
The Stories We Tell Ourselves (With Luca Pani)
My dad is back. Luca Pani — physician, psychiatrist, advisor to governments and pharmaceutical companies — sat down with me for what turned into one of the most wide-open conversations we’ve had on this show. We started with a simple question: why did leaving Sardinia matter? Why did coming to America matter? And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, we found the real question — the one most people spend their whole lives not asking. Are you living your life? Or are you living a story about your life? Luca makes the case — from evolutionary biology, from decades of psychiatry, from watching people at the highest levels of business and government — that most human suffering isn’t about what happened to you. It’s about the story you built around it. And the truth you’ve been hiding inside that story. We also talk about: what unconditional love actually looks like in practice (and why most parents get it wrong), how to know when your kids are starting to drift and what to do about it, why the data in your life is always telling you the truth even when your story isn’t, and why a secure base is the only thing that actually sets you free. The close of this episode is one I’ll remember for a long time. If your dad is no longer here — this one’s for you too.
- Transcript