Ep 16: How Running Toward Yourself Changes Everything | Cory Richards & Blake Mycoskie

In this episode of No Magic Pill, Blake Mycoskie sits down with Cory Richards, the renowned photographer, climber, and author whose work has taken him from the cover of National Geographic to the summit of Everest without supplemental oxygen. You might think the most dangerous place in the world for a mountain climber is an avalanche in the Himalayas. For Cory, the most frightening place he has ever been was inside his own mind.

This one is personal for Blake. Cory’s 2024 memoir, The Color of Everything, reached him as he was coming out of seven years of depression and untangling a bipolar misdiagnosis, and it inspired him to pick up his camera again. Together they go deep on what a bipolar mixed episode actually feels like from the inside, the day Cory walked away from an expedition and a lifestyle that was no longer working, why secrets erode us from within, and the freedom that comes from running toward yourself instead of away.

“I don’t need you to understand, I just need you to believe.”~Cory Richards

The Conversation

Walking Away at Base Camp

In 2021, after a year of exhausted overtraining through Covid shutdowns, Cory helicoptered to 14,000 feet on Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain in the world, as a training run for a new route on Everest. His mood started riding a wave the moment he landed in Nepal: quick to tears, not sleeping, not hungry, a mind speeding into chaotic, overwhelming noise. Alone in his tent, he began sobbing in a way so guttural it frightened him, screaming into his sleeping bag so the kitchen staff would not hear. With hundreds of thousands of dollars invested and a film in production, he walked into the kitchen tent and said two words: I’m done. Done with the expedition, done with the lifestyle, done with a life of constant stimulation that felt normal only because he grew up in chaos.

Naming the Mixed Episode

Home from the mountain, Cory’s therapist gave the experience a name: a profound mixed episode, hypomania and depression overlapping at once, common with bipolar II. He explains the seductive side of hypomania, where you are wildly effective, enviably social, and taking on the world, and the crash that runs beneath it, a feeling he is careful to articulate precisely: not wanting to die so much as not wanting to feel this way anymore. The fury and blame from his team came later, compounding the shame. What sat underneath it all, he believes, was an inner self that had been saying for years that this life was not working, and finally took care of the situation itself.

Believe, Don’t Fix

Blake and Cory dig into why mental illness draws so little empathy compared to physical injury: it is invisible, and most people have no frame of reference. Cory’s answer has become a mantra: I don’t need you to understand, I just need you to believe. He draws a sharp line between empathy, which engages with someone’s pain, and sympathy, which rushes to silver-line it. Trying to fix or take away another person’s pain, he argues, is actually a rejection of it, and it deepens the isolation and shame of the person suffering. What someone in that moment needs is not to be altered. It is to be accepted and believed.

Secrets Are the Termites of Love

Cory moved to LA to write, discovered he was writing about the wrong things, and found his voice through small exercises, one-page stories written in cafes. A painful chapter in Thailand, where a relationship dissolved and profound isolation set in, cracked the writing open. From the Okavango Delta, where he once ran the hardest expedition of his life, he pulls the book’s central metaphor: termites feed on decay, yet they build the islands that become places of refuge. Secrets, he says, are the termites of love and intimacy. Everybody keeps them, hiding what we believe is unlovable in us, and the more we hide, the more unlovable we believe ourselves to be. Turn into those things bravely, and the same material builds your islands of refuge.

The Treehouse: Men’s Work and the Way Out of Victimhood

Cory walks through Treehouse, the structured men’s group he does with his close friend Kenny Kane: eight men per cohort, meeting in person every two weeks around a fire, no drinking, built on shared meals and real structure. The exercises include boiling your purpose down to a single word, his landed on compassion, and auditing where your time and energy actually go, which are two different things. Both men are passionate about therapy done right. Cory’s line, that psychology is an invitation out of victimhood, not into it, frames the trap of mistaking language for healing, and Blake connects it to his experience at the Hoffman Institute and the art of self-forgiveness without reopening someone else’s wounds.

Superpowers, Not Sentences

Cory reframes diagnosis itself: bipolar, ADHD, and the rest are just words that create a container around a set of behaviors, extensions of neurobiology, and the story we attach to them is what breaks us. The story he lived with for years, that he was fundamentally flawed and beyond repair, is not what bipolar is. Managed well, he believes these conditions can be superpowers, and if you erased bipolar disorder entirely, you would erase most of the world’s greatest art. He is open about still taking medication and rejects the growing anti-med movement, while agreeing the country is overprescribed. And the real foundation is not biohacking pebbles but boulders: community with aligned values, mostly whole foods, walking, time outside, and sleep. The conversation closes with enoughness, the cup that was always full, his line that only the summit can illuminate its own insignificance, and Blake reading the Enough poem as he shares two bracelets, one to wear and one to pass on, like a flame lighting another candle.

About Cory Richards

Cory Richards is a photographer, filmmaker, author, and speaker whose career has spanned more than a decade shooting for National Geographic in the most remote corners of the globe. A National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, he was part of the team that made the first winter ascent of Gasherbrum II, the first American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter, and in 2016 he climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen. After surviving a grade 4 avalanche, his selfie became the cover of National Geographic’s 125th anniversary issue. His memoir, The Color of Everything, was published by Penguin Random House in 2024 and chronicles his adventurous life alongside his journey with bipolar disorder.

Links
Instagram: @coryrichards
Website: https://www.coryrichards.com/