. It's like everyone's just answering emails all day and speaking to people. It's just like the worst possible place you could actually think of to get work done, whereas I think meditation, again, there's so much more to it than I don't want people to do it just because it will help their work. But if that's what gets you started, then you know, absolutely do it and you will. You'll notice other benefits as well.
Richard L Blake:Yeah, absolutely Andrew. You wanna say something.
Andy Esam:I was just gonna ask, mike, what's next for you, obviously, if you've released the book, I gather it's doing really well and I, yeah, I just thought I really enjoyed it. But what's your sort of next big challenge? Yeah, so I haven't decided yet.
Mike Richards:To be honest, it's still. It was a couple of year progress to get that book out and it's really nice to see it's selling well and getting lots of nice feedback, and so I'm not gonna jump into anything too soon. I think another book will happen at some stage. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but I think it will be more focused on personal development, more focused on meditation, and maybe it's will be a bit more of an explanation of so.
Mike Richards:This book was about sort of external travel. Maybe the next book will be about, you know, internal, the internal journey of sort of personal growth. So I don't know exactly how it looks. But I'm quite keen also not to jump into the next thing I'm just so keen to do. You work on something for so long and then it's done and you're like oh, it's done that, what next? And rather than jumping straight into something, I'm gonna like enjoy the next few months, take my time. But yeah, I think there'll be another book and obviously in the meantime I still have my work as a geopolitical analyst and my meditation teaching.
Richard L Blake:Right, and where can our listeners find you, Mike?
Mike Richards:So you can find me on Instagram, at the TravelingAte and the website as well. You just Google the TravelingAte and if you wanna find my book as well, just type in the TravelingAte in the Amazon search bar and actually for American listeners it's traveling with two Ls, just in case you don't.
Richard L Blake:Just in case you don't know how to speak English.
Andy Esam:Very well but very diplomatically put there, great Well, I wanted to just mention my favorite quote from the book, because I think it's probably the most applicable to this podcast and the one that resonated with me the most. You said I was determined to approach personal development and indeed happiness like I'd approached seeing the world itself. I wanted to experience it all. I thought that was excellent.
Mike Richards:Well, thank you, thank you, and I would say that actually a little thanks goes to Rich here. I think he was at times been a bit of a mentor in demystifying. He was sort of the guinea pig in some ways. Rich would do something. I'm like is this okay, is this gonna be okay? And he's a good guiding force throughout the process. That, I think, led me to trying lots of things that I would have looked at with deep suspicion maybe 10 years ago, but actually realized there is something to all of this.
Andy Esam:All right here that listeners no whatever.
Richard L Blake:Hear that listeners, Listen to me do what? I tell you okay, and you'll be as successful as Mike. I won't steer you wrong.
Andy Esam:Bear in mind. Rich edits this. I think the podcast is gonna be about 20 seconds long. It's just gonna be that.
Richard L Blake:I'm definitely clipping that.
Andy Esam:yeah, I would say Mike, thanks so much for coming on. It's been awesome talking to you and, yeah, I felt like I've got to know you through the book more than I already did, but it's been a pleasure, thank you. Yeah, loved it.
Richard L Blake:Thanks guys. Yeah, thank you Mike, thank you Andy. Listeners like us, subscribe to us, write us a review, help us grow. We will thank you somehow Send us questions as well. We're gonna do Q and as as well on things. So, yeah, definitely stay in contact. Slide in my DMs, however you wanna contact me. I am available. But thanks, mike and Andy again, and thank you, listener, we will see you next week. See you next week, take care.