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Episode: #764: Edward Norton and Martha Beck

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:48:00

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features

segments from episode #133 "Edward Norton on Mastery, Must-Read Books, and The Future of Crowdfunding" and #732 "Martha Beck — The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner 'Integrity Cleanse,' Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)ExpressVPN high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00] Start [05:45] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:48] Enter Edward Norton.[07:19] Edward's introduction to acting.[08:45] First theater mentors and what they instilled in Edward.[12:11] Who comes to mind when Edward hears the word "successful?"[13:18] Most gifted books.[14:28] Life-changing essays.[15:50] Favorite documentaries.[16:40] Underrated movies.[18:51] Edward's advice to his younger selves.[20:09] Community appreciation.[22:37] Enter Martha Beck.[23:08] My contribution to teen atrociousness.[23:40] Connecting with Boyd Varty.[29:28] The path of not here.[33:25] Finding joy in the body can save your life.[38:18] The pregnant pause that ended Martha's obsession with intellect.[43:52] Sensitivity and suffering.[47:38] The year of living lie-lessly.[52:37] An illuminating change of perspective.[1:02:08] The path to taking a black belt integrity cleanse.[1:05:36] Owning your right to say "No."[1:09:39] Alternatives to "No" that remain honest.[1:13:05] The language of candor.[1:15:24] Ending relationships that have run their course.[1:16:30] The Asian influence.[1:20:20] Sweet or savory?[1:21:30] Are you comfortable?[1:23:27] Want vs. yearning and jumping the track.[1:36:30] Rhino ruminations.[1:38:00] The Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, and Byron Katie.[1:49:13] America's Goethe?[1:52:15] Weighing kryptonite against superpowers.[2:00:09] Exploring the opposite of anxiety.[2:12:55] Dick Schwartz and Internal Family Systems.[2:17:46] Compassion even for the self's unwanted pieces.[2:20:14] Favorite animal.[2:24:52] Equine therapy.[2:31:00] Selling the ranch.[2:34:31] The monkey whisperer.[2:36:00] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
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00:02:27 Speaker_03
I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says, not available in your current location, something like that.

00:02:39 Speaker_03
Or, creepier still, if you're at home and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly, and then a screen for AT&T pops up, and it says, you might be searching for this, how about that?

00:02:53 Speaker_03
And it suggests an alternative, and I think to myself, wait a second, My internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously.

00:03:07 Speaker_03
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00:05:10 Speaker_00
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

00:05:29 Speaker_03
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:46 Speaker_03
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:56 Speaker_03
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:06:08 Speaker_03
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:06:21 Speaker_03
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:06:31 Speaker_03
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:49 Speaker_00
First up, Edward Norton, philanthropist, environmentalist, director, producer, and Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning actor, who has starred in more than 50 films, including Primal Fear, American History X, Fight Club, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Birdman, and Motherless Brooklyn, which he also wrote, produced, and directed.

00:07:13 Speaker_00
You can find Edward on Twitter, at Edward Norton.

00:07:19 Speaker_03
When were you introduced to acting or how did that come to be? And I did do a fair amount of reading and for whatever reason wasn't able to pin it down exactly. I mean, the summer camp came up, but I don't know where things began.

00:07:32 Speaker_01
I mean, mostly my mother was an English teacher. She was a high school English teacher and was a real theater aficionado. Both my parents were theater aficionados and film lovers and stuff like that.

00:07:43 Speaker_01
And they exposed me very early on to theater and plays. And I had a strong pull toward that from the time I was five years old.

00:07:53 Speaker_01
Even I started, I, a babysitter of mine went and I signed up at the theater arts program outside of school that she was involved in. And that's how I got involved in it. And I went through ebbs and flows. I loved it.

00:08:06 Speaker_01
It wasn't like I knew I wanted to be an actor. I just liked doing it and I loved writing stories. I made up my own comic books and I made little VHS camcorder films where you use the pause button as you're cut. You know what I mean?

00:08:18 Speaker_01
Just all that stuff I love. Not exclusively, not in a way where I knew it was my life. as an adult. And then I got really self-conscious about it in high school, like I went to a public high school, it didn't seem cool to me at all.

00:08:29 Speaker_01
I was doing my athletics and... And the athletics were, at that time, what? I did a lot, I played tennis, I played baseball, I played ice hockey. Where was that? I ran track in Columbia, Maryland. It's like half an hour south of Baltimore.

00:08:45 Speaker_03
Who were your first then mentors in the world of theater acting or performing?

00:08:51 Speaker_01
The woman who created this local theater arts school in our community in Columbia, Maryland. Her name is Toby Ornstein.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
And it's crazy to say, but she really was, I still think she's one of the great minds I ever encountered on theater, the craft of theater, the craft of acting. she was not a regional theater hobbyist.

00:09:13 Speaker_01
She was my Stella Adler, really, when I was young, and infused us when we were really young with, I don't know, a sense of seriousness about it, and told us to read, and told us to be erudite on plays, and it was really interesting.

00:09:28 Speaker_01
And then, like I said, in my teens, I got kind of self-conscious about it, and then I saw Ian McKellen do a one-man show in Washington, D.C. when I was about 17.

00:09:38 Speaker_01
it had such a huge impact on me that I thought, wow, this is something you could actually do as an avocation. You know what I mean? This is something that you can do as an adult and it's like big and important and meaningful.

00:09:50 Speaker_01
That's how I felt about it. And then I still didn't really have a notion that I was gonna commit myself to that until a couple years after college even. A couple years after college?

00:09:58 Speaker_03
What was your major in college?

00:10:00 Speaker_01
I got a degree in history. With a focus on Asian studies and languages and stuff.

00:10:06 Speaker_03
If we go back to, and I'm blanking, I apologize, what was her name again? Toby Ornstein. Toby. Yeah.

00:10:12 Speaker_03
What, could you tell a story or give an example of what type of thing she would emphasize when she was working with you guys or any particular memories of her?

00:10:23 Speaker_01
Mostly I think, you know, I think a lot of people would say that someone in their early life

00:10:29 Speaker_01
If you're lucky, you have someone when you're young who doesn't talk down to you, who speaks to you as a serious person, and exhorts you to take something seriously, to take work seriously.

00:10:44 Speaker_01
And if a person does that in the right way, you feel elevated. As a young person, you feel elevated. You feel like someone's saying to you, hey, you wanna be taken seriously? Then take things seriously. Do the work.

00:10:56 Speaker_01
don't coast, and I'd say that's what she gave me. Later, when I was in New York, I had a teacher named Terry Schreiber who ran a terrific theater studio in New York, acting studio in New York.

00:11:07 Speaker_01
I've often said about him that the thing I admired most about him was that he was like a pluralist and by that I mean he basically kind of rejected this notion that has infused I think a lot of the training of actors that one methodology holds the key to anything.

00:11:25 Speaker_01
He was like all of these things are what a forehand, a backhand, a volley, a serve are to a tennis player that is the Lee Strasberg method, the Stella Adler imagination focus, the Sandy Meisner exercises.

00:11:39 Speaker_01
He basically just said if you don't get yourself conversant with a lot of shots, you're just not gonna be great. You're not gonna be able to address material with diverse skill sets as called for.

00:11:50 Speaker_01
That really resonated with me because I was really turned off by dogma.

00:12:00 Speaker_03
of acting and performance. Accept what is useful, reject what is useless, and act what is uniquely your own.

00:12:06 Speaker_01
Exactly, exactly. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, I agree.

00:12:11 Speaker_03
When you hear the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why?

00:12:17 Speaker_01
now in my life when I meet people who seem like they've got their aspirations and their engagement in balance with a lot of time for contemplative time, family time, personal health, physical health.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
I tend to look at that and go, wow, like I want to be like that guy or that woman, you know, that I definitely have seen more than enough people with success as defined by notoriety or money or whatever, who look like the specter of despair to me.

00:12:59 Speaker_01
Like I've seen, as I'm sure you have, lots of people, you know, with the albatross of success around their neck that seem like an intense cautionary tale to me, like I'd rather.

00:13:11 Speaker_01
So it's more my sense of like what constitutes a successful person is probably more defined now by what looks like a healthy person.

00:13:18 Speaker_03
What books or book have you given most as a gift to other people?

00:13:23 Speaker_01
There was a period where I really liked Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book, it's called Wind, Sand, and Stars. That's a great, great one. Were you interested in him because he was a pilot? Yeah, both. I was reading a lot of books about flying.

00:13:39 Speaker_03
A real innovator in, I guess, what, postal delivery?

00:13:42 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, I mean he's flying the mail from like the Sahara to Paris and from Patagonia to Paris, which is, you know, from... Yeah, that's insane. Crazy.

00:13:51 Speaker_03
For those people who don't recognize the name, also wrote The Little Prince.

00:13:53 Speaker_01
The Little Prince, yeah. Wind, Sand, and Stars is, it's as much a book about the philosophy of life as it is about flying. It's like zen in the craft of flying, but it's just beautiful.

00:14:06 Speaker_01
We were talking about this earlier, I really like that book, The Black Swan. I gave that to friends of a certain type. What type? I really enjoyed that book.

00:14:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, I think it's an extremely, like, if you absorb it right, it's got a really amazing capacity to prick certain bubbles of delusion. or help you realize bubbles of delusion that we all operate in, and I think it's really, really cool.

00:14:28 Speaker_03
You mentioned two essays, and we don't have to go too deep into the, I'll just name them and then link to them in the show notes, but there was Second Wind. Second Wind, yeah.

00:14:37 Speaker_03
Which was by the former Czechoslovakian president, I'm not gonna get his first name right. Václav Havel. Havel, H-A-V-E-L, and then The Catastrophe of Success, and the author is? Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams.

00:14:49 Speaker_03
Any context that you'd like to provide for folks for those two?

00:14:52 Speaker_01
just great, the catastrophe of success is like one of the great essays by a creative person about exactly what you're just talking, the traps, the traps that follow on achieving anything really that you were aspiring to achieve and then what happens after that happens, you know, and Second Wind is sort of the same from a different perspective, more like how do you have the courage to kind of not repeat yourself, put yourself out of your comfort zone,

00:15:20 Speaker_01
in a creative sense but also in a life sense and I think what I like about Second Wind is as a playwright he's sort of saying like that you kind of disgorge a point of view and you can keep doing that but at some point if you don't stop and go back into like

00:15:35 Speaker_01
absorption mode, you're going to be repeating yourself and you have to dare yourself to stop, listen, live, absorb, and then try again from scratch. You know what I mean? That's like, it's a great essay. It's really, really great.

00:15:50 Speaker_03
Do you have any favorite documentaries?

00:15:53 Speaker_01
Many. I love Bennett Miller's film The Cruise. The Cruise? Yeah, Bennett, people know he directed Capote and Moneyball and Foxcatcher, brilliant filmmaker, but I think almost my favorite film of his is a documentary called The Cruise.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
What is that about? It's about a guy who's a, he's a tour guide host on the open double-decker buses in New York City, who's a poet and who, you just have to see it. It's great. And I really like that one. I really like Adam Curtis's films.

00:16:25 Speaker_01
great British documentarian, he's got that four-part film called The Century of the Self, and then a three-part one called The Power of Nightmares. I think those are absolutely brilliant, brilliant films. Dense, but really eye-opening.

00:16:41 Speaker_03
Are there any other underrated movies that you think people should see? They're not necessarily documentaries. Any particular movies that come to mind for you?

00:16:48 Speaker_01
Of late, I think I'm a huge, huge fan of this French filmmaker, Jacques Odiard, who I think in the last few years, he put up a hat trick of films, The Beat My Heart Skipped, and then A Prophet.

00:17:02 Speaker_03
Okay, so that is one of my favorite films.

00:17:05 Speaker_01
Amazing. I personally put A Prophet as one of the three best gangster films ever made. So good. I think for me The Godfather, Goodfellas, and A Prophet are at this point my three if I had to pick three gangster films, I think they're the best ones.

00:17:18 Speaker_03
Yeah, if for those people who haven't seen A Prophet, it's, I don't speak French, but I guess it's Un Prophète, and the poster, if you're looking at it on Netflix or Amazon or iTunes or whatever, it's sort of red and black, but it's about, I want to say Middle Eastern.

00:17:31 Speaker_03
Algerian. Algerian.

00:17:33 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:17:33 Speaker_03
That's right. Algerian young male who goes to prison and about his ascension.

00:17:38 Speaker_01
Oh my God, I won't say anything more. And then after that, Rust and Bone was his next film, and it's like, It's just a brilliant film. Marion Cotillard, it's like one of the great performances in the last few years. And I love those, all those films.

00:17:55 Speaker_01
And I think, excusing the fact that I happen to be in one of them, but I think Alejandro Iñárritu's last three films in a row, Beautiful, was an extremely, extremely underseen masterpiece.

00:18:09 Speaker_01
It was Iñárritu's film prior to Birdman, and it's a masterpiece. It's just called Beautiful. Yeah, spelled wrong. It's a masterpiece and it's absolutely brilliant. And again, one of the greatest performances in a long time.

00:18:24 Speaker_01
And the third in his triptych, I think, is The Revenant out right now. I think The Revenant's one of the great films I've seen in the last many years. It's like, it's an absolute unqualified masterpiece.

00:18:35 Speaker_01
It's just, it's like a Native American spirit myth or straight out of a Joseph Campbell myth or something. It's just a magnificent, magnificent piece of filmmaking.

00:18:46 Speaker_03
We could have a whole separate conversation about Birdman, which we won't do today, but also one of my favorite films in the last few years. What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self, and could you displace where you were at the time?

00:18:56 Speaker_01
I was on the last two days of shooting a film I was directing when I turned 30, and

00:19:00 Speaker_01
I think I might tell myself at that phase to commit myself to a few fewer things than I did at that time that I'm still feeling obligated to and that maybe I wish I had a few less of those things.

00:19:19 Speaker_01
Like I think my aspiration and my sense of my own energy and time was like limitless at that time and now some of that has become a cage of obligation that I would like to unlock.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
But I'll get there. Senior year in college, what advice would you have given yourself?

00:19:42 Speaker_01
I might've told myself to go live abroad right then. Should've done it right then, like for a year or two. I had lived abroad a little bit. I should've gone and, that's like when you think everything's about to get started and it's not.

00:19:55 Speaker_01
And I should've gone somewhere and lived somewhere interesting or different that it would be much harder to do later. Where would you choose for yourself? I don't know. No? I don't know.

00:20:05 Speaker_03
Just take a trip to Japan together, get you back to Japan. The last real question is, do you have any ask or request of the audience, people listening, things they should do, ponder, or otherwise?

00:20:17 Speaker_01
What I think's cool about what you've assembled is I think it's driven by people's desire to, like, not hack life, but be proactive and participate and not be apathetic, and I like that.

00:20:28 Speaker_01
I think that's a positive community, and I think we all get really tired, you know? I think modern life is stressful and tiring and confusing, and I think

00:20:37 Speaker_01
Nietzsche has that great thing, that idea of self-overcoming, that the overman is not like a perfect person, it's actually the person who's perpetually trying to self-overcome. And I really like that idea.

00:20:49 Speaker_01
I think staying engaged in the idea of evolving yourself is really cool. So I think it's awesome that you've got this many people kind of

00:20:57 Speaker_03
Linked up together around those ideas yeah i. I really hope people listening no matter how small you might feel or isolated you might feel i know not everyone out there has community like.

00:21:08 Speaker_03
You are i might have in new york or sf it make this year the year that you astonish yourself with what you can do or be a part of and look back.

00:21:18 Speaker_03
On december thirty first of this year and just hope to say holy shit i can't believe i was part of x i did x yourself because i don't i think it's a lot easier than people might think.

00:21:32 Speaker_03
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1?

00:21:57 Speaker_03
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You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim.

00:22:29 Speaker_03
Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.

00:22:37 Speaker_00
And now, Dr. Martha Beck, described by NPR and USA Today as the best known life coach in America, host of the Gathering Room podcast, creator of Wayfinder Life Coach Training, and author of 11 books, including her upcoming Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose.

00:23:02 Speaker_00
You can find Martha on Twitter and Instagram at TheMarthaBeck.

00:23:08 Speaker_03
Martha, it is so nice to finally connect and to see your face, and I really appreciate you taking the time. So thank you.

00:23:14 Speaker_02
It's my honor. I gave your four-hour work week to my then-teenage children. I said, I want you to learn the way this man thinks. Whatever you do, just study his mind. It is your new Bible.

00:23:27 Speaker_03
Thank you for that. Hopefully it didn't turn them to the dark side.

00:23:30 Speaker_02
Oh, they're atrocious, yeah.

00:23:33 Speaker_03
That was the beginning of the end, so thank you. Thank you, Tim, for derailing the development of my children.

00:23:41 Speaker_03
Well, let's talk about mutual friend briefly, because our connecting point, the way we directly connected, even though I had observed you from afar for quite some time. is Boyd Vardian.

00:23:52 Speaker_03
For people who don't know, Boyd is the author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. He has been, there it is right behind you, beautiful little book, which I've read multiple times. And he is one hell of a guy. He's one of a kind. He really is.

00:24:06 Speaker_03
And I wanted to ask you to perhaps begin with describing how the two of you connected.

00:24:14 Speaker_02
It was such a strange thing. I mean, he's told me the story from his side since. All I knew was that I was in a weird period of my own life.

00:24:23 Speaker_02
I'd written a book about leaving Mormonism, and a lot of people didn't like it, and I was getting death threats and legal threats, and I sort of ran away to do a book tour in South Africa.

00:24:34 Speaker_02
And I went to my favorite place there, which is a game preserve called Londolozi, where I'd been once before. And it was like the thing I had saved up for and the thing I'd been looking forward to.

00:24:44 Speaker_02
And I felt safer there with the lions and the rhinoceroses and whatnot than I did anywhere among people. I was terrified of people at the time. Still sort of am, but I was really terrified at that time.

00:24:57 Speaker_02
So all I knew is that I had a certain ranger who was supposed to be taking me out on safari, and the guy who showed up was a different guy. All right, I didn't really care. But we got talking as we drove around, and here I am, he's 23, I'm 43, I think.

00:25:10 Speaker_02
So we start talking, and housewife to game ranger, just like a heart to heart would be. And I don't know how, within five minutes, we were in such an intense conversation and we were laughing at each other's jokes and we were having this amazing time.

00:25:31 Speaker_02
And we went back to the game preserve place, to the camp, and we had tea together. And he told me, you know, my family has been going through some difficult times. They've had really strange legal things happening.

00:25:45 Speaker_02
kind of paralleled what I was going through in some ways. So I felt really understood, but I also thought, oh my gosh, he doesn't understand really what the dynamics of what's going on. And I'm a sociologist. I study psychology as my trade.

00:25:58 Speaker_02
So I started talking to him about it. And he says, you have to meet my family. I didn't know that his family was the family that owned the game preserve and had started it and like reforested it and everything.

00:26:10 Speaker_02
Before I knew it, I was at their house with his sister Bronwyn and his parents, Dave and Shannon, and I was talking to them as fast as I could about how to deal with attacks from psychopaths.

00:26:23 Speaker_02
They can handle attacks from almost anything, but psychopaths were new to them. And I was supposed to leave on this small plane. They held the plane for an hour so we could keep talking. And I got on the plane, and I had a copy of Dave's book.

00:26:39 Speaker_02
Dave is Boyd's father, and he'd written a memoir. And I got on the plane, and they shouted after me, next time you come back, you can stay with us. And I got on the plane with my head spinning, and I thought, I just met my best friends.

00:26:52 Speaker_02
And I read Dave's book on the plane, and there's a place where Boyd, his sister Bronwyn, and his mother, and their teacher were all at home together. And there was a break-in, and Boyd woke up with a gun in his mouth.

00:27:08 Speaker_02
The guy had shoved the barrel of a gun in his mouth and woke him up that way. and they were tied up for five hours. They were threatened with death. So I'm on the plane and I'm sobbing hysterically because this is happening to my best friends.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
And I was like, you could have been killed. You know what, Tim, it's a good thing that flight was really long because I was out of my mind. I felt so close to Boyd and his family and I have ever since.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
It's been like 20 years, and I've gone back and gone back, and we've done things together, and he's become this incredible coach, and I taught him what I could teach him.

00:27:48 Speaker_02
He's learned so much more from other people, but it was just this incredible bond that formed between the most unlikely pair of friends, and yeah, he's one of the best people in the world, in my humble opinion.

00:28:01 Speaker_03
Yeah, he's amazing. Also an incredible storyteller, and as you mentioned, well-adapted to dealing with certain types of threats.

00:28:08 Speaker_03
And I suppose this will probably segue into other things that we talk about, but he almost was eaten alive by a crocodile, right? And his leg still bears incredible scars from that. He's got a gun barrel in his mouth.

00:28:21 Speaker_03
And yet, there are certain things we are not particularly well-evolved to handle, like modern-day psychopaths as one example.

00:28:30 Speaker_02
Psychopaths of any era, really.

00:28:32 Speaker_03
Of any era. And there are a few things that I took from Boyd, just to continue to give a kind of hats off bow to Boyd, who is also one of the best storytellers I've ever heard in my life.

00:28:43 Speaker_02
He's magnificent. I think he might be the best storyteller in the world.

00:28:48 Speaker_03
So for those who haven't heard my podcast with Boyd, I encourage you to check that out. There's a line from his book, from The Line Tracker's Guide to Life, which has stuck with me ever since.

00:28:58 Speaker_03
And I think of it often, which is a line from Rennius, this master tracker, who says, I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there. And I think that's resonating with a lot of people.

00:29:08 Speaker_03
There's another line, which I'm less familiar with, but in the process of doing, homework for this conversation. I came across this on your website, actually, and it's referencing Boyd, I know.

00:29:19 Speaker_03
We all have a lot on our websites, so you can't believe everything you read.

00:29:21 Speaker_02
We're both obsessed with Boyd, and we just need to accept it.

00:29:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. We'll have to come up with a custody plan. So he has a name for the experience of getting lost, the path of not here. Now, I have not heard him say that. What does that mean, the path of not here?

00:29:37 Speaker_02
Well, we're out wandering around trying to track. I remember once tracking a porcupine with Boyd and it was easy on the road because the quill drags are easy to see. Then the porcupine left the road and it was just scrub and rocks and everything.

00:29:50 Speaker_02
I didn't know what he was looking at, but he kept walking. I said, I haven't seen anything for a long time and I'm completely lost. He said, no, you're never lost.

00:30:03 Speaker_02
What you're getting is the information that the place you are now and the way you're going isn't the way you want to end up. That is an incredibly important place called the path of not here.

00:30:14 Speaker_02
And every time you realize you're in it, you have the option of shifting, of going somewhere else. Without recognizing that this is the path of not here, you can't shift. So when I coach people, they're almost always way into the path of not here.

00:30:31 Speaker_02
You know, they hate their job, their marriage is awful, whatever, and they've just kept going and going and going and going. And they haven't woken up and seen that there's not been a footprint for a very long time.

00:30:44 Speaker_02
And then, by the way, Boyd found the damn porcupine den in the middle of like, how he trapped this thing over a rock. I don't know how, but he was quite pleased.

00:30:57 Speaker_03
I'm sure he was pleased. Watching these expert trackers track is akin to having some type of ethereal experience on a different plane. But for them, it's very scientific, right? There's nothing mystical or very little mystical about it.

00:31:14 Speaker_03
It's very much deductive Sherlock Holmes type

00:31:17 Speaker_02
I call it the technology of magic, because it looks like magic to us. If you showed someone from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon an iPhone, they would say, oh, magic. And we'd say, no, no, technology. When people are using these ancient

00:31:33 Speaker_02
forms of wisdom that we don't have. It looks like magic. And we say, magic? And they say, no, no, technology.

00:31:38 Speaker_02
And I remember the first tracking lesson I ever had with Ranius, who is, I couldn't believe he would be so generous, especially to a female, because they don't usually train women as trackers. We're just walking along. He's not saying anything.

00:31:51 Speaker_02
He picks up his stick and makes a circle in the sand. And then he just stands there, doesn't say a word. And I look down and there's a huge paw print. And it's obviously a lion. So I'm like, it's a lion. And he was like, mm-hmm. And he just stood there.

00:32:06 Speaker_02
And I kept looking at it. And then he held up his hand and he did this. He just shifted it like a quarter inch to one side. And I looked down and I saw that the print had been disturbed in exactly that way.

00:32:19 Speaker_02
And suddenly I felt myself as if I was down on all fours and I shifted that left paw, that left hand, just that little bit. And I realized the lion had looked over his left shoulder and that had made a slight, a little swish in the track.

00:32:37 Speaker_02
And so the lion was either looking at something, one of his pride mates or one of his or potential prey, and he was going to go around to that spot so we could cut over there, because the lion had looked at that significantly.

00:32:49 Speaker_02
And I remember, it's like learning to read for the second time, even when you only know a couple of words, it's magic.

00:32:56 Speaker_03
Yeah, totally. Rhenius is something else. There are levels and then there are levels. And as you were talking, I thought of a quote that I really enjoy from the very much storied science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.

00:33:09 Speaker_02
One of my faves.

00:33:11 Speaker_03
I bet I know the quote. You have read a lot of books and the quote you know is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Exactly. So let's talk about the path of not here.

00:33:23 Speaker_03
If we could talk about a practical example, because in the email introduction, Boyd credits you with, in a way, rescuing him or helping him rescue himself from a period of great difficulty.

00:33:38 Speaker_02
It was mutual.

00:33:39 Speaker_03
And I would love to know what that intervention looked like, or maybe to be more specific, what are some of the questions, cues, things that you did with Boyd that might be instructive in terms of helping someone get off the path of not here?

00:33:57 Speaker_02
Okay, so the first thing is for me, and I want to be delicate about this because people get worried when we talk about it, but I watched your TED Talk doing homework for this. I watched it again.

00:34:08 Speaker_02
And you start out very courageously in one of your TED Talks talking about being in a depressive period and thinking you might want to end your life. I was so surprised to hear that there are people who haven't been there.

00:34:21 Speaker_02
I just thought that was how you spend a Thursday. So, I remember sitting in the Lamont Library at Harvard when I was 17. I call it the lament library because all these people had carved their woes into the heralds. It was a freshman library.

00:34:38 Speaker_03
Not surprising. Yeah, not surprising.

00:34:39 Speaker_02
And I was like, why stick around? We're all getting off the bus. We're all going to die. So, why not get off the bus now?

00:34:46 Speaker_02
And I remember sitting there and thinking, the only possible reason for sticking around, I remembered Emerson's statement that beauty is its own excuse for being. And I thought, joy is its own excuse for being.

00:35:02 Speaker_02
That is the one thing I can experience that makes it worth sticking around for the suffering this life entails. So I shifted my entire life toward a sort of very simple test, does it bring me joy or does it not?

00:35:15 Speaker_02
And joy became the track I was following. So Boyd had learned to track animals, but he'd lost the track of his joy a long time before.

00:35:25 Speaker_02
And I remember feeling, well, jumping ahead, taking some people out in a seminar and having him tell the group that you track your life the way you track an animal, but the track you're looking for is joy in the body.

00:35:42 Speaker_02
And it's so simple to put it that way. And I think that's the first thing where we really connected. And I said, boy, you have to find joy in your body. He'd been through so much trauma. I mean, good God, it wasn't just the break-in.

00:35:59 Speaker_02
tried to rescue a man from a hot spring. A guy had fallen in. The guy died. He was basically boiled alive. He was almost eaten by a crocodile. He's been attacked by more deadly animals and snakes and all kinds of things than you can even imagine.

00:36:14 Speaker_02
So here was this guy. He was tough and strong and brave, and he had long ago gone numb.

00:36:20 Speaker_02
The funny thing is that there are a lot of people who haven't had such a wild life who are sitting under fluorescent lights somewhere, and they're just as far off their track as he was. They're almost as miserable.

00:36:31 Speaker_02
If you can't find joy, you can't find joy. It's like oxygen. You need it. It doesn't matter how you lose it or what it looks like to you. You need it.

00:36:40 Speaker_02
So I remember when Boyden and his sister came to Phoenix to visit me shortly after we met, and I put them through a kind of American therapy, which was I made them lie down on the living room floor and watch Eddie Izzard routines on TV while I brought them ice cream for about three days.

00:37:01 Speaker_02
And they had just worked like mules their entire lives, physically worked, psychologically worked. And they were like, when do we start working? And I just say, sit, eat, laugh.

00:37:14 Speaker_02
And at the end of the three days, I saw them start to be able to access relaxation, which is the first step toward joy in the body. And our culture is so cerebral when we think that thinking is superior to the physical being. But our thinking process

00:37:33 Speaker_02
is very late in evolution. Our cognitive minds process about 40 bits of information per second. The nervous system of our entire bodies is processing about 11 million bits of information per second. The body is smarter than the mind.

00:37:48 Speaker_02
That is a very long answer. to a very good question, but if you haven't found joy in the body- That's why this is a long podcast, we have time. You did say you wanted me to tell stories.

00:37:59 Speaker_02
So yeah, I think when I could see him relax and I saw his shoulders open and I saw him smile spontaneously instead of should be polite, I said, there you go, that's the track, that's what we're tracking.

00:38:13 Speaker_02
And that's what we've done ever since in years and years of wonderful conversations.

00:38:18 Speaker_03
So I'm going to come back to Boyd probably just as an instructive case study, and we'll probably come back to Boyd, but I would love to ask you about reattuning the body to the nervous system.

00:38:30 Speaker_03
And specifically I'm asking because as I've done research for this conversation and listened to interviews and read so much, I've noticed that you have a prodigious ability to recall quotes, as one example.

00:38:48 Speaker_03
You mentioned Harvard and 17, which is not an age that most people associate with Harvard, so you seem to have a lot of horsepower between the ears. Generally – now, I don't know this about you – but generally, when I encounter that,

00:39:03 Speaker_03
And to maybe a lesser extent, I encounter that myself. You get rewarded for using this analytical workhorse and you end up perhaps a little less attuned to the physical body.

00:39:15 Speaker_03
So I'm curious how you have reconnected with that intelligence and specifically, this may or may not be related, but I would love for you to discuss equine therapy or interactions with animals and if that is related.

00:39:32 Speaker_02
The first place I'll go, I learned to brutalize my body. That year at Harvard, I was running 100 miles a week and trying to eat. less than a thousand calories a day. I did not have any regard for my body at all. I got sick.

00:39:45 Speaker_02
I got very sick with a multitude of autoimmune diseases. My body correctly figured out that I was the greatest threat to my own health. So I was actually on crutches and a back brace. I was in a lot of pain for a long time.

00:39:58 Speaker_02
I went back to Harvard after a year off for this issue. and got engaged to another, I'm an ex-Mormon, we got engaged very young.

00:40:08 Speaker_02
So I got engaged and married another guy from my hometown, and I stayed at Harvard for my master's and my PhD, and we had a daughter, and then my second child was conceived when I was halfway through my PhD.

00:40:21 Speaker_02
And I was caught in an apartment fire right in the middle of the pregnancy. And because of that, they ran a bunch of tests. And they came back and told me that the fetus had Down syndrome and I had two weeks to terminate. I was like six months along.

00:40:36 Speaker_02
I don't know if you've ever been pregnant, Tim.

00:40:39 Speaker_03
Not that I'm aware of. Yeah. I have suspected though at points. People say I'm glowing recently. I don't know.

00:40:46 Speaker_02
Maybe. You do look really flush. Yeah. I had the one baby already and I had bonded so strongly with the second one that even though I'm very pro-choice saying, he's got to go. He was already my child.

00:41:02 Speaker_02
I'd seen him sucking his finger on the ultrasound and everything. And I couldn't do it. I've advised other people. I've helped other people go on and terminate their pregnancies in similar situations. I just couldn't do it.

00:41:17 Speaker_02
And I remember the head of gynecology and obstetrics at Harvard at the time, because I was part of that university system. There were five of them. They all thought that I was making a huge mistake to not terminate.

00:41:32 Speaker_02
head honcho came in and told me, this is like having a malignant tumor and not letting me remove it. And I remember looking at him and I was being rehydrated. I couldn't stop vomiting and stuff. Oh, it was such fun how I laughed.

00:41:47 Speaker_02
I was looking at this guy, and he's saying, you need to do this. You're going to ruin your life. He said, you're throwing your life away. And I looked at him, and suddenly it appeared he had two faces. And I was really curious.

00:41:59 Speaker_02
And it was as if there was a face that he was presenting that was this stern Harvard doctor, and then right behind it was this terrified face, terrified. And I've been sort of terrified myself, but when I saw this, I was like fascinated.

00:42:14 Speaker_02
I just watched him and I said, do you know anyone with Down syndrome? He was very flustered. He was like, no, I wouldn't bother with that. And I just watched him and I thought, oh,

00:42:25 Speaker_02
He's not telling me to do this because he thinks I'm making a mistake to keep the stupid little boy inside of me. He thinks that there's a stupid little boy inside him, and he's trying to kill that.

00:42:37 Speaker_02
And I thought, oh, he didn't end up at Harvard because he knew he was smart. He ended up there for the same reason I did. He thought he was stupid. He wanted to prove he wasn't.

00:42:46 Speaker_02
And at that moment, I looked at him and I thought, you know, the reason for my life is joy. I don't see joy on either of this man's faces. And I don't think he understands his own path to joy at all.

00:43:02 Speaker_02
And I remember I said, I've heard that people with Down syndrome can experience joy. And he said, I wouldn't know about that. And I was like, yeah, no, I think they can. And right then, Everything changed for me.

00:43:16 Speaker_02
I waddled around Harvard pregnant out to here. Everybody knew. And I would go into my professor's offices and they'd be like, you've got to put this child in an institution. You're throwing away your career.

00:43:26 Speaker_02
And I'd look at their little offices and their little piles of books. And I'd look at them and think, are you in joy? Do you live in joy? Because if you don't, you can't tell me where it is.

00:43:41 Speaker_02
And I lost the obsession with intellect that I had learned not only at Harvard, but in all of Western culture. That's when it really shifted for me.

00:43:52 Speaker_03
I mean, that's a powerful story, and I'm sure we'll come back to pieces of it.

00:43:58 Speaker_03
How do you then elicit that realization or teach people to reengage with sensitivities that they've perhaps neglected or accidentally put offline or deliberately put offline? How do you cultivate that in someone?

00:44:13 Speaker_02
I can't teach it, I can't cultivate it, I can't do it, but I have an unfailing ally, and its name is suffering. Because when we lose the track of our joy, we suffer.

00:44:26 Speaker_02
And that's the only thing that gets our attention enough to make us stop and say, maybe, just maybe, I need to find another path here. You've had it yourself, I'm sure.

00:44:39 Speaker_03
Oh, for sure. I mean, I promised I would bookmark this and come back to it just to give Boyd a little sloppy kiss on the cheek again.

00:44:47 Speaker_03
Something else that I'm pretty sure was in that book, it certainly was in the curriculum when I've spent more time there with Reneas and Alex and other incredible trackers. Losing the track is part of tracking. That is always part of tracking.

00:45:02 Speaker_03
You are almost never going to A to Z. track something perfectly, you always lose the track. So part of good tracking is finding the track again or finding a proper track.

00:45:15 Speaker_03
In the case of Boyd, he's on the path of not here, unsure of what to do with himself. I'm sort of imposing a narrative that I don't

00:45:27 Speaker_02
He's not here, he can't defend himself, let's just do this.

00:45:29 Speaker_03
Yeah, he can't defend himself, so you're welcome, Boyd. And just using him as a stand-in for the audience, right? No, because we love him so much. And we love him so much.

00:45:38 Speaker_03
What are some of the things, once you'd fed him ice cream and had him relax, you see the shoulders open, what happens then? What do you do with, once you see that opening, that change, what do you do?

00:45:49 Speaker_02
You know, the first thing that happened for me when Boyd took me tracking, we went to look for a rhinoceros. They're fairly easy to track. Surprisingly difficult, though, at the same time.

00:45:59 Speaker_02
The first thing they do is they show you what a rhinoceros track looks like. Clear, plain, and simple, and really good terrain. Now you know what a rhinoceros's whole foot looks like.

00:46:09 Speaker_02
And you're going to go out through grass and rocks and trees and everything. And sometimes you'll just see the side of one toe or an imprint where the palm has pressed a leaf down or a bit of mud on a stick.

00:46:21 Speaker_02
But until you've seen that first track, you don't know what you're looking for. So that's why I fed him ice cream for three days. And when I saw the relaxation, I could say, that's your track. Now let's look at the things you're doing in your life.

00:46:35 Speaker_02
His mom was telling him she thought he should get a PhD. And I said, OK, hold that thought. More joy, less joy, less. Okay, don't go there. So take over Londolozzi for the rest of your life. More joy, less joy. I don't know, it's not clear.

00:46:51 Speaker_02
Okay, we don't go there yet. It's like going to the optometrist at that point. You know suffering and you know joy. And if it's more like suffering, it's the path of not there. And there are a million ways to suffer.

00:47:04 Speaker_02
And if it's joy, you know it's the path of yes. And there's actually only one path that takes you straight along the line of joy. And it's your individual destiny. I believe in that stuff.

00:47:15 Speaker_03
All right. I'm going to be keeping track of a lot of bookmarks. I knew I would. So I came prepared, pen in hand. For those of you who can't see us, I cheat. I use a pen. The pen is, I know the weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory.

00:47:29 Speaker_03
Therefore, blue pen. So individual destiny, that's my note I'm taking. And I didn't even add a question mark because I probably agree with you. on some levels. Let's talk about your own chronology a bit.

00:47:41 Speaker_03
And I believe it was at 29, correct me if I'm wrong, you decide to not tell any lies for an entire year. Now my understanding is that led to losing your family of origin, your religion, your job, your marriage. So it was an eventful year.

00:47:57 Speaker_02
my home, my career, my entire industry. Yeah, it was quite a brisk year.

00:48:02 Speaker_03
It was brisk. Yeah. So it was like the flamethrower approach to personal development. Why did you do this? And what did you take away from it that other people can use?

00:48:15 Speaker_02
Why did I do it? Yeah. Suffering. I'd like to say I had noble intentions. I was unhappy. I was very physically ill. I'd been sick at that point for 12 years. So in chronic pain for 12 years.

00:48:28 Speaker_02
And I had this baby with Down syndrome and I thought nobody at Harvard's gonna, I just didn't want them all staring at me.

00:48:34 Speaker_02
So to finish my dissertation, I went back to Utah where I knew that everybody would be thrilled with me not having an abortion, which they were, but then they assumed that I was super Mormon and I tried to fit in just out of respect for my, you know, culture of origin.

00:48:51 Speaker_03
Can you just say a quick sidebar on your father and who your father was? I think this is useful context. Not just any run-of-the-mill Mormon.

00:48:59 Speaker_02
No, he was not. My father was an apologist, which is a word for somebody who defends the principles of a religion.

00:49:08 Speaker_02
So Mormonism makes a lot of truth claims about things like the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites that came over in a ship in 600 BC. lots of real archaeological, anthropological truth claims.

00:49:22 Speaker_02
They don't stand up well under modern science. My father, he was asked to be an apologist for the church.

00:49:28 Speaker_02
He was a professor at Berkeley, and they brought him back to BYU, Brigham Young University, and he started defending Mormonism against all attacks.

00:49:39 Speaker_02
He became very well-known in the church, and he is the foremost apologist of Mormonism, I think, in the church's history. So I was considered Mormon royalty. They have a whole structure there. So I went back to Utah and tried to be a good Mormon.

00:49:59 Speaker_02
At the time, they came out and said there was a lot of unrest.

00:50:03 Speaker_02
People were just learning too much, and the internet wasn't a thing yet, but there were just too many scientists doing too much research and finding out too much stuff that was disproving Mormonism's claims.

00:50:15 Speaker_02
So, the church got very, very upset and came out and said the three greatest threats to God's kingdom in the latter days were feminists, intellectuals, and gay people. So, turned out I was all three. I didn't identify as gay at the time.

00:50:34 Speaker_02
I was married with children, so I was closeted to myself. That involves a lot of suffering that you don't understand when you're going through it.

00:50:42 Speaker_02
sexual abuse issues from my father when I was a child, those were bashing their way to the surface and coming out in flashbacks, and it was gnarly.

00:50:52 Speaker_02
And the one thing I knew is that when I heard the statement, the truth will set you free, it brought me a sense of joy, a sense of peace.

00:51:01 Speaker_02
So I thought, I don't know exactly what to do or what the truth is, so I'm just not going to lie for a year and we'll see what happens. We'll find out what the truth is.

00:51:11 Speaker_02
And I found out that mostly what I was lying about, I didn't tell lies like about my taxes or anything, or in my personal life even, I was telling lies about how I felt. I feel fine. I wouldn't say that anymore. People would say, how are you?

00:51:24 Speaker_02
And I'd say, not well. And it just, you start to do that, try it for a couple of days. Don't tell a single lie not to anyone for any reason. And pretty soon,

00:51:39 Speaker_02
every relationship you have, professional or personal, where there's any level of secrecy or untruth begins to fall apart. And then it starts to explode. And that's what happened to me.

00:51:52 Speaker_02
I just kept seeing what I believed until I realized I'm not Mormon. I don't believe in it at all. So I I actually committed the one sin worse than murder. I left. I said, please take my name off the church records. I am not Mormon.

00:52:06 Speaker_02
So everyone thought I was going to outer darkness. They probably still do. So my family stopped speaking to me. And yeah, then I realized I was gay. So as my husband, that was sort of convenient. So it was very amicable.

00:52:22 Speaker_02
But I also realized that I love to learn but I hated being caught up in academic politics, so I left my job. Everything went away when I stopped lying and everything that was left was the path of joy.

00:52:37 Speaker_03
No, this may not be the right question, but what gave you the courage to risk burning it all to the ground? Or was it not courage at all? It was just, this is suffering and I want something other than this suffering.

00:52:51 Speaker_03
And so you were just kind of rolling the dice on door number two.

00:52:55 Speaker_02
The suffering was bad, but it wasn't bad enough to make me endure the suffering of losing my family. I mean, seven siblings, all their wives and husbands and my nieces and nephews and everyone, every friend I'd made growing up.

00:53:09 Speaker_02
I couldn't have done that. But I think I made that pledge the day after I came out of an emergency surgery. I've been told that you are willing to entertain woo-woo things.

00:53:24 Speaker_03
It's Wednesday, right? Yeah, every Wednesday.

00:53:26 Speaker_02
Yes, with a skeptic's eye. Woo-woo Wednesday. It's woo-woo Wednesday. I'm rushed in for surgery.

00:53:32 Speaker_02
Actually, I was teaching a psychology class and I was behind a one-way mirror and the students started to talk about, it was a free discussion I was observing, and they started to talk about a number of the women had been raped.

00:53:48 Speaker_02
I suddenly got really hot and feverish and I ran into the hall and passed out cold. I like fell down. I looked up, all the students were around me. I got rushed to the hospital and they thought I had a tumor in a very intimate place.

00:54:03 Speaker_02
They immediately put me in surgery. And while I was lying there, I sort of woke up and looked at the surgical lights, which was odd because my eyes were taped closed. And then I thought, this is odd that I can see.

00:54:18 Speaker_02
And I sat up, which was strange, because my body was on the table. And I looked around, and I watched them operating on me. And they said, there's no tumor. It's just blood. This is scar tissue from old trauma.

00:54:30 Speaker_02
And then I lay back, and I thought, I don't know what's happening to me. And between the surgical lights, another light appeared. And it was about the size of a golf ball when I first saw it.

00:54:45 Speaker_02
They say we can only see about a trillionth of the available light spectrum, and I think this light had all of it. You can't describe it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was absolutely captivating.

00:55:01 Speaker_02
And as I looked at it, it grew, and it seemed to sort of penetrate things instead of bouncing off them. And when it touched me, this incredible warmth.

00:55:10 Speaker_02
I mean, talk about going from 12 years of chronic pain, a lot of psychological suffering, to no suffering, zero, absolute joy, beauty, warmth, physical, emotional, every kind of warmth you can imagine, and laughter.

00:55:27 Speaker_02
There was so much joy in this light, and I was laughing with it, and I heard the surgeons say to the anesthesiologist, She's crying, and I started crying from happiness. And they could see tears coming out, and they thought that I could feel the pain.

00:55:46 Speaker_02
So the anesthesiologist was going to give me more medication, and I talked to him the next day to make sure it wasn't a drug event. And he said that a voice had told him, don't increase the anesthesia. She's crying because she's happy.

00:56:01 Speaker_02
And he said, did I do the wrong thing? That never happened to me before. So that was odd. Anyway, basically, the light was saying to me, you totally bought this whole thing about you're just a physical thing and then you die.

00:56:14 Speaker_02
And I was like, I know I said I wasn't going to forget. And then I totally forgot. We were laughing and laughing and laughing. And then it's like you're going to go through something really horrible that I'm always here. I'm right here.

00:56:27 Speaker_02
I've always been here. I always will be. And I woke up in the recovery room and there was this guy who was there from the prison on some sort of work detail, and he was mopping the floor in this room where I woke up.

00:56:40 Speaker_02
And I looked at him and I said, I love you so much.

00:56:46 Speaker_03
He's like, I'm not even getting paid for this.

00:56:49 Speaker_02
He went to get the nurses. I was like, do people cry? They said, yes, surgery is traumatic. I'm like, no, do they cry because they're happy? They were like, no, really. The next day,

00:57:09 Speaker_02
The big thing was I'm never doing anything that makes me feel separated from that light, not ever. And lying was the first thing to go. There's still, to this day, one of the weird things about experiences like that is they don't fade.

00:57:24 Speaker_02
It's always right there with you in every choice you make. And that's what gave me the ability to do everything else.

00:57:32 Speaker_03
All right, I have quite a few follow-up questions. Thank you for sharing that. The broadest question is what do you make of that experience?

00:57:39 Speaker_03
The other, and you can tackle these in whichever order, but did you talk to the surgeon and other personnel about what you observed them saying?

00:57:51 Speaker_02
Yeah, the surgeon came in and was oddly tender with me. I mean, really, really tender.

00:57:58 Speaker_02
And I think the reason was that what had happened was I was bleeding internally from a lot of scar tissue that had happened when I was sexually abused very young, and they knew that some kind of violence must have caused that.

00:58:10 Speaker_02
So they said, yeah, we don't really understand why you suddenly started bleeding internally, but it was putting pressure and we just had to drain the wound and leave it open. And so that's what I said, do you know anything about the anesthesia?

00:58:24 Speaker_02
They went and got the anesthesiologist and he came back and I started just quizzing him. So what did you give me? What are the effects? What do people report? What are the side effects? Can I have some more?

00:58:37 Speaker_02
Finally, he just said, look, just tell me what happened in there because this thing happened to me. And that's when he told me about the voice telling him, don't give her more anesthesia. And I said, yeah, you did the right thing.

00:58:50 Speaker_02
And he said, you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of medical practice? I said, no. And he said, once. And then he kissed me on the forehead and left and wrote me a letter later about it. He said it was not a drug effect.

00:59:05 Speaker_02
Plus he had a woo-woo experience as well. So take that.

00:59:09 Speaker_03
Got it. So what do you make of that experience?

00:59:11 Speaker_02
I have been making of it, you know, I started meditating and thinking about it and I think about it every single day and it's been many years since then.

00:59:19 Speaker_02
And what I make of it right now, first of all, I love, it's kind of like the path of not there, don't know mind.

00:59:27 Speaker_02
I believe in the Zen or any Buddhist concept of don't know mind that in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few, and that none of us really knows anything.

00:59:38 Speaker_02
And in particular, we have no idea what consciousness is. I've studied physics, I've studied philosophy, theology, nobody has a clue what consciousness is.

00:59:49 Speaker_02
One neurologist said nobody even knows what it would be like to have an idea about what consciousness is. So what I make of it now is that consciousness is the primary reality of the universe. And I do believe in the

01:00:04 Speaker_02
Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics, that the observation of consciousness is making what is merely energetic appear physical. I believe that everything is full of consciousness and that light was a representation of consciousness.

01:00:19 Speaker_02
But I also believe that this glass is a representation of consciousness, and that you are, and that a tree is, and that a rock is. Everything is brimming with that light.

01:00:32 Speaker_02
My son actually, 19 years after they told me he was going to ruin my life, we were going home from the funeral. of his friend's mother, his best friend's mother. She died. And it was horrible. And he said, Mom, I didn't cry at the funeral.

01:00:49 Speaker_02
And I said, yeah, but you can cry. Strong men cry when things are sad, and this is sad. And this is a kid who barely talks. He said, well, it's not so bad once the light comes and opens your heart. And I said, what? A light came and opened your heart?

01:01:04 Speaker_02
He said, mm-hmm. I said, well, when did this happen? He said, May 10th. This was in February. And I was like, so what happened? So he told me he was in his room. He was having a struggle. He was 13 years old. This was years before.

01:01:21 Speaker_02
And a light appeared in his room and touched him. And he said it told him, you can do this. I said, well, I've seen that light too. And he looked at me like, wow, I didn't think you had it in you.

01:01:33 Speaker_02
And I said, and it told me that it's always with us even though we can't see it. And he said, oh, I can see it. And I said, you can? He said, yeah. I said, like right now? Of course. He was like, yes. I said, well, where is it? Is it like up there?

01:01:52 Speaker_02
Is it down here? Is it in your heart? And he just shook his head at me and he said, mom, it's everywhere. That's the world I live in.

01:01:58 Speaker_03
All right. So yeah, I feel like you and I are probably going to have quite a few conversations.

01:02:04 Speaker_02
I hope so.

01:02:05 Speaker_03
on and off records. So to be continued, I'm going to maybe just take a slight sidestep to integrity cleanse.

01:02:15 Speaker_03
If somebody wanted to do an integrity cleanse or attempt what you did, but with the lessons learned, maybe they are not willing to go kind of full throttle. How would you suggest

01:02:29 Speaker_03
they do that because most people listening, myself included, have never attempted something like this.

01:02:34 Speaker_03
And just as a quick humorous sidebar, I'll say if people want to read something very funny, there's an article, it's an old article from Esquire called I Think You're Fat by a friend of mine, AJ Jacobs, and it's about his experiments with radical candor.

01:02:50 Speaker_03
And his wife was like, how do I look in this? And he's like, I think you're fat. And you can imagine it didn't go super well. You learned a lot, but ultimately it was a pretty tough experiment.

01:03:00 Speaker_03
So what would you suggest to people and what is an integrity cleanse and what's the kind of like white belt, blue belt, black belt version or however you would like to answer that?

01:03:10 Speaker_02
Let's do the white belt first. Take a smaller time period. I said a year. Take three days a week. And you don't have to say everything you think, but you do have to be aware when you're saying something that you don't believe.

01:03:26 Speaker_02
So have a little journal or something so that you can, when you lie to someone else, and most lies are told to smooth social interactions. Nobody says you look fat. So just note in a little book, okay, I said this, but what was I actually thinking?

01:03:47 Speaker_02
So somebody said to me, oh, we'd love you to come out and visit. And I said, sure, sometime. But you write down, okay, that was a lie. I would rather die a thousand times than go to stay with these people, whatever.

01:04:01 Speaker_02
Write the truth down in your little notebook for yourself. That's the path of the truth. everything else is the path of not there. It's just mushy.

01:04:08 Speaker_02
I wrote a whole book on this based on The Divine Comedy because Dante starts that book just saying, in the middle of my life, I found myself just wandering through this horrible, dark wilderness, and I had no idea how I got there or where to go because I'd lost the true path.

01:04:24 Speaker_02
And then he shows how you find the true path. So most of us are doing that, and the way you find the true path is to start writing down the things that are true after you've said the things that are not true. Just do that for three days.

01:04:37 Speaker_02
That's the white belt. Blue belt, take a month and have a friend where you speak the whole truth to another person, even if it's a therapist or a 12-step group or something. You want to go black belt all in. This is what I try to do. No lying ever, but

01:04:56 Speaker_02
You don't have to say much. Consider if what you have to say is an improvement upon silence.

01:05:02 Speaker_03
You can be mute for a month.

01:05:05 Speaker_02
No, you end up finding out that you say it if it's true, kind, and useful, and not very few things are all three. But don't lie even with your actions or with your facial expression or anything. Don't eat a bite of food you don't want. That's a lie.

01:05:21 Speaker_02
I like to be tough on these things. Like I used to run 100 miles a week. Now I will be like, I will never do anything false. And it's fun and rigorous. It is rigorous. I would imagine.

01:05:33 Speaker_03
All right. So quick tactical question for people who want to maybe get somewhere between the blue and black. They're gonna make an attempt at fewer lies, more truth. So not just becoming aware of it, but actually changing some behavior.

01:05:52 Speaker_03
You mentioned offensive, you mentioned rigorous. Somebody who is being truthful is going to say no in some form a lot more than someone who's being untruthful.

01:06:02 Speaker_03
what are some of your go-to phrases or language that you like to use that is, I think you're fat. In terms of saying no to the many things that would otherwise consume your time in your life.

01:06:20 Speaker_02
Most people, when they want to say no and they don't know how to say it, will try to become victim-y and say, I can't because of this, this, and this, which is horrible because the person always thinks of a way out of those things.

01:06:33 Speaker_02
I love this quote from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where his wife says, don't go to the Senate. I had a horrible nightmare, you're going to get stabbed. So the guy comes to get him, and he says, go tell the council Caesar will not come.

01:06:48 Speaker_02
That I cannot is false, that I dare not, falser still. Now, go tell the council Caesar will not come. Boom! Like, that is my model.

01:07:00 Speaker_02
And there have been really good studies that show that to get out of depression, one study had a control group, a group that had therapy, a group that had meds, and a group that did nothing but eliminate the words, I can't and I have to from their responses.

01:07:13 Speaker_02
Instead, they had to say, I choose not to, I choose to, I will, I won't. And they came out of their depression faster than any of the other groups.

01:07:22 Speaker_02
every verbal thing we say that is not true hurts our bodies, hurts our psyches, and leads us to anxiety and depression. So in that case, keep a book that says

01:07:34 Speaker_02
have to deal with the people who don't like you saying, no, I've lost a lot of friends this way, friends that perhaps needed losing. But I always say, just think, know what you really know about something.

01:07:47 Speaker_02
Okay, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, at least to yourself in your notebook, and then do what you really want. And that sounds so self-serving, but in fact, it's quite

01:08:00 Speaker_02
I know you follow the Stoics, and the hedonists, they were weirdly similar. They'll do what is true because it's more felicitous to them in every way. So have a notebook where you write down what you would do if you were being really honest.

01:08:18 Speaker_02
Once you know what you're dealing with, start to become that person in the way you actually conduct your life. And as you make mistakes and as you don't keep your commitments, forgive yourself.

01:08:30 Speaker_02
Because one of the things I've found is that it's never true to hate yourself or to condemn yourself. It's never true.

01:08:40 Speaker_03
What do you mean by that?

01:08:41 Speaker_02
we are such little monkeys, you know? I just got back from Costa Rica, and we had a fabulous monkey encounter. And they had this fear expression, and they were afraid of so many things. And I just thought, we are this far from them.

01:08:56 Speaker_02
All we've got is shoes to differentiate us from them. And We're terrified of everything all the time and most of us are really doing our best and we have all kinds of socialization weirdness. Our brains get reconditioned and rewired for fear.

01:09:10 Speaker_02
If you're not in integrity and you didn't manage to pull it off and be honest in a hard situation, kindness and gentleness are the truth.

01:09:20 Speaker_02
I actually wrote a book that's coming out next year after I wrote The Way of Integrity because I was so tough on myself in the integrity thing. And it was making people anxious. And there's a level beyond just telling the truth.

01:09:34 Speaker_02
And it is called compassion. And it's truer.

01:09:39 Speaker_03
So forgive me while I get really nitty gritty with maybe a mundane question. But it's building on what we were just talking about. And I'll give an example. So we were first corresponding via email.

01:09:53 Speaker_03
And I was exploring the potential for maybe doing something in person. which is not to say you didn't want to do that, but the logistics weren't going to work out.

01:10:02 Speaker_03
And you had a line that was something along the lines of, I would love to do in person, but I can't due to life Tetris, something like that. And I was like, life Tetris, due to life Tetris, that is a good phrase I'm going to steal.

01:10:15 Speaker_02
And so I am wondering... You can't steal it because I give it to you freely.

01:10:20 Speaker_03
Oh, thank you. I will gratefully receive then this phrase. I'm wondering if, let's just say, hypothetical example, really close friend of yours. And his wife, so male friend, his wife invites you to a costume party on a Thursday night.

01:10:39 Speaker_03
And in your mind, you're like, I would rather throw myself face first through a play class window than go to a costume party on a Thursday night for any number of reasons, right? Like perfectly nice person. You do not want to go to this thing. But

01:10:52 Speaker_03
Do you know it would be meaningful to her? You know it would therefore be meaningful to the husband who might have to deal with some flack, who knows, like back channel if you say, yada, yada, yada, but you really don't want to go. What do you say?

01:11:05 Speaker_02
I would say something like, what else could we do together? This actually is a really effective thing when you're raising a child. If you just say no, It leaves them with no options.

01:11:15 Speaker_02
They don't know what to do with their feelings, and none of us ever really grows up. So when somebody says that, you say, ah, what else could we do together? If you love them and you care about them, you want to do something with them.

01:11:29 Speaker_02
It's just not that. If you don't want to be around them at all, it's time to say no to the costume party and get rid of those people. Not get rid of them, but cut them loose. So when I started asking people to do things with me that I wanted to do,

01:11:45 Speaker_02
Everybody's life got better. I had so much fun, and I didn't have all the awful things where I was pretending to have fun when I wasn't.

01:11:53 Speaker_03
Could you give an example of just what that looks like? Somebody comes to you and they're like, let's do A, or please do A, and you're like, in your mind and body, I don't really want to do A. What might be an example? It could be made up.

01:12:05 Speaker_02
No, it doesn't have to be made up. I've been actually working this through. Have you interviewed Liz Gilbert?

01:12:10 Speaker_03
I have. It's been a few years. We're going to talk again.

01:12:13 Speaker_02
She's so much fun. Anyway, we've been trying to figure out how to do live events and our schedules haven't jived very much. We had the same speaking agent and there was some conflict over that.

01:12:26 Speaker_02
I finally had to just go to her and say, I don't think it works for us to have the same speaking agent when we go and we're creating events together.

01:12:35 Speaker_02
And it was kind of hard to say that because we both really love this agent, but Liz and she are really, really close, so I thought it might upset her. And maybe it did, but the fact is it was true. And so she didn't bat an eye.

01:12:51 Speaker_02
She just said, whatever makes it more fun and gives us more ease when we're together Great. We want our friendship to be as much fun, as joyful as it can be. So that was the track. And it was a little awkward, but it worked.

01:13:15 Speaker_02
When you said any other language, I literally thought of Chinese.

01:13:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. Just respond in a different language. I don't speak English.

01:13:29 Speaker_02
I remember the most awkward, oh, Tim. When I was freaking out about my family and the sexual abuse and everything, my mother called me and said, we hadn't seen you for a while. We miss you.

01:13:42 Speaker_02
I had just taken this pledge and I said to her, I miss the concept of having parents.

01:13:48 Speaker_03
Oh, wow.

01:13:49 Speaker_02
Because it was the truest thing I could say. Whoa.

01:13:53 Speaker_03
Return volley strong.

01:13:56 Speaker_02
I didn't want to hurt her. I had to tell the truth because that light was still right there, and I hadn't gotten any experience being skillful. Here's another bit of language. Know what you really know and feel what you really feel.

01:14:08 Speaker_02
So for me, it might be something like, oh, you know what? Lunch sounds great. Breakfast is just too early for me. I'd be miserable. That's just the truth. I'm not being a victim. I'm just telling them the truth. I'm not a mourning person.

01:14:21 Speaker_02
So you sort of claim your right to joy. And you make it really clear that you want them to have joy, and you expect yourself to have joy, and no one has to keep secrets or cross boundaries that are hurtful in order to make the other person feel good.

01:14:38 Speaker_02
It's not true. And a relationship built on that, it isn't a real relationship. It'll fall apart. There's so much manipulation. going on where people are pretending to do things that each other like, and both of them are miserable.

01:14:55 Speaker_03
Yeah, there was a piece and I think it was McSweeney's. Well, there was a tweet and then there was an actual written piece that resembled this, but it said being an adult. This was a tweet. I wish I had the attribution.

01:15:06 Speaker_03
Being an adult is saying so sorry for getting back to you so late over and over again until both of you die. Something like that. Sorry for the delayed response.

01:15:17 Speaker_02
I like the cartoon where the guy is holding the phone and going, what about never? Does never work for you?

01:15:22 Speaker_03
Yeah, the New Yorker. That's an amazing piece. When there is someone where you're like, you know what? This is just not a relationship I want in my life. How do you break up with those people?

01:15:33 Speaker_02
You do what you really want to do. I remember I had one friend, she wanted to come stay with me. I didn't want her to come. I remember saying, let me think about it. And then we had a conversation later where she was very, very upset.

01:15:47 Speaker_02
And she said, you paused and you had to think about it. And we were friends and like, and I said, yeah, that's sometimes I have to think about it. And she said, well, is it that you had something else going on or did you really not want me there?

01:16:00 Speaker_02
And I was like pinned to the wall and it was physically painful. to speak the truth, but it would have been more painful not to. So I said, yeah, I really, I wasn't in a place where our energies were gonna work well together.

01:16:12 Speaker_02
I just did not feel like it would be good for either one of us. After a while, a few of those, and they'll break up with you, I promise. You just tell the truth and people go away. That's joy.

01:16:31 Speaker_03
All right, so I am going to ask you about anxiety. I want to ask quite a few questions about that. Before we get to that, so you had some Mandarin pop up. I feel like we should give people a little bit of context. So you've lived in Asia.

01:16:44 Speaker_03
You've studied not just East Asian languages, but also philosophies. This is just a sidebar that I thought you might find entertaining, which is I was in Greece many, many, many years ago.

01:16:57 Speaker_03
And when something is completely foreign, alien, unintelligible in English, you say, well, it's all Greek to me.

01:17:03 Speaker_03
And then I realized, well, if you're a Greek person, in Greek, you see something you don't understand, you can't say it's all Greek to me because that's your native language. So what do you guys say? And they're like, oh, yeah, good question.

01:17:17 Speaker_03
Afta yemena inna kinesika, which is, it's all Chinese to me. So if you're Greek, it's all Chinese to me, which I thought was great.

01:17:24 Speaker_02
That's fabulous.

01:17:27 Speaker_03
How has your experience with Asia, Asian languages, philosophies, influenced who you are, what you do, let's just say in a coaching capacity?

01:17:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, this was before I had kids or any of the other stuff happened. I went over and spent a year studying Chinese at a research center in Singapore, and then I worked in Japan and studied that for a while.

01:17:53 Speaker_02
And I wasn't particularly interested at the time in the philosophy, in the deeper wisdom of the Asian cultures. I just saw people offering oranges at little stands on the road and thought, oh, that's weird.

01:18:08 Speaker_02
I went back to Harvard, so I did my junior year in Singapore, and I went back to Harvard, and I remember sitting in classes and thinking, do people assume so much? You just assume so much.

01:18:24 Speaker_02
There's this edifice of stuff you believe that I see no evidence for. And as I went on studying the languages and philosophies of Asia, they have a reverse idea of perfection. So in the monotheistic Western religions, You are born imperfect.

01:18:41 Speaker_02
You're an imperfect, original sinning mess. And your job is to get better and better and more godlike until you can be godlike. You have to get better and better and learn more and more.

01:18:52 Speaker_02
In Asia, the idea is you're formed completely perfect and you accrue illusions as you grow up. So a baby comes in completely innocent.

01:19:06 Speaker_02
sees that people react nicely when the baby smiles, and they don't like it when the baby cries, and suddenly they start betraying themselves by smiling when they want to cry. That's the dawn of the loss of integrity, and everyone does it.

01:19:18 Speaker_02
We're a social species. But in Asia, when you set out to be free from suffering, you drop your illusions. So like the illusion, I should be cheerful all the time. If it causes suffering, it has to go.

01:19:32 Speaker_02
In the Tao Te Ching, my very favorite book, it says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment, or the Tao, every day something is dropped. So you know less and less until you arrive at non-action.

01:19:48 Speaker_02
And when nothing is done, nothing remains undone. I remember thinking, That is so cool, but I don't know why. And yeah, that was even before the white line and everything. I was already sort of on that path.

01:20:03 Speaker_02
And now everything appears to me to be illusion. All my thoughts are illusion.

01:20:08 Speaker_02
And truth is something that I can feel or participate in as consciousness, but I've just been dropping and dropping and dropping my illusions, and I try to do that every day.

01:20:21 Speaker_03
So we've been jointly baking a nice conversational cake. I just want to put a little icing on top and then we're going to segue to anxiety.

01:20:27 Speaker_03
And then we're going to make, who knows, we'll make a meringue pie or a key lime pie maybe, a carrot cake perhaps out of anxiety.

01:20:36 Speaker_02
You would probably go on The Great British Baking Show and outbake everyone in Britain.

01:20:42 Speaker_03
Well, you know, sometimes when kids go through or people go through culinary school, they're trying to decide on the sweet or the savory path. So do you become a chef or are you going to become a pastry chef? Sweet or savory?

01:20:53 Speaker_03
And for people who are having a tough time deciding, I remember

01:20:58 Speaker_03
hearing when I was working on The 4-Hour Chef, someone who was involved in one of these very, very well-known schools said, well, one question we sometimes ask these students is, do you fold your socks? Do you have them in neat rows in the shelf?

01:21:11 Speaker_03
If so, maybe sweet and baking is for you because it's so OCD-friendly and precision-oriented. So yes, based on that at least, I think I would really enjoy, I would find baking very satisfying.

01:21:25 Speaker_02
I love that. I want to eat what you bake.

01:21:28 Speaker_03
You know, there may be a day. So the first is a story that I would love you to tell and tell me if this is enough of a prompt. So it's a story of an audience. You're on stage. Are you comfortable? Could you tell this please?

01:21:44 Speaker_02
I do this over and over. I speak in various places, all rooms and theaters and places. And I'll be talking about how to do better at work, whatever I've been hired to talk about.

01:21:54 Speaker_02
And right in the middle, I'll stop and say, wait, wait, is everyone comfortable? And they all look at me as if I'm crazy. And I say, no, seriously, are you really comfortable? And they start to say, yes, we're fine, go on. I'm like, no, I mean it.

01:22:08 Speaker_02
Are you really comfortable? And the whole audience will get quite angry. Yes, we're comfortable, just talk. And then I ask them, okay, so now answer this question.

01:22:19 Speaker_02
If you were home alone in your bedroom right now, how many of you would be sitting in exactly the position you're in at this moment? And maybe one hand goes up in a room full of hundreds of people.

01:22:31 Speaker_02
And then I say to them, why would you be in a different position? And they literally have to think. And then it comes to them after about five seconds, this isn't comfortable. And then I say, it's okay that you're not comfortable because we're tough.

01:22:50 Speaker_02
We're a tough species. We're tolerating discomfort so we can be together in this way. But I do have a problem. with the fact that you all just looked me in the eye in clear daylight and repeatedly lied to me.

01:23:03 Speaker_02
And you thought you were telling the truth, but you knew you were lying. And they're like, what? And like your body is telling you the truth. That's how cut off we are from our bodies.

01:23:16 Speaker_02
And that's the first thing you ask yourself when you need to know the truth is, am I comfortable? That'll give you everything else.

01:23:23 Speaker_03
The next, so that would be the icing. Then there's the cherry on top. I'd love for you to expand on a question, because these words will be words people recognize, but I think the context, I would like to hear more about the context.

01:23:35 Speaker_03
What do you want versus what do you yearn for? And that may not be the exact wording that you use.

01:23:41 Speaker_02
No, it is.

01:23:42 Speaker_03
Okay. What is the significance of that question?

01:23:45 Speaker_02
It's interesting that you made the comment about, is it the exact language? That's one of the few places where I'm very exacting about language because somehow we divide that conceptually when we use language. I ask people what they want.

01:23:59 Speaker_02
They make me a list of things, a better job, better relationship, a better car, whatever. And then I say, when you wake up at night and it's dark and there's no one around, what do you yearn for? And the list is completely different.

01:24:14 Speaker_02
And it's very short. And almost everyone lists the same things.

01:24:19 Speaker_04
Peace, belonging, freedom, love, happiness.

01:24:24 Speaker_02
That's kind of it. Everybody wants them. And all the lists of things they want, those are all, I call it the difference between your social self and your essential self. The essential self yearns, the social self wants.

01:24:40 Speaker_02
You've gotten a lot of stuff you wanted. It doesn't make you happy. Nice. It's true. But if you get what you yearn for, it actually does make you happy.

01:24:52 Speaker_03
I can't resist the bait here. So when you have something like a car, right? Okay. So-and-so wants, you know, the newest Tesla model. So-and-so wants the XYZ car. It's very cleanly discreet in the sense that it costs $88,000.

01:25:14 Speaker_03
I can finance it for this much a month. Therefore, I know how much I need to work to earn a bonus to get this, to do that.

01:25:21 Speaker_03
It's actionable in a convenient way, kind of like the drunk guy looking for his keys under the lamp at night even though he knows it's in the bar somewhere because that's where the light is.

01:25:31 Speaker_03
How do you help people, and this might not be the right way to phrase it, but to actualize something like peace or belonging, which at least at face value is much more amorphous.

01:25:45 Speaker_03
I mean, it's a thing that people know, but it's not as easy to slice and dice and then maybe work backwards from, like the new Tesla?

01:25:54 Speaker_02
It's not as cognitive. It's not analytical because it's not physical. So it's not measurable. Our particular science doesn't believe that it exists, even though we all want it. So a couple of things. The first thing is something I call jumping the tracks.

01:26:10 Speaker_02
And it's jumping the tracks between seeing your life in purely physical terms and then opening your mind to the possibility of all non-physical realities. And as we know from physics, all physical things are ultimately not physical.

01:26:26 Speaker_02
So that's the first thing is to say, I live in a world that is not just made up of objects. I live in a world where I deal in energies. When you track the joy through your body, it is a physical sensation, but it's also an energy.

01:26:40 Speaker_02
So then you start looking for the energies that bring you the essence of what you yearn for. And I've found the simplest exercise, and I've been doing it with people since the pandemic to calm people down, speaking of anxiety.

01:26:54 Speaker_02
I'd love to do it just a little bit with you.

01:26:56 Speaker_03
I would love to.

01:26:58 Speaker_02
So simple. So I have you write down whatever your concerns are. Then tell me, honest to goodness, three things you love to taste.

01:27:08 Speaker_03
Okay, you want me to go for it? Or I guess should I write down? No, no, just tell me.

01:27:13 Speaker_02
I mean, you can write them if you want.

01:27:15 Speaker_03
Cheesecake with really thick frosting, for sure. I would say barbecue brisket would be there. And then I would say really cold, slightly sweetened iced tea on a really hot day.

01:27:31 Speaker_02
Ooh, okay. So as you say that, can you remember the sensation of tasting those three things? So focus your attention on the actual experience of the taste. Now, tell me three things you love to hear.

01:27:46 Speaker_03
Definitely not leaf blowers. Those fucking things are everywhere. I hate leaf blowers more than anything. They're everywhere in Texas. I don't know what it is with the compulsive leaf blowing.

01:27:55 Speaker_03
All right, so that's just a bit of a mini rant based on this morning.

01:28:00 Speaker_02
You and I are very much alike in this way.

01:28:02 Speaker_03
I'm just like, what are these people doing? It's like, I think there's a racket where it's like Tuesday, they blow the leaves to one side, and then Wednesday, they blow the leaves back to the other side. It doesn't make any sense. It blows.

01:28:13 Speaker_03
Iblos, right. Iblos, exactly. All right, so three sounds.

01:28:17 Speaker_02
Yeah, three things you love to hear.

01:28:19 Speaker_03
I would say acoustic guitar. So instrumental, say like classical guitar, like Segovia, that type of guitar, I find really soothing. I find, what else do I like to hear? I'm thinking of all sorts of obscene things. Go for it!

01:28:41 Speaker_03
Very responsive female partner, let's call it. Certainly would be high on the list. And then the sound of my dog, Molly, when I get home and she's so happy to see me. She's just doing porpoise calls and happiness whines left and right.

01:28:59 Speaker_03
I'd say those are three that come to mind.

01:29:01 Speaker_02
OK, so the task here is you're going to try to hold all these sensations in your memory. You're going to activate them all at once. So you've got cheesecake. You've got the tea. You've got the brisket. You've got the dog. You've got the human.

01:29:13 Speaker_03
If you have a drug that can help me to get all of these things felt at the same time, I will be first in line. All right, so I'm trying to hold all of these things.

01:29:21 Speaker_02
That's the challenge. And the left side of the brain, I'll give you a hint, can't do it. So it's forcing you to use the right side of your brain more than you usually do.

01:29:30 Speaker_02
Maybe you can't remember all of them, but like cheesecake, a guitar, whatever it is. Now, we're going to go through the other senses. You know we are. What are three things you love to feel with your skin?

01:29:43 Speaker_03
Feel with my skin?

01:29:44 Speaker_02
Can you feel anything with that?

01:29:49 Speaker_03
I didn't foresee this conversation going on this morning, but I'm into it. Any specific part of your skin. Yeah, I got it. I would say my skin. Yeah, for sure.

01:30:02 Speaker_03
A very, very saturated Epsom salt bath where there's almost like a silky residue when you move around, that would be one. Another, I'll try to keep this family friendly for the moment, another would be definitely dog kisses for sure. That's super high.

01:30:24 Speaker_03
And then I would say hot stone massage with a small amount of oil. Fantastic. So those would be three.

01:30:33 Speaker_02
Okay. So now we're going to do three things non-food that you love to smell.

01:30:40 Speaker_03
non-food, I would say. There's a tree, I don't know how to pronounce this word actually. It's called cananga in Spanish sometimes, but a ylang-ylang, the Y-L-A-N-G. However that's pronounced. That particular tree, the scent of the flowers on that tree.

01:31:00 Speaker_03
Second would be, I'm really on a dog kick, I think partially because I'm getting a second dog this summer. Just that puppy smell.

01:31:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:31:10 Speaker_03
True with babies, too.

01:31:11 Speaker_02
A lot of people tell me the smell of dog's feet is one of their favorite things.

01:31:16 Speaker_03
Oh, weird. I've never tried that.

01:31:17 Speaker_02
I know, right? I've never even smelled a dog's foot.

01:31:19 Speaker_03
I haven't gone for the feet, but I... I think we need to try.

01:31:22 Speaker_02
We need to go take that step.

01:31:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, yeah. I'm more of like a soft-ear smelling guy with the pups. But then there's like puppy breath thing. So, well, let's just say puppies more in general. So, it's two. Is that two? Yeah.

01:31:36 Speaker_03
Then I would say non-food number three would be the smell of cedar saunas.

01:31:47 Speaker_02
Nice.

01:31:48 Speaker_03
Cedar.

01:31:48 Speaker_02
Okay. One sense to go. Three things you love to see.

01:31:52 Speaker_03
Three things I love to see. Snow-covered mountains dotted with trees. I would say babies laughing, kids laughing. Just got a nice dose of that with my friend's family over the last few days.

01:32:09 Speaker_03
Then just to showcase my OCD, when things are just really lined up nicely, say like a bookshelf or stacks of things perfectly parallel, there's a certain uniformity or symmetry.

01:32:27 Speaker_03
Maybe if I want to give it a highfalutin label and sound fancy, I'll say symmetry. Different types of symmetry.

01:32:33 Speaker_02
I love that.

01:32:34 Speaker_02
Okay, so now your job, and as you've been thinking of these things, because there are so many of them and they're activating the parts of your brain that are sensory, and that's taking you away from the analytical cognitive part that's so overdeveloped in most people these days, because everything we do develops it more and more.

01:32:53 Speaker_02
So now your job to learn to be happy is vividly imagine a scene with as many of these components as you can put together. So imagine sitting in a perfectly symmetrical gorgeous cedar sauna on a snowy mountain

01:33:09 Speaker_02
looking out, you've got your dog on one side, you've got a responsive female partner on the other. You've got cheesecake, you've got like someone's playing the guitar.

01:33:19 Speaker_03
I have a guitar player with a blindfold playing Spanish guitar.

01:33:24 Speaker_02
Just pretend he's not here. And you start to drop in to a space that you've created in your mind, but not the part of your mind that we talk about as mind. It's the sensory experience of being human.

01:33:39 Speaker_03
Right, the Sensory Error Spreadsheet.

01:33:41 Speaker_02
And in, yes, as you start to go into that, what you're doing is you're accessing the part of you that is capable of feeling the things you yearn for. because everything we actually yearn for is a feeling state.

01:33:56 Speaker_02
And you can start with these very simple, small things. When I have somebody do this, I have people do this on Zoom calls and put it in the chat, and hundreds of words are going by of different beautiful things.

01:34:09 Speaker_02
And I'll start by saying, how nervous, anxious, and depressed are you? They give me a number from one to 10. Everybody's nervous and depressed. After they do this for a while, and everybody's looking at everyone else's delights,

01:34:20 Speaker_02
Everybody is in a completely different energy state. And that is how you get to the things you yearn for. You jump the tracks from the way we're taught to think to a sensory-based, experiential way of thinking, which is, for me, more real.

01:34:37 Speaker_03
And so jumping the tracks, does that refer to doing this exercise as an example, establishing this like emotional landmark, like, okay, remember this feeling, you're in the sauna, the snow cap peaks, the dog, the this, the that, remember this, and this is now your sort of homing direction from a sensory perspective.

01:35:00 Speaker_02
It's a track. And it may just be the side of the rhinoceros's toe. It's very likely. You've been on the path of not there for so long, you don't know what the real, for me, that white light thing was the whole track, bam!

01:35:15 Speaker_02
I could not miss it after that experience.

01:35:18 Speaker_02
But what you just did is an experience of moving into that territory and seeing sort of, you feel the shape of it or the, I end up having difficulty describing it in words because it's not a verbal experience.

01:35:30 Speaker_02
And the fact that it's not a verbal experience is part of the reason it can fulfill your yearning. And it's also part of the reason you've never gone there.

01:35:41 Speaker_02
Stephen Hayes, who founded ACT Therapy, he set out to figure out why humans commit suicide and no other animal seems to deliberately do that. And his answer is language.

01:35:53 Speaker_02
We're the only species that can create a reality with words in our minds that is so terrifying that an unknown future is worse than the fear of death.

01:36:04 Speaker_02
If you stop thinking in terms of language and logic, which we call that thinking intelligence, it's like a pair of scissors. It's good for certain tasks. It's not great when you need to stay warm, right?

01:36:18 Speaker_02
When you jump the tracks into your entire nervous system, which is all part of, it's not disconnected from the brain, then you're in the territory where you can actually experience joy.

01:36:31 Speaker_03
I want to go to two places. One is going to be a complete non sequitur, but just for purposes of trivia, I want to tell people something about rhinos. So you mentioned rhinos and the toe of the rhino.

01:36:46 Speaker_03
Part of the reason, as you alluded to, rhinos are a good starter animal for tracking, at least in South Africa where you and I were in the Sabi Sands Reserve at different times with Lontolosi, which coincidentally means the protector of all things.

01:37:02 Speaker_03
I believe it's in Zulu. But it has this large front toe. You can imagine it like the edge of your big toe toenail. And then there are these two side toes. And I mean, it just goes back to Pangea and it raises all sorts of great questions.

01:37:20 Speaker_03
But it's so weird. So there is an order called parasodactyla, which is an order of ungulates. So you could think elk, deer, etc. The order includes about 17 living species divided into three families.

01:37:36 Speaker_03
You have equidae, which comes back to the equine therapy maybe at some point. That's horses, asses, and zebras. Rhinos and tapirs, which you find in South America.

01:37:47 Speaker_03
So those are all related, which is pretty wild to think about rhinos, tapirs, and say zebras or horses. But if you look at the tracks, I mean, there are some similarities.

01:37:56 Speaker_03
So I just wanted to mention that briefly because it was just needed to get out of my head. And then the second is related to a book you mentioned earlier, the Tao Te Ching.

01:38:06 Speaker_03
And I was wondering if you could speak to Stephen Mitchell and Byron Katie in what you have learned from them. It could be related to integrity, it could be related to other things, but what have you modeled from them or learned from them?

01:38:25 Speaker_02
Speaking of the concept of having parents, I mean, they're friends more than parents, but I really do feel like they've kind of reparented me with their books.

01:38:33 Speaker_02
I read Stephen's version of The Doubted Jing right around the time I had The White Light Experience. That's when it was first published. It was such an intense, it was like my nervous system caught fire when I read that version.

01:38:46 Speaker_02
I'd read other versions and they didn't float my boat as much. But there was so much energy in my body that I felt like I was going to literally physically explode, and I drove to a place where I knew I could hike to a waterfall.

01:39:00 Speaker_03
Oh, they're going to say safely explode. I literally

01:39:05 Speaker_02
ran along this mountain path to this large-ish waterfall, ran under the waterfall and just stood there. And then the cold water beating down on me equaled the sort of heat that was rising.

01:39:17 Speaker_02
I mean, my connection to that book was so overwhelming, and I know it's been powerful for a lot of people. So I memorized it, took it around, gave it to everyone I knew.

01:39:28 Speaker_02
Then I was on a book tour and I saw this book by a woman named Byron Katie, and it said with a foreword by Stephen Mitchell. Never would have looked at it if I hadn't seen that. Then I found out on the book leaf that they were married.

01:39:43 Speaker_02
I was like, wow, okay, now I'm interested. So I bought the book, got on a plane, read the book, and she had a series of four questions which are very simple. Think of a thought that makes you upset. Is it true? Can you know that it's true?

01:39:57 Speaker_02
What happens when you think it? Who would you be without it? It seemed very, very simple. And I applied it. I started applying it. And there on the plane, I had an injury on my knee. And my thought was, I'm mad at my knee because it won't let me work out.

01:40:12 Speaker_02
And Katie has this way of reversing everything that's causing you suffering. After reading her stuff and doing her work forever, I actually believe that The direct verbal opposite of your worst fear is your next step toward enlightenment.

01:40:26 Speaker_02
I truly believe that.

01:40:27 Speaker_03
Okay, can you say that one more time? So I have some familiarity with your workshops and worksheets and just for people who want to find this, they can find The Work by Byron Katie online.

01:40:37 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's called The Work of Byron Katie and you can go online and download free things and she's very generous with it.

01:40:43 Speaker_03
Could you say that one more time because this seems like an important point.

01:40:46 Speaker_02
It will sound odd if you haven't been doing the work for a long time, but this is what I've realized. The exact verbal opposite of my worst fear. So the opposite. Take your worst fear, find the direct opposite of that.

01:41:00 Speaker_02
That is your next step toward enlightenment. So for example, when I wrote my book about Mormons, and I said to the publisher, don't tell anyone until it's published, and they said, you're afraid of the Mormons? How cute.

01:41:13 Speaker_02
Then the galleys went out, and I started getting calls from New York. Why didn't you tell us? These people are insane. We're all going to die. you mess with a religion, you get some weird responses.

01:41:25 Speaker_02
So if this is a different time, I'm on this plane again, and I'm thinking something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book. Something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book.

01:41:37 Speaker_02
And this thought just dogged me, so I did Byron Katie's work on it. And she picks it apart for you, and then you get the reverse. And the reverse of my worst fear here was, I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book."

01:41:53 Speaker_02
Instead of, something terrible is going to happen to me, it became, I'm going to happen to something terrible. And something in my psyche just went click, click, click, click, and I was no longer afraid. I thought I might get killed for sure.

01:42:07 Speaker_02
I knew I was doing what was right for me, period. I never went into a welter over it again. That was just true for me. That gives you a little tiny weird backwards taste of the way Byron Katie's work affects you when you do it.

01:42:25 Speaker_02
And she was doing her work, and some people who were into it said to Stephen Mitchell, a great translator and writer, you've got to write a book about this woman. And he said, no. And they said, no, you really, really have to.

01:42:38 Speaker_02
And he's like, I hate gurus. I don't like, oh my gosh, she's living in California. Ugh, ugh, Stephen is very picky, very picky. He said, all right, I'll go to Barstow where she lives. But she wasn't living in Barstow anymore. She just had lived there.

01:42:55 Speaker_02
She was living in LA. But he said, she will meet me in Barstow and we will sit down on the floor and we will look into each other's eyes for an hour, and then I will tell you whether I will write her book or not.

01:43:07 Speaker_02
way I tell the story, which is not far off the truth, but it's my story, not theirs. But they went to Barstow, and Katie was thinking, why does he want to go to Barstow?

01:43:19 Speaker_02
And they sat in a hotel, I believe they sat on the floor, knee to knee, and they looked into each other's eyes without speaking for an hour, and then they got married. That's not quite right. But he said to Katie, I've got to go back to New York now.

01:43:34 Speaker_02
And she just said, would you go back to New York?" He said, because I live there. And she was like, so? And he said, well, I have to go deal with my affairs. And she said, but you're the only person I've ever met who's of my species.

01:43:52 Speaker_02
And they talk about two kids in love in their 80s. They are in love with life, in love with each other, in love with the world, in love with death itself, like in love with everything. And their work has just mothered and fathered me through my life.

01:44:10 Speaker_02
And they've done it themselves as people now, so I love them dearly.

01:44:14 Speaker_03
I encourage people to check out the work for sure. And I have a, I guess, technical question about the opposite that you landed on. So I am going to happen to something terrible because of my book.

01:44:27 Speaker_03
Is that an example of a turnaround and could you have ended up on a different version? For instance, something wonderful is going to happen to me because of my book or some alternate. There could have been a number of varieties.

01:44:39 Speaker_03
Did that happen to be the one that of several resonated with you?

01:44:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, that was the one that really hit the gong in my mind, but I did have several. And very often you can come up with a bunch of them, and some of them are just plain wrong. They don't feel right at all.

01:44:53 Speaker_02
Some of them are okay, but it's not changing my life. Like, nothing terrible is gonna happen to me because I wrote this book. I thought, I don't believe that. And actually, terrible things did happen to me.

01:45:05 Speaker_02
Death wasn't one of them, but some things are gonna happen to me for sure. So maybe if I hadn't believed it, it wouldn't have happened, but it did. So that one didn't work. wonderful things are going to happen to me because I wrote that book.

01:45:16 Speaker_02
I did think that one seemed truer, and it ended up being truer. I just couldn't know what was going to happen.

01:45:23 Speaker_02
Often for me, it's the one that's strange and not grammatically normal that will break the construct in my mind because I think of the strange verbiage, and it sort of breaks open an assumption, and I'm in that space of don't know mind.

01:45:41 Speaker_02
It's a little Satori, right? And it's really fun to take your fears, put them through Byron Katie's questions, and then look at the turnarounds, and it can really, really change your life just sitting in a chair.

01:45:56 Speaker_03
I have seen people in 15 minutes doing this exercise live with Katie, reframe 20 years of resentment towards a parent because of X, Y, and Z, and they do a 180, and seemingly it just evaporates or transforms into something completely different with at least some durability, and I expect for some folks a lot of durability,

01:46:26 Speaker_03
I've been really impressed, and it's not that this happens to everyone every time, that's not the case, but you do see some really remarkable changes.

01:46:37 Speaker_02
But I'll tell you something, the work itself is incredibly powerful.

01:46:41 Speaker_02
But the reason people have these massive shifts with Katie in person, this one guy, he was in a house that was bombed to smithereens in Poland, I think it was in World War II, and his whole family died and a roof beam fell on him.

01:46:58 Speaker_02
It was winter, and so he gets up and he's haunted by this moment. And you know, for 50 years he's carried this. And she says, can you find The nine-year-old boy in that scenario with that roof beam on his head who was just fine.

01:47:14 Speaker_02
And he thinks for like literally two seconds and goes, oh yeah. And things like this happened around Katie all the time. And the reason is that she has jumped the tracks.

01:47:24 Speaker_02
And to understand why it's so powerful to do the work with her, you have to jump the tracks. You have to start believing that there's an energetic field that is connecting all of us and you can feel people's energy.

01:47:38 Speaker_02
I know I start to sound all new age and Steven wants to slap me in the face. He doesn't, he never would. But he gets very grumpy with me. I don't believe any of that stuff.

01:47:46 Speaker_03
He would stare at you for an hour very intensely.

01:47:48 Speaker_02
He's like, I don't believe any of that stuff, it's just phony. I'm like, explain this, Steven, and I show him something Katie's done. He just laughs and says, all right, I can't explain that. But it's really nice. He's such a Super hardcore, analytical.

01:48:04 Speaker_02
He doesn't believe anything because everything can be disproven. And she is a field of transformation. She just is.

01:48:16 Speaker_03
She really is a different species. It's just a different thing. And I'm not making any claims. I'm not deifying her. She just, she's a very, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, but very unusual.

01:48:26 Speaker_02
I have met a lot of people who claim to be gurus and self helpers and everything. And she's the only one I've spent quite a lot of time around her. I have never seen any reason to disbelieve what she says about the fact that she lives in perpetual joy.

01:48:41 Speaker_03
Yeah. It's pretty wild to see her in action. I have not spent a lot of time with her, but I spent a few days in a workshop with her. You're just like, is this an act? Did she go home and just yell on the phone?

01:48:57 Speaker_03
At least I was not able to see any deviation. I did not see any deviation whatsoever.

01:49:03 Speaker_02
No, I've never seen it. I've been around her when she's exhausted, when she's sick, when she's jet lagged. She's never in psychological suffering, ever, as far as I've seen.

01:49:13 Speaker_03
So let's chat about another great for a second. Goethe. So the German writer, innovator, polymath of every possible variety. I'm wondering what you find most striking about Goethe.

01:49:28 Speaker_03
There are a couple of quotes that popped up that I think may resonate with you that I think you've mentioned in conversations before. But when you trust yourself, you will know how to live. That's one. Another, never hurry, never cease.

01:49:41 Speaker_03
That's one I've heard permutations of in Buddhism as well, right? No hurry, no pause, all these things, which I quite like. Any others that come to mind or any aspects?

01:49:52 Speaker_02
From Goethe himself?

01:49:53 Speaker_03
Or anything, I mean, that doesn't need to be specifically to, we can meander as we want to meander.

01:49:59 Speaker_02
I love the stuff about self-trust. I'm blanking, actually, which I rarely do. All I can think about is Faust now, and how he talks about the bargain with the devil.

01:50:11 Speaker_02
I think we all make a bargain with the devil, metaphorically, because we're forced to confront the question, will we do what it takes to be admired and approved of by humans, or will we follow the soul? Will we trust ourselves, or will we trust

01:50:29 Speaker_02
what other people want us to be. So the Faustian bargain is the only thing that's really coming to mind right now. Is Goethe a particular favorite of yours?

01:50:37 Speaker_03
I have a collection of aphorisms and lived in Berlin for a period of time, became really infatuated by Goethe just because, and for those wondering what the hell we're talking about, lots of different pronunciations in English, but G-O-E-T-H-E.

01:50:54 Speaker_03
There's the Goethe Institute and certainly, I don't know if it'd be fair to call him the Shakespeare plus of Germany, but that's one way to think about it.

01:51:04 Speaker_02
I know why you're into him.

01:51:06 Speaker_03
Tell me.

01:51:07 Speaker_02
He's just like you.

01:51:08 Speaker_03
He's just like me.

01:51:09 Speaker_02
Yeah. I mean, there aren't many people like you.

01:51:11 Speaker_03
Bald and handsome?

01:51:13 Speaker_02
There really aren't. And I love the way you're so incredibly generous with all your life hacks and everything, but I'm like, okay, so you can learn 12 sentences and then know a language.

01:51:23 Speaker_04
Not everybody can.

01:51:26 Speaker_02
You can learn the tango and be an Argentine champion.

01:51:29 Speaker_04
Not everybody can.

01:51:30 Speaker_02
But you are kind of a freak, you got to admit that. Because you don't just pick up hobbies, you pick up hobbies and then become a Japanese translator. It's kind of insane, the kind of equipment you were born with.

01:51:47 Speaker_02
And it must be a heavy burden in some ways, and quite lonely. Because as much as you try to help people be the same, they probably rarely are. And I think Goethe's life might've been similar. You are America's Goethe.

01:52:06 Speaker_03
Oh, wow.

01:52:07 Speaker_02
There you go.

01:52:07 Speaker_03
Thank you. I appreciate that. That is high praise. I would say for a multitude of reasons, definitely feeling lonely. I mean, that's something I'm familiar with for sure. I do have different hardware. I'd say that it manifests in maybe unpredictable ways.

01:52:21 Speaker_03
I did a bunch of cognitive assessments recently because that's the kind of thing that I do. And for instance, for digit recall, just doing five and six digit recall,

01:52:34 Speaker_03
When I don't have the ability, I don't have the time to use a crutch of say a mnemonic, I am terrible. I'm like lowest decile in the US for sure, like bottom 10%.

01:52:46 Speaker_03
But then there are other things like the Stroop test where you're looking at say the word red, but it's displayed in green and you have to either indicate red or green depending on some parameter and it's very fast. Stroop test, I'm like top 1%.

01:52:59 Speaker_03
I have no idea why. I don't know what that translates to. And it kind of goes on and on. There are super abilities and super weaknesses.

01:53:09 Speaker_02
Oh, tell me. This is fascinating.

01:53:12 Speaker_03
Well, I mean, they're very, in my experience, often right side by side. They're very adjacent, right? So I would say I can, you can see how this would cut both ways.

01:53:27 Speaker_03
I can walk into a room, I was doing a remodel at one point, for instance, and I had never seen this entire room built. And I walked in and there was a mirror 10 feet away, and I said, it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left.

01:53:40 Speaker_03
I'm talking about symmetry. I was like, it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left. And they're like, what? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it's not centered.

01:53:46 Speaker_03
And they went over and measured it, and lo and behold, within a fraction of a second, I was like, yeah, that's off. You can see how that would drive me fucking bananas, too, though.

01:53:55 Speaker_02
That would be hard to live in the world.

01:53:56 Speaker_03
Very monkish. Beauty is such a, what'd I say? It's so gratifying to me.

01:54:04 Speaker_02
It's its own excuse for being.

01:54:07 Speaker_03
It's its own excuse for being. So when there is something that lazily violates beauty, it bugs the shit out of me. And I'm not proud of that. I'm not saying it is enabling. Most of the time I would say it is distracting. At worst it would be disabling.

01:54:27 Speaker_03
Yeah. But it enables me to do certain things, right? Like I can draw the floor plan of almost any restaurant I've ever been in. It doesn't matter if it's once, twice, if I've only been there for five minutes, that's just something I can do.

01:54:40 Speaker_03
And then there are a lot of things that normal people can do that I just seem unable to do in terms of Let's just say on one hand, I have a great creative capacity because I will ruminate.

01:54:56 Speaker_03
On the other hand, that same rumination can manifest as lifelong onset insomnia.

01:55:02 Speaker_02
Oh, yes. Yes. I'm in treatment for this right now. I just found someone. Yeah.

01:55:07 Speaker_03
Oh, wow. All right. So it goes both ways. And I will say there are examples where I can't teach someone to replicate what I've done. There are thankfully more examples of where I can help someone actually get beyond where

01:55:21 Speaker_03
I arrived after x point in time, mostly because I would say the vast majority of teaching has a lot of fat on it, and logical sequences aren't particularly prevalent, and old methods persist for a really long time.

01:55:36 Speaker_03
So, I mean, the way that we, as an example, teach languages, since you mentioned languages, the way we teach languages in most schools is the equivalent of saying, okay, you want to learn how to ski and you're excited to learn how to ski? Great.

01:55:47 Speaker_03
We're going to have you take a six-month avalanche course and you're going to memorize meteorological tables and historical weather patterns for the first six months. Who is going to want to do that? Nobody. Everyone's going to drop out.

01:56:00 Speaker_03
Maybe there are one or two people who survive and then they get called good at languages. That's a failure of the method, not a failure of the student.

01:56:09 Speaker_03
So if I'm able to suffer through that and then break it down, rearrange it, remove 90% of it, then I can teach people to go further than I did in a lot of ways. However, then I have an unusual ability to mimic. I just do.

01:56:26 Speaker_03
And for whatever reason, even though I've done audiological exams because I like to know what I'm dealing with, I do not seem to have any greater range, any greater sensitivity than the average person.

01:56:39 Speaker_03
But my brain, for whatever reason, interprets these sounds and signals and I can mimic accents. I can mimic tones. I can do these things. I don't know why, but that does give me an advantage.

01:56:50 Speaker_02
So have you ever been given a word for your neurodivergence?

01:56:54 Speaker_03
No. And I'm grateful in the sense that I was not of a generation where, say, overprescription was common.

01:57:07 Speaker_03
or even really existent for things that didn't have labels, constellations of symptoms or characteristics that didn't have labels until later, because I for sure would have been medicated to the gills.

01:57:19 Speaker_03
And I'm not saying there is a place for medication, but I would have been given everything under the sun. hyperactive, rambunctious, bouncing all over the place, refused to learn the alphabet for a while.

01:57:32 Speaker_03
And then I was stupid and then I was going to be held back. And I mean, I would have been just saturated with pharmaceuticals. So no, I haven't been given, I have not been given a word. Is there a good word that comes to mind?

01:57:45 Speaker_02
I don't know. I mean, my oldest child just self-identified as autistic, so I went in and looked at all the symptoms, and I'm like, oh, that's what's been wrong with me this whole time.

01:57:54 Speaker_02
I truly believe this thing about destiny, and I remember thinking even as a child, if my destiny is to climb to the top of Everest and someone else's destiny is to dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench,

01:58:08 Speaker_02
The equipment that I need would actually make them unable to fulfill their mission. If I'm climbing, that would not be good in diving, and I couldn't haul an aquatic set of tools up Everest.

01:58:20 Speaker_02
So I thought, all right, there are things I wish I could do that I can't, and things I can do. I don't know, I just can do them and it's really easy for me and weirdly easy.

01:58:29 Speaker_02
I just thought, well, this must be in some way a description of what I'm meant to do with my life.

01:58:37 Speaker_02
I remember thinking that when I was eight or nine years old and I look at you and you've done so many things that, what do you do if you're good at dancing? You become a champion. Yeah, you can do that. But your brain is so different.

01:58:50 Speaker_02
I hope they never medicate it unless it's something that makes you happier, but I am really curious about your brain because it's clearly, I actually think the future of our species depends on people who are neurodivergent in ways that make them unable to fit the culture that Western colonizers created, the weird cultures, right?

01:59:13 Speaker_02
And that's an oversimplification and there are many, many cultures, but the overall culture that we have hierarchical capitalism, whatever, is destroying the planet, and teaching people languages by putting them in avalanche courses.

01:59:28 Speaker_02
Then there are people who just will not because their brains work differently. You've just got the most unusual brain I've ever seen.

01:59:37 Speaker_03
Thank you. I think about this a lot. I don't know if I want to paint this broadly, but superpowers come with costs. Always. Or just powers. Powers come with weaknesses. The two sides of the same coin come in different varieties.

01:59:55 Speaker_03
I think that, for instance, a lot of my abilities almost certainly would not exist without also a propensity towards depression, a propensity towards anxiety and hypervigilance.

02:00:08 Speaker_03
And there are times certainly when I would trade it all for the ability to get to sleep easily, the ability to

02:00:19 Speaker_03
Look at the glasses half full instead of half empty i mean there are times i'm like you know what i'm not sure right now if someone's like here's your list of abilities and disabilities.

02:00:31 Speaker_03
And if you strike out one, you have to strike out something from the other column. Like I might erase a number of things. Arrived at a good place.

02:00:38 Speaker_03
I feel that number of recent experiments have been particularly interesting, but I'd love to hear from you. And this stuck out. This is in some prep notes. And I'd like you to take this wherever you would like to take it, but this is a line.

02:00:54 Speaker_03
I'm just going to use it as, as a prompt. So the opposite of anxiety isn't calm. It's creativity. I like that. I've never heard it before, but there's part of me that's like, even without dissecting it, it makes some sense to me.

02:01:07 Speaker_03
Could you elaborate on that, please?

02:01:10 Speaker_02
I came to this conclusion, I was noticing this huge spike in all my clients of anxiety, and I was reading about this massive, mostly in the pandemic, but anxiety just went bananas, and it didn't come down, and things eased a little bit.

02:01:24 Speaker_02
And at the same time, I got to be friends with Jill Bolte-Taylor, the woman who had the left hemisphere stroke when she was a Harvard neuroanatomist. It was the first TED Talk to go viral, and she lost all language and analytical cognition

02:01:39 Speaker_02
while her left hemisphere was offline. It took her eight years to rebuild her brain, but she experienced things with only the right hemisphere that she'd never experienced before.

02:01:50 Speaker_02
This incredible joy, bliss, awe, the feeling of being completely a field of energy, no barriers between physical objects. It was a very different view of the world.

02:02:01 Speaker_02
If she hadn't been a neuroanatomist, she probably would be sitting in a vegetating somewhere. But fortunately, she was among people who knew how to help her rebuild.

02:02:10 Speaker_02
So now she goes around telling people, we're overusing the left hemispheres of our brains. We need to be able to access the right. And so I'd been talking to her about this endlessly. I love talking to her.

02:02:23 Speaker_02
And I was reading a lot of brain science, always have, always will. And I noticed that there were tons of studies that showed that the moment someone is even slightly stressed, their creativity goes to shit.

02:02:36 Speaker_02
Like they do these creative tests and then they say, we'll pay you $5 if you get the answer. Instead of motivating them, they get that little bit of anxiety, can't do it. All these studies showing that little kids

02:02:49 Speaker_02
Happily create things and adults can't do the same things why it always boils down to social anxiety so this is. Spaghetti and marshmallows have you heard of it.

02:03:01 Speaker_03
This is a game of height, right?

02:03:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, you're trying to build the tallest tower possible using uncooked spaghetti, a marshmallow, some string and some tape. And they gave this problem to a whole bunch of engineers, groups of MBA students, groups of lawyers, all these people.

02:03:15 Speaker_02
They all had similar results. Then they gave it to a group of five-year-olds who won by a country mile. Five-year-olds do better by far at so many creative tests. And why do they stop doing well as they get older?

02:03:31 Speaker_02
it boils down to socialization and social anxiety. So then I looked at the brain structures, and what Jill told me was you basically have two brains. They're symmetrical, but they don't work the same.

02:03:43 Speaker_02
The left hemisphere has this alarm signal that goes into fear, and then immediately the left hemisphere starts to try to control whatever's going wrong, whatever makes you afraid. and telling verbal stories about it.

02:03:58 Speaker_02
The problem is the verbal stories that you tell feed back into the amygdala as environmental reality. So if I'm afraid something's going to jump at me from the dark, it's as if something really is going to jump at me from the dark.

02:04:13 Speaker_02
So when I say I may have a fatal illness, there's no evidence, but I can literally go into a panic over that because of language. The left hemisphere is also unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the right hemisphere's perspective exists at all.

02:04:27 Speaker_02
Like if people have a right hemisphere stroke and they're only in the left hemisphere and you tell them to draw a clock, they'll draw the side of the clock from 12 to 6, and they'll say, that's finished. And there's nothing wrong with their eyes.

02:04:39 Speaker_02
They will not acknowledge anything the right brain is observing. When Jill only had her right brain, zero anxiety, zero time, zero physical reality really. On the right side, the amygdala is afraid. Ah! but it starts to get curious.

02:04:55 Speaker_02
So you said something about curiosity really early on in this interview, and I was like, oh, that's the trick. Because if something scares you, if you go to control, you're in anxiety.

02:05:05 Speaker_02
If you go to curiosity, my mind is open, I have no assumptions, and I want to know what this is about. Instead of anxiety, you get creativity. So it depends which side, and one side shuts off the other. So it toggles.

02:05:23 Speaker_02
So when I asked you to talk about these things that you were sense, the things you love with all five senses, you had to go into the right hemisphere of the brain and it had to shut down the part of the brain that produces anxiety.

02:05:35 Speaker_02
That's just the machinery. So my premise was anxiety kills creativity. Maybe creativity kills anxiety. So I started designing things to test that, and it tests amazingly well.

02:05:49 Speaker_02
Even though I haven't seen any direct studies on it yet, if you put together the science around it, it's kind of an unavoidable conclusion. And when I try it myself, oh my God, the results are ridiculously powerful.

02:06:03 Speaker_03
What types of exercises do you do for yourself?

02:06:06 Speaker_02
Oh, for example, if you were to write your name, Tim, that's cheating because it's short, Tim Ferriss. Are you right-handed?

02:06:14 Speaker_03
I'm right-handed.

02:06:15 Speaker_02
So I would have you write your name, then put your pencil just to the left of your name and write it backwards in mirror writing. So mirror your signature.

02:06:24 Speaker_02
Then you put your pencil under your signature and do it upside down, and then upside down and backwards. Leonardo da Vinci used to write in mirror writing.

02:06:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, that is a wild example of people go back and look at this extensive backwards writing.

02:06:37 Speaker_02
Nuts. I used mirror writing constantly as a kid. It was amazing to me that other people couldn't read it. I totally maxed out this IQ test once when I was five because the guy had the test right in front of him and he was giving it to me orally.

02:06:53 Speaker_02
And I thought, doesn't he know I can read it upside down? I mean, I'm fine here. I aced that one. Anyway, but just because I can read mirror writing. But try doing that and staying anxious at the same time. Can't do it.

02:07:08 Speaker_02
Then I decided, okay, I'm going to take January 2023. I'm going to give myself an entire month in lockdown because the conditions are very controlled, so this is a good time for an experiment in the pandemic.

02:07:21 Speaker_02
I'm going to get up every morning and do things that are purely right brain function. So I started with drawing and painting, and I thought, I'll just go from there. I drew and painted like a maniac. I didn't want to sleep. I didn't want to eat.

02:07:40 Speaker_02
I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was in pure heaven. And the problem was, at the end of the month, stopping was horrible. It was like some kind of suicide right there.

02:07:54 Speaker_02
And now, since I finished, I had to get back into my left hemisphere to write the book about it. But as soon as I sent the manuscript away, I just started paint. I get up every morning at like between 4 and 6 and paint until 11.

02:08:05 Speaker_02
And I'm just like completely blissed out.

02:08:08 Speaker_03
Yeah. I find drawing to be a real self, and I wanted to be an illustrator for a long time when I was a kid. paid some of my expenses in college by being an illustrator. I actually illustrated a few books.

02:08:20 Speaker_04
I did that too.

02:08:21 Speaker_03
Long time ago. And getting back into that, even just going to, you do not need to be good. It's not about being good. It's about using different Circuitry, patterning, a different type of awareness. There are many different ways you could frame it.

02:08:38 Speaker_03
Gesture drawing, going to live classes where you have nude subjects posing and just in case there are a bunch of guys who are like, awesome. No, you're going to get some like obese naked dudes too. Yeah, it's not awesome. So it's dealer's choice.

02:08:53 Speaker_03
So just realize you got to be there for the drawing.

02:08:56 Speaker_04
Yes.

02:08:56 Speaker_03
It's not a singles bar and the fact just for people who've never been the way this works gesture drawing is so called because you're intended to capture at least the essence of a pose. The pose automatically changes with a timer.

02:09:10 Speaker_03
The timer could be one minute initially and the model will change his or her position every 60 seconds and then it might go to two minutes and then to say five minutes but

02:09:20 Speaker_03
The point I want to make is part of the beauty of this is when things are changing that quickly, I really like gesture drawing live classes as an introduction because you just cannot, you do not have the space to overanalyze what you're doing.

02:09:39 Speaker_03
Whereas if I'm like, draw this apple on a table, and you have two hours to do it, you can scrutinize and tie yourself up in knots every which way from Sunday. But if it's a pose that changes every 60 seconds, you just have to draw.

02:09:53 Speaker_03
In any case, I find it so deeply therapeutic. It's unreal.

02:09:57 Speaker_02
I used to put like a silk scarf in front of a fan and try to draw it.

02:10:01 Speaker_03
That sounds like torture potential.

02:10:04 Speaker_02
No, it's heaven. Because I mean, I had this massive depression and anxiety. and you know from experience, and it's when you do it for the joy of it. The moment you're doing it for money is just work.

02:10:17 Speaker_02
The reason I went so deeply into it this last January is that I'd always been doing it for the result for a long time. I was doing it for money, I was doing it to give to someone, whatever, to teach, and this was just

02:10:32 Speaker_02
to activate the right side of my brain. That was it. I would be obsessed with a drawing or a painting, and when it was done, I would just throw it in. I don't even know where they are anymore. They just started littering the floor. I was in pig heaven.

02:10:44 Speaker_02
And it really does, when I'm anxious, this is what I tell myself, make something. make something. You can't stay anxious if you're making something.

02:10:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, for sure. So two quick comments. The first is for people who want a great reinforcement of this, Make Good Art, a commencement speech by Neil Gaiman is unbelievably good. And watch the actual delivery.

02:11:09 Speaker_03
Watch the video because his mellifluous dulcet tones add so much to it. His delivery is so good. And then the second thing I would say is, for those people who are like, what?

02:11:20 Speaker_03
How am I going to find a naked person in a class and this, that, and the other thing? There are websites, and we'll put some in the show notes, where you have effectively gesture poses that change, and you can set the duration. So you can mimic this.

02:11:35 Speaker_03
At home you don't need to do a class but the class has so much more to it you're doing it with other people you're probably standing you're actually moving your body and getting away from a staring at something 18 inches at a fixed location in front of your face there's so much more to it.

02:11:51 Speaker_02
what you just described is the way the right hemisphere moves with people in motion with the body versus the left hemisphere moves. Fixed, rigid, in space, got to get this right. And there's an overemphasis in our entire culture.

02:12:06 Speaker_02
Again, an oversimplification, but there's a huge overemphasis on left hemisphere functions to the point where this...I love this guy, Ian McGill-Christ at Oxford. He says the whole culture functions like someone with a right hemisphere stroke.

02:12:21 Speaker_02
Like, we've lost half our brain, and it's the part that includes, that nurtures, that finds meaning, that finds joy. I mean, we have left out the best part.

02:12:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, there are many different ways of knowing, different modes of living. So these types of exercises I've just found so important as certainly joy-inducing, but just a critical vitamin.

02:12:47 Speaker_03
And if you're deficient in this, the consequences psychologically are just as dire as if you were deficient in essential amino acid or something like that. So let me ask you,

02:12:57 Speaker_03
in a slightly different context as it relates to, it doesn't need to be specific to anxiety, but I'm very curious because Boyd had mentioned this in his long list of potential topics that we could discuss.

02:13:10 Speaker_03
So I'm wondering if this ties in in any way, or if you could just speak to, he put down IFS, so parts work, internal family systems. How have you used that? What is it? What do you find it best for? We don't have to spend a lot of time on it.

02:13:23 Speaker_03
I'm just wondering if there's an intersection in the same way there might be an intersection. If thoughts are beliefs we take to be true, something like that, or beliefs or thoughts we take to be true.

02:13:34 Speaker_03
If the work, Byron Katie's, the work can have such a dramatic impact on people by helping them to re-author beliefs. I'm wondering if IFS also has a role, and if so, what that role is in, say, the work that you do.

02:13:50 Speaker_02
I think so. IFS is going bananas because it works so damn well. And I got really curious reading about it, so I signed up. I tried to get a training course, but there's a waiting list.

02:14:00 Speaker_02
Signed up with my own IFS therapist, ended up meeting Dick Schwartz, who created IFS, and having conversations with him about it. And the way he puts it, he was a family therapist.

02:14:11 Speaker_02
And there were times when he's working with a group of people and say the dad was really aggressive and a child didn't want to talk in front of the dad. He asked the dad to step out of the room and then the child could talk, could speak more freely.

02:14:24 Speaker_02
And then he was working with just one patient and he heard them using a very critical, angry voice. And he had this odd thing of, could I ask whoever just said that to step out of the body for a minute? Not literally.

02:14:37 Speaker_02
And to his surprise, the patient said, sure. And then the critical part stepped out and he said, I'd like to talk to whoever is behind this critical voice or whoever disagrees with the critical voice.

02:14:49 Speaker_02
And different parts of the patient would start to express themselves. It's not a shift in identity, it's not multiple personalities or anything like that. It's just that we all know we have parts.

02:15:02 Speaker_02
There's a part of us that loves to go out dancing and a part that likes to stay home and go to sleep. There's a part that feels little, there's a part that feels strong, whatever.

02:15:10 Speaker_02
So the thing is, the Byron Katie work, for example, if you do it, but only one part of you does it, there may be another part that is just not down with it. And that part needs to have its experience.

02:15:25 Speaker_02
What Dick found was that the parts have their own unique and whole identities. And if you respect them, they come together and they start to integrate with each other and solve the problems that make your life miserable.

02:15:42 Speaker_02
And it works really, really well.

02:15:43 Speaker_03
Do you use that with clients?

02:15:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm not trained, but he's also very generous with his theory and there are books out there. One is called Self Therapy by Jay Early with little illustrations and everything to tell you how to use it.

02:15:58 Speaker_02
And the biggest thing I found, especially to relate to anxiety, so there's a part of you that gets anxious and depressed, yeah? Or maybe there are two different parts, one anxious, one depressed, I don't know.

02:16:09 Speaker_02
So when you think about your anxiety, or your depression, or your insomnia, how do you think about it? What are the thoughts you think?

02:16:17 Speaker_03
What are the thoughts I think?

02:16:19 Speaker_02
Yeah, when you're thinking about insomnia.

02:16:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, remarkably, I've seemingly fixed a lot of that for the first time in 30 years. But I would say if we're talking about anxiety or depression, I'd say the most common type of thought pattern, and I did do a live

02:16:38 Speaker_03
I had Dick on the podcast, Dick Schwartz, and we did a live kind of demo, or he asked me if I'd be willing to do it.

02:16:45 Speaker_03
So we did do a live walkthrough, but I'd say to answer your question, the most common thoughts that I have are even related to depression, fear-based. So for instance, if I don't get sleep for one or two days, I'm like, Catastrophizing, right?

02:17:00 Speaker_03
I can feel myself slipping. I don't want to go into this state. I need to do everything to avoid it because if I end up in the spiral, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, and all these catastrophe scenarios might ensue.

02:17:14 Speaker_03
So there's a lot of fear around slipping into a persistent depressive or anxious state, especially depressive state, because the anxious state I've brute forced through so many thousands of times that I have a greater degree of confidence in my ability to just by sheer will and overpowering my psyche, I can compensate, whereas the depressive stuff is more

02:17:42 Speaker_03
handicapping, but there's a lot of fear around it, I would say.

02:17:45 Speaker_02
Yeah. So there's fear, there's avoidance, there's dread, there's catastrophizing. Now, what I've found is that when people talk to me about anxiety, they're like, I hate it. I want to get rid of it. I'd do anything to be rid of it. So I had this theory

02:18:02 Speaker_02
that the part that holds the insomnia or the part that holds the anxiety or depression is a part that wants to be included. Everything wants to belong, right?

02:18:14 Speaker_02
So when you're saying, get away, I don't want you, the part of you that does insomnia and depression goes into a kind of panic because it's now being told it can't belong. You don't want it. You've rejected it.

02:18:29 Speaker_02
And so it ups the ante, and all it knows how to do is keep you awake and make you depressed. So it starts to spiral upwards.

02:18:35 Speaker_02
I had this huge breakthrough when I was meditating, and sometimes when I have a negative thing that won't seem to leave, I just use this little let go, let go mantra. And it wasn't letting go. I thought, OK, how would Byron Katie do this?

02:18:50 Speaker_02
And I said, let's stay. So I said to my anxiety at the time. Stay, don't go anywhere, please come and sit down, stay here. I want you exactly the way you are. I accept you exactly the way you are. I want you with me. I care about you.

02:19:07 Speaker_02
I care about your welfare. I want to know all about you. I want to know everything about you. Come sit by the fire with me. And in a way, it's what I do with every client. It's what I did with Boyd when we were getting to know each other.

02:19:22 Speaker_02
Sit by the fire with me and tell me your worst fears, your worst stories, because I have room enough in my heart for all of them.

02:19:29 Speaker_02
And I said being creative is the opposite of anxiety, but you can't get to creativity if you don't start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness. toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can't stand.

02:19:47 Speaker_02
And that was a really dramatic shift for me in my insomnia, for one thing, but in all the negatives when I started saying, stay.

02:19:58 Speaker_03
I love that. You know what it also makes me think? Man, oh man, is it time for me to go back and reread Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach? Probably. Yeah, that's a great book. Probably. It's probably time for me to get back on that horse too. I love that.

02:20:14 Speaker_03
Adelafield, do you have a favorite animal? Is there a small set of animals, birds, or otherwise, where you're like, you know what? Yeah, I do. I particularly like or find these animals interesting.

02:20:26 Speaker_02
I do. Cheetahs.

02:20:29 Speaker_03
Cheetahs, all right.

02:20:30 Speaker_02
Yes. I love big cats anyway, but cheetahs are delicate and scared and skittish. Because they're built for speed. They have those long legs and stuff. And if a lion or a leopard or a hyena gets to them, they're toast.

02:20:46 Speaker_02
So I had a chance to meet an orphan cheetah, an adult cheetah. And you know how animals have energy, like dogs have this energy that is just dog, like genius.

02:20:56 Speaker_02
Horses have this energy which is like, I'm about this far away from wild and I'm scared of everything. Lions have this energy like serial killers because they are, you know.

02:21:08 Speaker_02
But cheetahs, I once came upon a cheetah that was throttling an impala and it held on until the animal had suffocated. Then it looked up at me and it said, I met this adult cheetah. Tim, you've got to meet cheetahs. They have like dog energy.

02:21:30 Speaker_02
If you put a ton of sugar in it, they are the sweetest animals.

02:21:35 Speaker_03
What do you mean by putting a ton of sugar into it? Just throwing doughnuts out of the car?

02:21:41 Speaker_02
Not in the rot your teeth way, but just like how dogs love you. She does love you twice that much. They love each other twice that much.

02:21:51 Speaker_02
And it started licking my arm and it was taking off a layer of skin with every lick because they have these really raspy tongues. I literally had a scar for months and I don't care. It could have eaten my arm.

02:22:01 Speaker_03
As far as scar stories go, that's up there with the greats. What happened to your arm? Oh, nothing. Just a cheetah licked my skin off.

02:22:12 Speaker_02
You never know.

02:22:13 Speaker_03
Yeah. Okay, cheetahs. Yeah. I have not been that close to a cheetah, but I was really overjoyed. I think it was my last, last

02:22:25 Speaker_03
outing at Londolozzi, like in the trackers and rangers and with the whole kit and caboodle where they could actually use the radio. So we weren't on foot, at least not initially. I really wanted to see a cheetah.

02:22:38 Speaker_03
And as it happens, you probably can identify with this maybe, but I was so jet lagged at one point, I skipped one morning drive. So of course they see all these cheetahs. And they're like, you missed the cheetahs. I'm like, oh, you gotta be kidding me.

02:22:52 Speaker_03
And then luckily because just the technical abilities of these rangers and trackers is so otherworldly. We're able to find a cheetah who's just killed an impala and was resting in the shade and had just eaten a bunch, so it wasn't going anywhere.

02:23:09 Speaker_03
They're like, yeah, don't worry about it. We're able to get probably within 30 or 40 feet and just lock eyes and for those people,

02:23:22 Speaker_03
who haven't done this, which I'm guessing is a pretty large percentage, they have very different eyes from lions or leopards.

02:23:30 Speaker_03
They have this, at least the cheetah I saw, this deep kind of amber-orange eyes and a very square brow, like a very straight brow line. And it's so distinct. And they're, as you pointed out, so delicate

02:23:47 Speaker_03
I mean, certainly if push came to shove, they could rip your face off, but they're very, very skittish, right? Like they are going to run away from everything because every other cat can steal prey from them or kill them. So they are built for speed.

02:24:00 Speaker_03
They've made a lot of compromises in optimizing for speed. Quick side note for people who may not realize this. If you look at, say, a leopard's tail, it's kind of like a squirrel tail, right? It's built for balancing at height. So it's very round.

02:24:13 Speaker_03
It's very bushy. And a cheetah tail is actually very rectangular. It's almost like a rudder or a beaver tail turned 90 degrees on its side because they use it for maneuvering aerodynamically when they're traveling at high speed. It's so wild.

02:24:30 Speaker_03
But I don't have a cheetah licking scar. I'm actually very, very envious of this.

02:24:35 Speaker_02
It really goes to what you said about every superpower has its cost though. I think you would identify with cheetahs.

02:24:43 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, I love cheetahs. I love, love, love cheetahs. I've only seen them that close that one time, but what a wonderful experience. Let's hop to this far from wild, and I'm afraid of everything, horses.

02:25:00 Speaker_03
I want to say, did at one point you own a ranch? Am I making that up? North Star Ranch.

02:25:07 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:25:07 Speaker_03
Do you still own the ranch?

02:25:09 Speaker_02
Nope. Moved out to Pennsylvania.

02:25:12 Speaker_03
Okay. But you did. This was in San Luis Obispo.

02:25:14 Speaker_02
Slow. For six years.

02:25:16 Speaker_03
For six years.

02:25:17 Speaker_02
It actually was in a national park. I mean, the nearest grocery store was an hour's drive. Wow. There was no road going past it. There was us and a national park.

02:25:30 Speaker_03
Mm-hmm, okay.

02:25:31 Speaker_02
I kept a lot of bears and a lot of mountain lion.

02:25:33 Speaker_03
I bet you had a lot. So equine therapy was, now I don't know how much time you've spent in that context.

02:25:42 Speaker_03
The reason I'm asking about it, I spent one afternoon here in Texas on a farm that specializes in equine therapy for people with PTSD, kids with different neurodivergent conditions, including autism, and I wanted to have the experience of interacting with horses.

02:25:59 Speaker_03
And I've ridden horses before, but being in a pen, interacting without any objective to ride a horse is foreign to me. Could you describe what this is? And if I'm kind of barking up the wrong tree, please stop me. But I'm just curious what your

02:26:17 Speaker_03
The broad question is kind of what you gain from interacting with animals writ large, but since horses are less inclined to eat your face than say big cats, it's a little more approachable for folks.

02:26:31 Speaker_03
That is a huge avalanche of word salad of a non-question, but would you like to take on the challenge of doing something like that?

02:26:38 Speaker_02
I love it. Yeah, I got that ranch because I got the chance to work with some equine therapists and I made a sort of amalgamation of the way I coach people. with what they were doing, and we ran seminars and put work teams through it and everything.

02:26:53 Speaker_02
And the reason it's so amazing is that I talk about people exuding an energy or cheetahs exuding an energy. Horses are responding to that energy and they respond in a way that is undeniable.

02:27:06 Speaker_02
So we'd have a team of people and their boss would go into the pen. They were all too frightened to tell the boss that he was terrifying. The horse would just start to gallop and gallop and gallop and rear and the guy would be, I'm being nice to him.

02:27:22 Speaker_02
and you could correct for posture. There's a way to speak hoarse, and you speak it with your physical body. You basically have to learn to stop acting like a predator, which we are, and start moving more like a prey animal.

02:27:36 Speaker_02
So gentle energy, eyes down, eyes soft, these sort of wishy-washy sounding things, but when you're in there in the pen with the horse and your eyes aren't soft, the horse is afraid.

02:27:47 Speaker_02
And then you learn how to soften your eyes and the horse goes, ugh, and like physically drops its tension. And if you get to a place where you are in really calm,

02:27:59 Speaker_02
really connected state of being, so calm but also open, the horse will make you the leader of the herd. And I had a few experiences with that where I was taught to act like a herd leader.

02:28:16 Speaker_02
And this one time, some horse whispers took me to a herd and they said, we want you to join up with this one little Palomino mare. And there were like 20 horses in this pasture. And this one was the most skittish, the hardest to get close to.

02:28:29 Speaker_02
I had to get my energy so soft and do everything just right. But eventually I got to the place, there's something we used to call a join up, where you walk past the horse

02:28:40 Speaker_02
and you sort of brush past it with your shoulder and walk away, and it follows you, and you are now its leader. I've done this with individual horses. I finally got this little Palomino to join up with me, and I walked past her and she came with me.

02:28:56 Speaker_02
And then you walk for a while together just to establish the connection. And she was walking with me, but I heard something weird behind me.

02:29:05 Speaker_02
And so after we'd walked a while, I looked back and I just looked down and over, not over my shoulder, sort of under my shoulder, because you don't want your eyes to be up and staring. And she was the herd matriarch.

02:29:15 Speaker_02
And when she joined up with me, the whole herd did. And they were all walking with me. Holy shit.

02:29:24 Speaker_04
That's amazing.

02:29:25 Speaker_02
That's why I bought a ranch in California. I'm like, I'm buying a ranch. And what happens is you start to realize that these horses are just more sensitive to stuff that people are seeing in you all the time.

02:29:38 Speaker_02
And we'd put people in with horses, and the horses would force them to tell the truth. And then the other people, the boss would say, am I really that scary? Everybody would go, all five horses are afraid of you and we are too.

02:29:51 Speaker_02
And it's a very, very quick way to learn to tell the truth. There was this one woman who kept trying to do it. She was having no success at all. The horse just kept bumping up against her and she hated it.

02:30:04 Speaker_02
She said she was getting nothing out of the seminar. I was panicking inside.

02:30:08 Speaker_02
And finally she said, after three days of this, she said, all right, I've been working on all these stupid little things, but the real thing is I'm getting a divorce and I haven't told anybody.

02:30:17 Speaker_02
And she started to cry and it was obvious that was her real issue. So we said, just go in with the horse and do whatever, but be honest. So she went into the pen and she just stood there and started to cry and the horse came up.

02:30:32 Speaker_02
walked up and touched her with his shoulder and then wrapped his head back around so that his nose was touching his flank and just held her. And it was a genuine hug. This is not me anthropomorphizing.

02:30:50 Speaker_02
When you realize that nature is available to you as a companion, if you just tell the truth, it really is worth giving everything else up.

02:31:00 Speaker_03
So why did you sell the ranch?

02:31:02 Speaker_02
Because I felt like it was time, like I'm following this energy through the world. And I had written a novel about a woman who goes into the forest of California and has all these experiences.

02:31:13 Speaker_02
And then I was going to write a sequel that happens in the eastern forest, the little piece of the eastern ancient forest that still survived.

02:31:21 Speaker_02
It was going to be about a plague that affected New York City, so I moved to a little patch of the ancient eastern forest in Pennsylvania, and then there was a plague that affected New York City.

02:31:32 Speaker_02
I'm writing the sequel now, but I go through life tracking and saying, I have a ranch now, I'm a rancher. No, I don't know. I could sell this house and move tomorrow if I felt like I should, and I would.

02:31:48 Speaker_03
Okay, so what was the, if you flash back to the day or the week or the conversation or the walk in which you're like, I'm done, no more ranch. What did that look like?

02:32:03 Speaker_02
Oh, it was much more gentle than that. It was like a death. It was like an animal dying. Have you ever had to put down a dog?

02:32:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, unfortunately, yes.

02:32:14 Speaker_02
Unfortunately, and yet, it's such a clean pain, right? Death in nature is not the horror we make it. Death in nature is this deep gratitude for physical experience and then this profound release of the physical form of what you loved.

02:32:34 Speaker_02
And it teaches you how to die. And when you really know how to die, then you can live without any fear. And I felt the ranch dying for me, and something else coming to life. And I grieved.

02:32:49 Speaker_03
How did that feel? Just because I think that might sound hard to grasp for some folks.

02:32:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, it is. I know.

02:32:54 Speaker_03
Yeah. So what does that feel like?

02:32:57 Speaker_02
It was, this was exactly the place I was supposed to be. And now, well, Liz said it in Eat, Pray, Love, now it is time for something that is beautiful to change into something else that is beautiful.

02:33:07 Speaker_02
And I knew that if I stayed there, the beauty of it would decay. Because the real beauty, it's like I said to myself in that month of my Right Hemisphere stuff, it's not about the picture I'm painting, it's not about the painting, it's about painting.

02:33:21 Speaker_02
It's about the process of being in continuous creative response to whatever is present. that state of mind. And it said, buy a ranch, so I bought. I literally, on my 50th birthday, spent every penny I had on a ranch, and six years later, I sold it.

02:33:37 Speaker_02
And you know something great? We had a wonderful massage therapist who used to come out and work on people there. And she'd have her massage table in her car, but I'm sure she was living kind of paycheck to paycheck or hand to mouth.

02:33:49 Speaker_02
When we decided to leave, she inherited a whole bunch of money and bought the ranch.

02:33:54 Speaker_03
That's wild.

02:33:56 Speaker_02
And Boyd loves her. We all love her.

02:33:58 Speaker_03
That's amazing.

02:33:59 Speaker_02
Yeah. And then this place, there were wild turkeys and deer and everything. And the place we came here, first thing that happened when I saw this house was a whole flock of wild turkeys walked out of the forest. And I've never seen them since.

02:34:13 Speaker_02
It was just like I was being welcomed. You know how Londa Losey is. Nature is like that everywhere. And that's why it's worth it to tell the truth and let people hate you. because nature loves you when you tell the truth.

02:34:28 Speaker_02
And it tells you to go places and have adventures. I just went to Costa Rica. We didn't see any monkeys for six days. So I went and I energetically called monkeys. I know it's stupid. We got mobbed by monkeys.

02:34:43 Speaker_02
They were everywhere until my son got scared of them and I had to ask them to leave with my mind.

02:34:51 Speaker_03
The Monkey Whisperer. I don't see that in your bio.

02:34:54 Speaker_02
I haven't gotten around to it. It was just last week.

02:34:57 Speaker_03
Oh, wait. No, here it is on your LinkedIn. There you go. That's right. Okay.

02:35:00 Speaker_02
Yeah. I mean, life is full of wildness.

02:35:03 Speaker_03
2020 to present. Monkey Whispering Inc. Yeah. I like it. Monkeys also, look, I mean, all of the fables about monkeys, there's something to it. Those beautiful creatures can also be mischievous rat bastards.

02:35:16 Speaker_02
Scary animals. They are scary. Oh, my God. Boyd's stories about baboons are the most hilarious.

02:35:23 Speaker_03
Oh, baboons are especially terrifying. Yeah. Oh, boy. I was listening. You know, it's funny you mentioned baboons. I was literally listening to recordings from La Delosie two days ago.

02:35:33 Speaker_03
I shouldn't have done it right before bed because I had some terrifying dreams. But listening to baboon alarm calls. Yeah, don't listen to baboon. Don't listen to baboon alarm calls right before you go to bed.

02:35:46 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not good.

02:35:47 Speaker_03
Novice mistake. Don't do that. But yeah, Costa Rica. Were they spider monkeys? Howlers?

02:35:53 Speaker_02
What did you say? No, they were capuchins.

02:35:54 Speaker_03
Oh, nice. They're cute.

02:35:56 Speaker_02
Yeah. And scary, just a little.

02:35:58 Speaker_03
And they can get a little scary. Well, Martha, we've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to chat about before we land the plane for this first conversation?

02:36:11 Speaker_02
This might sound so yarfy, but I just, I'm really grateful for you and for the life you've lived and for your differences and how you've pushed them. And then you've given them to the world just so generously and completely.

02:36:30 Speaker_02
And you've given me so much time today. And I feel an enormous joy and, okay, I love your presence, your energy, your being. I am awash in wonder the way I am when I'm in nature and I meet a really interesting creature. Thank you.

02:36:52 Speaker_03
Thank you so much. I've been a fan from afar for a long time, so it's really nice to finally connect. And Boyd has been sort of patiently waiting, I guess, for me to make the connection I've wanted to do for quite a while.

02:37:06 Speaker_03
And this story is certainly that he tells. Now we've gotten to pay him back with stories about Boyd. He can't defend himself.

02:37:13 Speaker_02
We should all hang out and make some more stories because I will tell you one thing. If you go wherever you feel you're supposed to go to maximize your joy, your adventures just increase.

02:37:24 Speaker_03
Yeah. I feel like I'm in a liminal phase right now between one thing and the next. There's probably quite a bit running in parallel, but I'm excited. I have no idea what that next big thing is.

02:37:37 Speaker_02
in some traditional cultures and like Europe, for example, tribal Europe before civilization, the threshold is the place of magic because it's not one place or another. And when you're on it, you're not anyone anywhere. You're a liminal phase.

02:37:53 Speaker_02
is the place where you're completely unformed, but that's why it's a place you can do magic. So maybe you should just stay in the liminal phase. Hang out here.

02:38:02 Speaker_03
Hang out in the waiting room for a little bit.

02:38:05 Speaker_02
Learn some magic.

02:38:07 Speaker_03
Yeah, the customs office between territories. Yeah, the boundary walking. I enjoy just walking on it as opposed to crossing over it. So maybe I'll hang out here for a bit.

02:38:18 Speaker_02
That's where the shamans live.

02:38:22 Speaker_03
Trixie Trixie Shamans, yes.

02:38:24 Speaker_02
The monkeys of the human race.

02:38:27 Speaker_03
Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's for sure. When you're like, why did so many cultures murder so many shamans? You're like, well, you know, they can be rascals. They can be very Trixie.

02:38:38 Speaker_03
There is a really fun book, just you may have already come across this, but Trickster Makes This World. or Made This World by Lewis Hyde. Fascinating, really fun book if people want to get into trickster mythology. And of course, it's tricky.

02:38:55 Speaker_03
And of course, how these archetypes are present in all of us and some more so than others. But I've been spending more and more time with mythology. There's a lot there.

02:39:04 Speaker_02
If you stay in the liminal phase and tell the truth all the time, instead of being tricksy, if you learn the magic and tell the truth, you have to use it in ways that are for good and not evil. Yeah, yeah.

02:39:16 Speaker_02
And that is like, I think maybe that's what we're supposed to. We're all humans are supposed to do that. I don't know. Byron Katie does it.

02:39:25 Speaker_03
And by Trixie, I don't mean necessarily bad. I just mean Trixie.

02:39:29 Speaker_02
Really Trixie.

02:39:30 Speaker_03
Probably doesn't help very much. But I mean, if you look at like Coyote or Raven or any number of... Anansi. Exactly. These trickster deities, it's like usually they are incredible creators. They've stolen something from the gods.

02:39:47 Speaker_03
and bestowed it to humans. They've done a lot of good, and they're constantly getting themselves into trouble.

02:39:53 Speaker_02
Constantly. Oh, it's just a nightmare.

02:39:57 Speaker_03
Yeah. So I'm going to try to avoid some of the trouble, but I think there's some liminal mischief that might be right on the doorstep that could be fun to explore. So we'll see where that goes.

02:40:09 Speaker_02
I want to hear about that.

02:40:10 Speaker_03
Yeah, it might be a show don't tell kind of situation. So that'll be my show and tell. We'll see where it goes. But it's been such a pleasure to spend time with you today.

02:40:19 Speaker_03
Thank you again for taking the time and your recent book is The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self.

02:40:26 Speaker_03
New York Times bestseller, Oprah's book club selection, and I found your thinking on integrity and your writing on integrity incredibly powerful. Your upcoming book is Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose.

02:40:40 Speaker_03
That is forthcoming, so people have that to look forward to. And they can find you in all things Martha Beck, I would imagine, at MarthaBeck.com. And the Martha Beck is your account on Facebook, Instagram, et cetera.

02:40:57 Speaker_03
And we'll link to all these things in the show notes for everybody at Tim.blog.com slash podcast. So we'll put everything in one place, including everything we talked about.

02:41:03 Speaker_03
And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to bake some conversational cake with you today.

02:41:12 Speaker_02
I love the cakes you make. Let's make more someday. Yeah, let's make more. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to get to know you and also to be on the podcast in that order.

02:41:25 Speaker_03
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. My pleasure entirely. And for everybody listening, as usual, I mentioned where you can find the show notes. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Don't forget the last part.

02:41:40 Speaker_03
And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:41:54 Speaker_03
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

02:42:03 Speaker_03
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:42:13 Speaker_03
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:42:25 Speaker_03
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:42:40 Speaker_03
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

02:42:52 Speaker_03
I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas, and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says, not available in your current location, something like that.

02:43:04 Speaker_03
Or, creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me, I search for something, or I type in a URL incorrectly, and then a screen for AT&T pops up, and it says, you might be searching for this, how about that?

02:43:18 Speaker_03
And it suggests an alternative, and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously.

02:43:32 Speaker_03
That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now. And I recommend you check it out.

02:43:39 Speaker_03
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02:43:50 Speaker_03
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02:44:01 Speaker_03
Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address.

02:44:04 Speaker_03
Also with the example that I gave of you can't access this kind or that content wherever you happen to be then you just set your server to a country where you can see it and all of a sudden voila you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to .UK or whatever.

02:44:19 Speaker_03
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Just go to ExpressVPN, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, ExpressVPN.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Momentus.

02:45:33 Speaker_03
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02:45:43 Speaker_03
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02:46:07 Speaker_03
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02:46:31 Speaker_03
So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently and to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now back to the bigger picture.

02:46:44 Speaker_03
Olympians, Tour de France winners, the U.S. military and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentus and their products.

02:46:54 Speaker_03
Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market. including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett.

02:47:05 Speaker_03
They also work with Dr. Stacey Sims to assist Momentus in developing products specifically for women.

02:47:11 Speaker_03
Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else.

02:47:22 Speaker_03
And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, That is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-U.S. listeners, more good news, not to worry.

02:47:35 Speaker_03
Momentous ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off.

02:47:45 Speaker_03
That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off.