Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

How do great leaders build teams to become who they're capable of becoming, and prepare them to handle their emotions when the pressure is highest? Eddie Jones is one of the most accomplished coaches in world rugby. He has led Australia, England, and Japan on the international stage, and guided Japan to one of the greatest upsets in rugby history at the 2015 World Cup. He has built a career on tur...

What if the most important work of parenting isn’t about your child at all... but about understanding yourself? Dr. Dan Siegel is a Harvard-trained clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, a neuroscientist, and one of the leading voices helping us understand how relationships shape the developing mind. He has authored over 20 books, five of them New York Times bestsellers, including co-authoring...

If your body already has powerful systems designed to repair and protect you, are your daily habits helping switch them on... or working against them? Dr. Valter Longo is a professor and director of the Longevity Institute at USC, one of the world’s leading researchers on aging, nutrition, and lifespan, and the author of The Longevity Diet and his latest book, Fasting Cancer. His path into this wo...

What does it take to build a team that trusts each other enough to go through hard things together... not around them? Mike Macdonald is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks and one of the youngest head coaches in modern NFL history to win a Super Bowl. His path is an unusual one. He grew up with almost no family pipeline into football, a baseball kid in Georgia who fell in love with the strateg...

What if the reason so many of us are struggling right now isn’t a lack of success… but a lack of connection to something deeper? Dr. Lisa Miller is a clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University, and author of The Awakened Brain , and her research challenges something many of us have been taught to overlook: that spirituality isn’t optional, and it isn’t just religion… it’s a core part...

What if the real crisis we're facing right now isn't political or technological… but a crisis of attention? Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist, professor emeritus of medicine, and the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the program that helped move mindfulness from contemplative tradition into modern medicine, psychology, and high performance. The last time Jon joined Findin...

What if the most important skill of our moment isn't knowing more, but knowing what's actually worth caring about? Mark Manson is the bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked , with three #1 New York Times bestsellers and tens of millions of readers around the world. The last time Mark joined Finding Mastery was in 2020, mid-COVID, when uncertainty was lou...

Why is it that so many of us are loved... and yet don’t actually feel loved? Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside and one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness. Her newest book, How to Feel Loved , co-authored with relationship scientist Harry Reis, lands at a strange moment: a time when more people than ever say they are connected, and more people than ever...

Why do so many conversations break down, even when both people are trying to connect? Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators . This is his third conversation on Finding Mastery, and the timing matters. The world has shifted since the last time he and Dr. Michael Gervais spoke. Families, friendships, even whole c...

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers help you live and perform with more clarity? We're back with another special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast: an Ask Me Anything episode, built from the deep and sometimes vulnerable questions submitted by our community. Joining Dr. Michael Gervais again is Jeff Byers, former NFL player, Co-Founder and CEO of M...

What does it really take to stay at the top for 16 years and still know who you are when it ends?  Andrew Whitworth is a Super Bowl champion, four-time Pro Bowler, and the oldest left tackle in NFL history to start a Super Bowl. He spent 16 seasons protecting the most valuable position on the field, finished his career by winning a championship at 40, and walked off in one of the most viral m...

Are you playing the game, or being played by it? Tom Bilyeu is an entrepreneur, co-founder of Quest Nutrition, and founder of Impact Theory, one of the most-watched interview platforms in the world. He has spent years studying the systems that shape financial outcomes, and in this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, he makes a case that most people find unsettling: the financial system you're w...

Why do we keep chasing happiness in ways that don't actually work? Dr. Laurie Santos is a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale, where she created the most popular course in the university's 300-year history, the Science of Well-Being . Since then, that course has reached millions of people around the world, and her podcast, The Happiness Lab , has become one of the most trusted...

Why do diets so often fail... is it discipline or biology? Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, nephrologist, and one of the most influential voices challenging how we understand metabolism, obesity, and chronic disease. He is the bestselling author of The Obesity Code , The Diabetes Code , and his newest book, The Hunger Code , which explores a deceptively powerful question: what is actually driving hu...

What separates the athletes who perform when it matters most from those who don't... and can that difference be trained? Michael Johnson is one of the greatest sprinters in history: four-time Olympic gold medalist, nine-time World Champion, and the former world record holder in both the 200 and 400 meters. He was also, by his own account, one of the most psychologically prepared competitors the sp...

There's a version of honesty most of us have never tried. Not brutal honesty. Not radical honesty. Something quieter and more demanding than either: a genuine commitment to saying what is true and useful, and nothing else. That is where this conversation begins. Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up app, joins Dr...

What if the biggest barrier between you and your potential isn’t talent - but a belief you’ve never questioned? Nir Eyal is a behavioral design expert and the bestselling author of Hooked , Indistractable , and his newest book, Beyond Belief . In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, he explores a deceptively powerful idea: that beliefs operate like the hidden software of the mind, shaping w...

What does it look like to bet on yourself, embrace reinvention, and build a YouTube channel that reaches millions? Michelle Khare is the creator and host of Challenge Accepted , the award-winning YouTube series where sherains with elite performers, athletes, and professionals to take on some of the world’s toughest stunts and professions. But this conversation goes far beyond spectacle. It’s about...

What questions are tugging at you right now, and how might exploring the answers help you live and perform with more clarity? We’re back with a special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast: another Ask Me Anything episode, built from the deep, thoughtful questions submitted by our community. In this AMA, Michael Gervais is joined by Jeff Byers, former NFL player, Co-Founder and CEO of Momentous,...

What if the hardest part of money isn’t earning it, but knowing how to use it well? Morgan Housel, bestselling author of The Psychology of Money , returns to Finding Mastery to explore the core idea behind his newest bestselling book, The Art of Spending Money . In this next chapter of his work, Morgan shifts the conversation away from accumulation and toward a deeper question: after the basics ar...

Why are young people today reporting the highest levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and despair in modern history? Dr. Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world’s leading voices on grit, self-control, and the science of thriving. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Angela reflects on how her thinking about grit has evolv...

What if one of the biggest nutrition mistakes we’re making isn’t what we eat, but what we’re missing? Dr. Tim Spector is one of the world’s leading researchers on the gut microbiome and how it shapes metabolism, immunity, and even mental wellbeing. In this conversation Tim challenges the conventional nutrition playbook, explaining why calories are a poor guide to health, why most diets backfire, a...

Data on an NFL sideline is immediate. Decisions are filtered through fear, experience, and instinct. In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais and NFL legend Brandon Marshall explore the tension between analytics and intuition—what happens when information is instant, comprehensive, and impossible to ignore. As technology reshapes decision-making on the NFL sideline, the re...

Some moments don’t fade. They wait. In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais reconnects with Ricardo Lockette as returning to the Super Bowl setting brings old emotions back to the surface. The conversation moves beyond the game itself into grief, loss, and the weight of moments that never fully resolve. Lockette speaks candidly about the Super Bowl heartbreak, the injury...

The huddle is one of the quietest moments in football—and one of the most revealing. Before the play is called, before anyone moves, a team comes together in a space where trust, tone, and connection matter more than words on a whiteboard. In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais and All-Pro wide receiver Brandon Marshall go inside the huddle to explore what really happens...