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Episode: #767: Tim and Uncle Jerry Tackle Life, Big Questions, Business, Parenting, and Disco Duck

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 01:43:13

Episode Shownotes

Here is my brand-new conversation with Jerry Colonna, CEO and co-founder of Reboot.io, an executive coaching and leadership development firm dedicated to the notion that better humans make better leaders. He is the author of Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up and Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to

Belong. Enjoy!This episode is brought to you by:The League curated dating app for busy, high-performing people: https://click.theleague.com/qmhm/timferriss; available on iOS and AndroidEight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 1B+ users: https://linkedin.com/tim (post your job for free)*[00:00] Start [08:40] “How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” and its misinterpretations.[21:55] Recharging off the grid on sabbatical.[24:41] Is a tired dog a happy dog?[29:21] What are you hearing that’s not being said?[33:14] Closing transgenerational, transpersonal, and intergenerational wounds.[44:05] Focusing on the future when the past keeps pulling us back.[52:18] Changes in challenges Reboot’s clients have faced over the past decade.[55:34] Guilt vs. remorse and how to move from one to the other.[1:01:40] Interpretations of legacy.[1:13:17] Jerry’s parenting experience and advice.[1:19:02] My thoughts on having children and grandchildren.[1:24:54] “This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin.[1:26:08] Book recommendations and their impact on Jerry and his children.[1:28:46] Novel truths.[1:32:40] The importance of laughter and human connection in difficult times.[1:35:45] 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_02
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferriss welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to interview them and tease out the habits routines favorite books and so on that you can apply to your own lives.

00:00:14 Speaker_02
Sometimes I get not just a two for one but a hundred for one when I interview someone who also helps world class performers in addition to being such themselves.

00:00:24 Speaker_02
to get past sticking points to redefine themselves to reinvent themselves to chart new paths forward and my guest today jerry colonna is such a person he is the ceo and co-founder of reboot.io and executive coaching and leadership development firm dedicated to the notion that better humans make better leaders but prior to that.

00:00:43 Speaker_02
He was an operator in many different ways prior to being a coach he was a partner with jp morgan partners the private equity arm of jp morgan chase

00:00:51 Speaker_02
he also led new york city based flat iron partners which he founded in nineteen ninety six with partner fred wilson flat iron went on to become one of the nation's most successful early stage investment programs at age twenty five years editor in chief information week magazine is written bunch of books will mention them at the end of the conversation but what is reboot the other is reunion both highly recommended you can find his company reboot at reboot dot i.

00:01:16 Speaker_02
Oh, and Jerry on Twitter and Instagram at Jerry Colonna, C-O-L-L-O-N-N-A. And he has been on the podcast twice before. He is a fan favorite. People always take a ton away from our conversations.

00:01:29 Speaker_02
And I recap some of my favorite aspects of those in this episode. And we cover a lot of ground. There are a lot of stories I've never heard. We have a lot of laughs, almost a few cries on my side.

00:01:44 Speaker_02
We dig into his toolkit, the questions that he uses with himself and with clients that I have adopted as some of my favorites. There is a lot to learn and it was a hell of an enjoyable conversation.

00:01:56 Speaker_02
It was a walk and talk and I have done this before where I am out in nature today. It is a beautiful bluebird sky day in the mountains and to sit in a dark room.

00:02:07 Speaker_02
staring at a screen seemed like an insult to nature, complete travesty, totally unnecessary. So I have high fidelity recording equipment. That is what I'm using right now. It is a headset.

00:02:17 Speaker_02
I am sitting 10 feet from a beautiful river where I'm watching the eddies swirl around rocks. So why not? Get out and move. If you can listen to this while you're moving, I encourage you to do so. Audio is a secondary activity.

00:02:32 Speaker_02
So if you can walk and talk or walk and listen while I'm walking and talking, all the better for you, me, everybody involved. So hopefully that all makes sense.

00:02:42 Speaker_02
But without further ado, please enjoy a wide ranging conversation, a very tactical, practical and also funny conversation with Jerry Colonna. But first, a few quick words from the fine sponsors who make this show possible.

00:02:56 Speaker_02
I use all of their products, so this is not me just shilling. I've tried it all, I've vetted it all, and here they are. Okay, this is going to be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating.

00:03:13 Speaker_02
What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know. I've tried all the dating apps, and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League.

00:03:27 Speaker_02
Why did I end up using the League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On the League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to.

00:03:40 Speaker_02
It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with.

00:03:49 Speaker_02
So more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work and that is one of the reasons that I use it.

00:04:01 Speaker_02
Second, people verify using LinkedIn. So you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together.

00:04:10 Speaker_02
It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this.

00:04:21 Speaker_02
So, for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests, as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountains guy.

00:04:32 Speaker_02
The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So, you can search by interest and specify multiple cities.

00:04:41 Speaker_02
So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out, features available on the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from co-workers, bosses, family, etc. That's very easy to do.

00:04:54 Speaker_02
You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for?

00:05:06 Speaker_02
I am looking for a woman who is well-educated and who loves skiing or snowboarding, or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important, so I'll leave it at that for now.

00:05:18 Speaker_02
Someone who is default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years.

00:05:28 Speaker_02
Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women. not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea.

00:05:37 Speaker_02
It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag Date Tim, so hashtag Date Tim, in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up.

00:05:50 Speaker_02
So these are all reasons why I was excited when The League reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three-minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch.

00:06:03 Speaker_02
So check it out. Download The League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating.

00:06:13 Speaker_02
You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download The League today on iOS or Android and check it out.

00:06:23 Speaker_02
Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. So check it out, The League. on iOS or Android. Pod 4 Ultra, it cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically.

00:06:58 Speaker_02
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00:08:11 Speaker_02
They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

00:08:22 Speaker_01
Can I ask you a personal question? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

00:08:41 Speaker_02
I was so pleased with how much from our prior conversations has stuck with me.

00:08:46 Speaker_02
I just wanted to tell you that and also to ask you, is there anything that you have repeated or shared that to you is the equivalent of a four-hour workweek in terms of being the blessing and the curse that you just can't seem to shake?

00:09:01 Speaker_02
for better or for worse, because I know we're going to talk about legacy. But specifically, I'm wondering, is there a point when you get tired of hearing some of your own profound questions echoed back to you? Specifically, can you guess which one?

00:09:17 Speaker_05
Have I been complicit? Yes. Yes. I don't get so tired of it. I will tell you that I get tired of the misinterpretation that goes along with that. OK.

00:09:30 Speaker_02
Would you mind laying out the context of this question? What is the question? And then we'd love to hear you expand on misinterpretations of the question.

00:09:41 Speaker_05
So what is the question or what was the conditions that caused me to ask that question initially of myself?

00:09:48 Speaker_02
Let's do the question because we covered... Actually, you know what?

00:09:52 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:09:53 Speaker_02
Let's rewind the clock all the way. Let's do both. And for people who are like, what the hell are they going on about? This is a question that I revisit a lot. Maybe I'm revisiting it the wrong way. So we will find out shortly.

00:10:05 Speaker_02
But yes, if you could just explain the Genesis story, then the formation of the question, and then how people misinterpret it, if that order makes sense to you, that would be, I think, a great place to start.

00:10:16 Speaker_05
And the Genesis story, the origin story isn't that complicated. You know, if we go back in time to my mid-30s, when I was a Prince of New York and a former VC and totally fucked up as an individual, I was knee deep in the first decade.

00:10:36 Speaker_05
I'm now in my fourth decade of psychoanalysis. And I had a very tough-as-nails, nice Jewish lady psychoanalyst named Dr. Sayers.

00:10:49 Speaker_05
And what she taught me repeatedly, endlessly, boxing my ears when she'd say this is, how have you been complicit in creating these conditions you complain so much about? And you have to picture it, right? I'm lying on the couch.

00:11:08 Speaker_05
There's this, you know, old Jewish lady who's 30 years older than me, who's just basically had it with me, complaining.

00:11:18 Speaker_05
And so, the roots of the question are really a kind of an exasperation, not just from my analyst to me, but eventually with me about me.

00:11:32 Speaker_05
And it was really only by taking that question, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want, that there was a massive unlock for me. Now, you asked about the misinterpretation.

00:11:49 Speaker_05
The first level of misinterpretation that people go through is that they assume I'm saying, how have I been responsible? And I am very, very particular. I get very, very angry when people misinterpret the word complicit for responsible.

00:12:07 Speaker_05
And it's not because I want to let people off the hook, but quite the opposite. I want people to understand that they've been an accomplice. Here's the thing, Tim, when we get into our mindset that says, I am responsible for all the shit in my life,

00:12:24 Speaker_05
we're actually walking away from doing the hard work. Could you expand on that?

00:12:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, sure, because guilt is a defense mechanism. Right, because some people might say, well, that's extreme ownership. As I say, I'm responsible for all the shit. Exactly. That's the beginning of the solution, but where do they take a wrong turn?

00:12:43 Speaker_05
So I like the kind of ownership. I like the word ownership. I don't like the word responsibility. And the reason for that is because, and the reason I think it can be a defense mechanism, is because it can be an old structure.

00:12:59 Speaker_05
So many people that I encounter, myself included, spend our childhood pendulating between grandiosity and a sense of worthlessness. I'm either shit or I am the best. You got rid of that in your childhood?

00:13:15 Speaker_04
Man, good for you.

00:13:16 Speaker_05
Well, I got rid of it in my adulthood. This is the point, dude. I got rid of it by actually asking the right questions of myself.

00:13:28 Speaker_05
If the word complicit is replaced with the words even extreme ownership, the danger is that I tip over into misunderstanding what actually has been going on, and I end up in this zone of being responsible for everything.

00:13:47 Speaker_05
And the truth is, it's much more complex than that.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
I was just thinking that you're referring to a pendulum and that not taking any responsibility for anything is one example of sort of absolving yourself of the hard work. But I never thought of the opposite.

00:14:06 Speaker_02
If you're accepting that anything and everything bad that happens is your responsibility slash fault. it puts you in a similar position, it seems. Exactly.

00:14:18 Speaker_05
The position it puts you in is unable to actually, with discernment, diagnose what's really going on. And you know what? You don't get to transform stuff if you don't really know what's going on.

00:14:33 Speaker_05
And so to understand what's really happening for you, you have to understand what your role is and what it isn't.

00:14:43 Speaker_02
So how do you walk, say, a client through answering that question well? How are you complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don't want, or the conditions of your lives in your lives that you say you don't want?

00:14:57 Speaker_02
How do you walk them through their rough draft of trying to answer that?

00:15:02 Speaker_05
Okay, so the unlock on the question is the second half of the question which people skip. You say you don't want. So give me an example from your own life, Tim. What do you say you don't want?

00:15:16 Speaker_02
Oh man, how much time do we have? I have become better at this, so I'm not dodging the question, but I would say probably some form of busyness.

00:15:30 Speaker_02
I've got this and I'm over-scheduled and I've got this and that and the other thing that is imposing on what maybe I say I want, which is more locked out space for writing or making.

00:15:44 Speaker_05
Right, so you say, Mr. Four-Hour Workweek, I don't want to work more than four hours a week. Nice turn, nice turn. I think you said that to me in the first conversation.

00:15:57 Speaker_05
Right, so you say you want to be so efficient and so productive that you get everything done that you want to get done so that you have time to play, take care of yourself, wear Breathe Right strips as you talk to me, right? This kind of thing.

00:16:14 Speaker_02
Right? Okay. Just a quick sidebar. Breathe Right, this one's on me. Next time, you got to sponsor the podcast.

00:16:26 Speaker_05
I could recognize them because I'm a breathe right user. I used them to sleep at night. Oh my God. And we would, we would both like a lifetime supply. So feel free. Okay. So you say you don't want to be so busy. Right.

00:16:43 Speaker_05
And you were asking, how do I walk a client through to understand the role of complicity? Right. In this regard. So,

00:16:53 Speaker_02
How does it feel when you're not busy? I would say, and I don't want to steal your thunder here, but since I'm cheating with a cheat sheet, right? It's your show. So it's your thunder. And action.

00:17:09 Speaker_02
So segueing to a compliment or maybe a necessary component of the first question, how are you complicit in creating conditions that you say you don't want, which is in what ways does that complicity serve you?

00:17:21 Speaker_02
Okay, so to answer your question and that at the same time, I would say probably, and this is almost a certainty, looking back at some of the scariest depressive episodes in my life, it's when I had a lot of empty space.

00:17:38 Speaker_02
And there's an underlying fear

00:17:41 Speaker_02
Even though I haven't experienced anything close to that magnitude of desperation and darkness in a very long time, there is a fear that if I create a void, that is the voice, that is the narrative that is going to come to dominate my thoughts.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
I would say that therefore, my complicity serves me by avoiding that.

00:18:05 Speaker_05
Right. And so, if you really want to transform, when will you be comfortable with the void? That's a good question.

00:18:14 Speaker_02
And in my defense, your honor, I will say that I'm about to go off the grid for a week starting this Friday. So in a few days, I'll be going completely off the grid, no phone, no nothing for a period of time.

00:18:30 Speaker_02
So I have injected these periods, but let's get into the messy stuff for a second since life is rarely as much of a randomized control trial as you would like.

00:18:40 Speaker_02
I've had an ongoing number of chats with friends and WhatsApp and different messaging platforms and it's been around taking breaks, creating space, chilling out, right? So a lot of these friends of mine.

00:18:57 Speaker_02
have passed every hurdle and objective they could have had. And the goalposts keep moving, right?

00:19:03 Speaker_02
They wanted to make a million, and then it was 10, and then it was 20, and then once it gets indefensible, then it's like, what's your annual compounded growth rate?

00:19:13 Speaker_02
And this then turns into percentages because they can't even with a straight face defend the rest of it. What they claim to want and what they believe I need is to chill out, take a break, create all this space.

00:19:27 Speaker_02
My experience is as social animals or at least as a person who benefits from social interaction, I do best around other people. I just do. And there are, it's not 100%, but it's not 0%.

00:19:42 Speaker_02
There's a risk that I do return to some of those dark places or dark narratives. It's not zero. So I struggle to answer the question of like when can I allow space because I do it in small doses, sometimes larger doses. I took almost all of October

00:19:59 Speaker_02
last year off the grid, so perhaps you can help me to find my way to answering the question you posed.

00:20:07 Speaker_05
You know, look, Tim, I feel like Uncle Jerry in that we speak every few years, and every few years, my, how you've grown. I know you don't feel that way because you're in your body.

00:20:19 Speaker_05
But when we first started talking, which was years and years ago, this was a big struggle for you. This was a tremendous struggle.

00:20:27 Speaker_05
And there was a sense that you might miss out, there was a sense of like you being falling behind in some sort of weird little race. are raised to the top.

00:20:38 Speaker_05
And I think the speed with which you're able to go right to the fear of the void, what Blaise Pascal identified when he said that all of man's problems stem from their inability to sit alone in a room.

00:20:54 Speaker_05
You know, I think you've got, like a lot of us, you've got a component of that. And I also want to say I'm watching you letting go of the need to turn that void time into productivity time, right?

00:21:12 Speaker_05
When I first started promoting the notion of sabbatical, which we've talked about in the past, I remember dealing with a client who would say, well, I'm going to learn Portuguese. It's like, no, you're not.

00:21:23 Speaker_05
You're not gonna learn Portuguese in four weeks, you know? You're going to learn to breathe without breathe right straps. You're going to, you know, you're just going to learn to enjoy yourself.

00:21:36 Speaker_05
Now, what I hear you doing is learning to enjoy yourself, which is a really powerful skill.

00:21:46 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be a lifelong project, which is okay. A lot of things are lifelong projects. That's right.

00:21:55 Speaker_05
We got here because you were asking about that process and this is the process. Right? This is the process. So for you, when you're off the grid starting Friday, you know, what will that experience be like for you?

00:22:11 Speaker_05
At what point might you be anxious and at what point might you start to relax? Cause are you going to be with friends this trip too?

00:22:19 Speaker_02
This particular example may not fit the exercise, but what I've done for the last handful of years is every year I do a past year review rather than setting, let's just say blind, semi-uninformed, overly optimistic New Year's resolutions.

00:22:36 Speaker_02
I look back at the past year and figure out what the highs and lows looked like if I were to do an 80-20 analysis. Places, people, activities, the most life-giving and the most life-draining, and then I schedule time as soon as possible

00:22:52 Speaker_02
in blocks of one week, two weeks, depending on availability, to spend time with energy and people doing energy and things, right? And this particular week off the grid is going to be an alpine elk hunt, which I do once every two years or so.

00:23:09 Speaker_02
with Bo at probably between 10,000 and 12,000 feet for most of it. It's going to get cold, we're going to be eating a lot of shitty freeze-dried fruit, hopefully a bunch of trout en route to finding elk.

00:23:26 Speaker_02
I have just found that particular experience and the time dilation that it allows to feel like a month off or two months off. It is just so regenerative for me that it's become a core piece of my

00:23:42 Speaker_02
annual planning, not necessarily a hunt, but that type of shared experience with a small, very small group of people. So that's what that will look like.

00:23:50 Speaker_02
And I, in a sense, I don't want to say I'm disallowing myself from feeling discomfort because there's going to be incredible discomfort physically. Sleep is probably not going to be fantastic.

00:24:05 Speaker_02
and we will be very, very, very active, but it's not the same as doing a silent retreat and sitting there watching your monkey brain just contort itself for 16 hours a day.

00:24:21 Speaker_05
It's the kind of retreat where layers of your skin are stripped away because you're so raw and rugged out in the world, and that's just gonna drop you into your body and drop you more and more into the land.

00:24:37 Speaker_05
And that's a place of nourishment for you, for sure.

00:24:41 Speaker_02
Yeah, let me ask you if I could, how often do you find with your clients or your team find with their clients that the fixes in the body or in something physical versus in the mind, even though the symptoms

00:25:03 Speaker_02
permeate both because the Cartesian separation of mind and body is ridiculous. It's not a thing.

00:25:11 Speaker_02
And the reason I ask is that for me, let's just say taking a trip like this, it is such a restorative reminder of how what I want and need is simple and right in front of me. But that comes

00:25:27 Speaker_02
through, for me at least, often, not always, but physical movement, sometimes physical hardship, where, as they say in dog training, a tired dog is a happy dog.

00:25:41 Speaker_05
I think humans are pretty similar. Well, we're both mammals, right? Yeah. You asked how often. I would say 95% of the time. Wow. I would say you're finding your way. I'm older than you, Tim, so I get to be the wise one.

00:25:58 Speaker_05
But you're finding your way to that really inherent wisdom. And my take on the Cartesian Descartes notion is, instead of it being, I think, therefore I am, I am, therefore I think. And that's where all the problems begin.

00:26:16 Speaker_05
You know, what you're really talking about is getting into the essence of your existence. The only cautionary note that I would sound is when we start to invade the productive thinking into that tired dog.

00:26:39 Speaker_05
effort, meaning I'm going to do this so that I, I mean, the worst case is I'm going to do this so that I lose weight, or I'm going to do this so that I can look better, or I'm going to do this so that I can, I don't know, quiet some negative self-thought.

00:26:58 Speaker_05
And I think you're beyond that. But I would say to those listening, what I have found is when I can let go of even those things and just get dog-tired,

00:27:09 Speaker_02
then I'm happiest, for sure. It was definitely possible to sort of run towards things, run away from things, and I think with

00:27:19 Speaker_02
athletics movement it's not necessarily a condemnation to be wanting to quiet something because you may just have too much inherent physical energy and it has nowhere to has no vehicle through which to dissipate so it just creates the

00:27:41 Speaker_02
Kind of devil on your shoulder, creating all these fairy tales to drive you insane. And I do think that quieting that by dissipating the energy through exercise makes a whole lot of sense.

00:27:53 Speaker_02
But if there's a persistent problem that you're trying to avoid that requires attention, then it's a different matter altogether.

00:28:02 Speaker_05
Let's just agree that bypassing is not a good strategy. I mean, it is important to take a vacation. And that wise old analyst, Dr. Sayers, used to say to me all the time, enough, Jerry, you figured it out. Now go take a break.

00:28:19 Speaker_05
But it gives you insight in what was going on in that session room. But it's really important that we let go of those things that are driving us. And that's not bypassing. When you go on this elk hunt,

00:28:37 Speaker_05
I mean, maybe you're avoiding the conversation that you're supposed to be having, you know, to use one of my other questions. Maybe you're not saying the thing that you need to say.

00:28:48 Speaker_05
But I suspect at this point, what it's doing is it's giving you the ability to come back to the stuff that you've had to confront, but it's giving you some ground to stand on so that you can confront the things that you need to confront.

00:29:03 Speaker_02
That's how I feel. And it's also planned so far in advance at this point that it's not a reactive, it's proactively basically injecting turbo boosters on my physical and mental well-being so that I can bring that back to everything else.

00:29:22 Speaker_02
And you mentioned a few things just a moment ago that I just want to reiterate for folks. This, I believe, maybe, the same therapist, could be a different one, taught you these questions to ask when in existential pain.

00:29:39 Speaker_02
What am I not saying that needs to be said? What am I saying that's not being heard? What's being said that I'm not hearing? Am I getting that right?

00:29:47 Speaker_05
That, sorry, well, she taught me the first question, and it was, again, in a moment of exasperation when I had been hospitalized with a really terrible migraine.

00:29:59 Speaker_05
and spent a week going through neurological tests only to find out that there was nothing physiologically wrong with me. And in the first session back, she looked at me and she said, what are you not saying that you need to say? You need to talk more.

00:30:17 Speaker_05
So when you see those questions, please hear that voice. I'll add, by the way, that those questions have sort of bounded around the internet the way a lot of my questions do. And one woman wrote back and said, here's another one.

00:30:31 Speaker_05
What are you hearing that's actually not being said?

00:30:35 Speaker_00
That's a good one. That's a really good one.

00:30:39 Speaker_02
That should be on my bathroom mirror. That's right. But, you know, you hearing that. Oh, that's good. That's really good.

00:30:47 Speaker_05
Because, boy, oh, boy, do we tell ourselves stories, eh?

00:30:51 Speaker_05
What we're getting at in all four of the questions and really in much of this conversation is the importance of not bullshitting yourself, the importance of not bypassing what's really going on for you.

00:31:05 Speaker_05
And I have found in my 61 years now that that is also a lifelong practice, that my capacity to bullshit myself continues unabated.

00:31:20 Speaker_05
And no matter how progressive I think I am and evolved, I think I am, my ability to be deluded by my own mind knows no end. So I have come to see that as just a part of the human condition.

00:31:37 Speaker_05
Maybe when I'm as old as my friend Parker Palmer, who's 86, I'll have the wisdom of not being able to bullshit myself.

00:31:46 Speaker_02
Parker Palmer, also the author of one of your favorite books, I believe, Let Your Life Speak. I'm getting that right. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus.

00:32:04 Speaker_02
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00:33:14 Speaker_02
I want to overlay a few more questions that can be used that I took note of when I was reviewing our past conversations that I really like I guess it often isn't conscious bullshitting, right, where we know we're lying to ourselves.

00:33:48 Speaker_02
It may just be a really compelling narrative that isn't true, right? We're hearing something that isn't being said. So one is, no, really, how are you doing? Not just how are you doing, but like, no, really, how are you doing?

00:34:00 Speaker_02
And then the little trick of asking people if they want their kids to feel the same thing that they're feeling when they get to be the same age. And if they don't, it prompts them to start reorganizing their lives.

00:34:13 Speaker_02
And so I'll start with a whip, I'm next to a river. Such things happen. And there are more, of course, but what I was curious to ask you is, I'll segue into this by way of an anecdote. There's a amazing, fascinating sage man named Bill Richards.

00:34:30 Speaker_02
And Bill Richards wrote a book called Sacred Knowledge. He is a religious man, and also I think he may be an ordained minister, something along those lines.

00:34:40 Speaker_02
He also has the distinction of having administered hundreds and hundreds of psychedelic assisted therapy sessions, both before and after Prohibition. And last time I spent time with him, he kind of looked like Santa Claus.

00:34:53 Speaker_02
Amazing big white beard, kind of jolly old elf type of feeling, always smiling with a little twinkle in his eye. And I spent some time with him probably eight years ago, something like that, near Johns Hopkins, where he's done a lot of work.

00:35:12 Speaker_02
And I was asking him some question about doing the work, right? This is a phrase that comes up a lot in personal development circles, dealing with your shadow self and X, Y, and Z. It can take a million different forms, doing the work.

00:35:26 Speaker_02
And he said something to me that has stuck ever since, and it was along the lines of, well, you know the tricky part about doing the work? And I was like, I don't. What's the tricky part?

00:35:35 Speaker_02
He's like, there's a very thin line between doing the work and just picking on yourself. And he said a few things to me that day where afterwards I was like, fuck, I just thought it was funny, but there's actually a lot to unpack there.

00:35:52 Speaker_02
And how do you help clients or how do you think about helping people to distinguish between the two right because there can be a degree of like trauma fetishizing and past fetishizing where people are doing everything and anything to just revisit

00:36:11 Speaker_02
every mishap of childhood, every mistake their parents made, and the dose makes the poison, right? And it seems like Paracelsus said so long ago, not in English, obviously. And how do you think about navigating that?

00:36:27 Speaker_05
I think it's a brilliant question, and I think it's something I probably, as I've slip-slided my way into elderhood, have begun to finally let go of in my own life.

00:36:42 Speaker_05
And so when I think about supporting other people, what comes to mind is really, I mean, think about the way Bill responded to you. Think about the way Dr. Sayers would respond to me.

00:36:58 Speaker_05
Think about, you know, I think about the conversations I have with my elder friend, Parker, it's always laced with humor, and it's the humor that cuts through it. Humor, forgiveness, and not in this kind of, I don't know, self-development book.

00:37:22 Speaker_05
bullshit self-forgiveness thing that's out there, but genuine care and concern. I mean, I'll give you an example.

00:37:32 Speaker_05
I wrote a book that came out last year called Reunion, and part of that journey was really reuniting, to use language from the book, with the parts of myself that I had disowned. But more importantly, my ancestors.

00:37:50 Speaker_05
And in this case, I went into a relationship with my father. Now, my father died 32 years ago. And in unpacking his story, what I came to have a new relationship with was his own depression, his own alcoholism.

00:38:16 Speaker_05
And I unpack, you know, to spoil the plot, my dad was on his wedding day. His mother was so angry at him for marrying my mother that she screamed from the back of the church, putana, putana, putana, whore, whore, whore.

00:38:36 Speaker_05
because my mother was pregnant at the time. And then she screamed out, you're not my son. You were adopted. Jesus. And that's how my father, yeah, that's how my father found out he was adopted.

00:38:50 Speaker_05
And I grew up, as we've discussed before, my mother was mentally ill. My father's depression and alcoholism really marked my childhood. And I would say that I spent most of my life being angry with him. And this is to the point of the forgiveness.

00:39:12 Speaker_05
And I think that what happened was, in writing this book, I started to really step into his body. What would it be like to be 18 months old? Because it turned out that he was given up for adoption at 18 months old.

00:39:29 Speaker_05
And he was given up and raised by the only parents he knew, an Italian-American couple. And the reality is his biological mother was an Irish immigrant to New York who gave birth to him when she was 20. And I ended up in Ireland at her gravesite

00:39:53 Speaker_05
not only forgiving my father, but forgiving her. And I did that, I tell that story in this book, but more important, to your point, I think that that laughter came about from forgiveness, where now I actually can feel myself going, he wasn't so bad.

00:40:19 Speaker_05
He did the best he could. And he got a raw deal. And yeah, some of the things he did sucked, but not bad.

00:40:29 Speaker_02
Was that incremental, a hundred different realizations adding up over time, or were there any flashpoints where there were particular experiences or insights that covered the bulk of the traverse from anger to

00:40:51 Speaker_02
forgiveness or acceptance in the way that you just described it.

00:40:55 Speaker_05
It's interesting, because we were talking before about the physical being, the somaticized being. And, you know, there was a moment, but it wasn't an insight, meaning it wasn't a thought. And, you know, I talk about this as well.

00:41:10 Speaker_05
My youngest son is named Michael, and he was a junior in college. And he did a semester abroad in Dublin. And one week for my birthday, I went to Dublin to visit with him. And we went to visit. His girlfriend was there as well.

00:41:31 Speaker_05
She was also taking a semester abroad. And we went to visit the printing museum in Dublin. Printing. Printing. And we're walking through the museum, because we're freaking nerds looking at old print presses, right?

00:41:47 Speaker_05
And I'm explaining to him how the machine works. And, you know, he's looking at me like, oh, yeah, you're bullshitting me, dad. And it's like, no, no, no. My father worked in a print shop.

00:41:59 Speaker_05
I remember walking through the print shop and seeing molten lead flowing as they would refire lead type, and that the sparks would fly as they were doing this. I remember all of this from when I was a kid.

00:42:15 Speaker_05
And I was explaining all of this, and I look up and they have this replica copy of the equivalent of the Irish Republican Declaration of Independence.

00:42:27 Speaker_05
And it was actually at that moment that I had this profound visceral experience of my father, which was not an insight, right? It was, first of all, my father would have loved walking through the museum with his son and grandson.

00:42:44 Speaker_05
And all of a sudden I realized that the folks who had put up that poster originally and declared their independence were the kinfolk of my father. which is a very different and powerful word for me.

00:43:01 Speaker_05
And, you know, later, about a year later, when I was in the churchyard in the grave site and visiting my grandmother's grave, it's still weird to say this because I never knew her, and I was walking through this tiny little graveyard.

00:43:18 Speaker_05
I realized that I was surrounded by the bones of my kinfolk. And Tim, that was not an intellectual experience. That was not an insight. That was a viscerally felt experience.

00:43:34 Speaker_05
I look up and I see the light slanting through the trees and I swear to God, I felt like I could hear my grandmother at four years old running down the lane, you know? What a story.

00:43:48 Speaker_05
you know, to bring it all back, I feel like because of that experience, I closed a wound that was transgenerational, transpersonal, and intergenerational.

00:44:06 Speaker_02
This brought me to want to ask a few different questions and I'll first say that personally I've found tremendous value in metabolizing a number of things from the past.

00:44:18 Speaker_02
I've had some horrible things that happened to me as a small child so it seemed important for me to at one point contend with that or triage it, process it in some way. Now if I were to take

00:44:33 Speaker_02
Not necessarily devil's advocate position, but look at, for instance, many people I've interviewed on this podcast. There are some, and I'm probably misquoting, but it's not going to be too far off.

00:44:45 Speaker_02
I remember chatting with Mark Andreessen, one of the most storied, famous, and successful venture capitalists of our age, also an incredible technologist in his own right, and coder slash product developer, Mosaic, being among his achievements.

00:44:59 Speaker_02
He answered, it may have been, I think his billboard was raised prices, his billboard answers, so that's not it. But there was some type of, perhaps the question was related to if you had to live your life with one mantra, what would it be?

00:45:11 Speaker_02
And it was some version of forever forward. And he told this story of a character in a detective novel who has arrows tattooed on his shoulder pointing forward to remind him always forward.

00:45:26 Speaker_02
And many of the most effective people, I don't know if they're the most content people, I don't have that window into them, Have a philosophy along these lines. You can't change the past, you can change the future.

00:45:39 Speaker_02
Pay attention to your thoughts, behaviors, habits. Those all form your destiny moving forward. There's a very forward focused view. And it works for a lot of things. Then let's just say, on the opposite end of the spectrum,

00:45:53 Speaker_02
I'm sure there are very, very successful people who also spent a lot of time metabolizing the past. I know quite a number of them.

00:45:59 Speaker_02
But there are also folks who get so focused on the past, there are a lot of them in Austin, Texas where I live, that they don't really seem to be grappling with the present or the future particularly well. And they feel like their past is this

00:46:15 Speaker_02
unalterable, basically shaping of a sculpture they cannot undo on some level. They can't seem to escape the vortex, the gravitational pull of the narratives they have about their past.

00:46:27 Speaker_02
How do you help someone find the right blend of past focus versus present or future focus? I know that's a very, very long lead up to the question, but it's something I do think about a lot.

00:46:43 Speaker_05
I think that you are identifying a real challenge in the human existence, and I'll reframe it just slightly and take us back to the notion of bypassing. I can argue that those who are only forward-looking with no awareness of the past

00:47:04 Speaker_05
may be bypassing. As you know from your own experience, ignored trauma can stay in the body, can affect us forever.

00:47:19 Speaker_05
But the fear that many people have, and one of the reasons why we struggle to sit alone in a room is that we're afraid of our thoughts, and the thoughts are either about the future or the past that we're afraid of.

00:47:35 Speaker_05
Many people fear being trapped in the past. So your question is, how do you balance those two, which is a great framing of it. And I often think of the Carl Jung quote, which is, I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

00:47:52 Speaker_05
And I think that no one would ever accuse Carl Jung of ignoring the past, but seeing it as, if you will, the source material of what the future is.

00:48:05 Speaker_05
The reason we open the closet that is really fucking messy is so that we can straighten it up and close the closet door and move on.

00:48:15 Speaker_05
Because the stuff in the closet that's ignored and messy has a way of busting through the door and messing up our lives. So I think part of your question, too, is how do we get somebody who's stuck in the past to move forward?

00:48:31 Speaker_05
Is that a fair statement?

00:48:32 Speaker_02
Yes. Yes.

00:48:34 Speaker_02
I think that the trend seems to, at least in certain places, to have swung pretty extremely from the sort of Gordon Gekko, let's just say, pure machine with just enough reflection on the past to take advantage of new opportunities, but not much more.

00:48:56 Speaker_02
all the way back to sometimes what I would say very self-indulgent past reflection and oversharing and It's like, okay, you wrote the script, you're on your 247th read, right? Maybe it's time to stop.

00:49:12 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to parse things a little bit. Please. I don't feel comfortable criticizing someone for being, quote, for oversharing.

00:49:24 Speaker_05
Having grown up with the consequences of far too much silence and secret keeping, I know the detrimental effects of that. What I really liked, though, is your word overworking.

00:49:39 Speaker_05
And I keep thinking of like dough, bread dough, when bread dough is overworked. I was actually thinking of clay and playdough.

00:49:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, yeah.

00:49:46 Speaker_02
But then I chose to use the writing because I know it better.

00:49:48 Speaker_05
Yeah, there is that tendency to overwork it. What I have found to be helpful is a Buddhist aphorism, which I've used often, which is this being so, so what? And what's powerful about that, it's not, so what, who cares?

00:50:05 Speaker_05
It's, so what are you gonna do about it? Which is that forward momentum, whether it's mere wounds, which we all have, or trauma, which many of us have. Retraumatizing ourselves by replaying and reworking it, overworking it, doesn't release us.

00:50:25 Speaker_05
But acknowledging what has happened, And then really empowering yourself to say, and what will you do about it? I think that's the unlock. I think that's the balance point that you're looking for.

00:50:41 Speaker_02
And I'd love to actually say something related to your pushback, which I think is valuable and valid in the sense that you mentioned being on one end of the spectrum. That you come from a family at a place of

00:50:56 Speaker_02
withholding in silence and stiff upper lip, not communicating feelings, experiences, etc. Or worse, secrets. Or worse, secrets, right.

00:51:06 Speaker_02
It can be very therapeutic and very healthy to push yourself towards the other end of the spectrum, recognizing you're probably not going to end up

00:51:15 Speaker_02
at the furthest diametrically opposed point, which is something I do think is unhealthy, which is performative trauma, right?

00:51:24 Speaker_02
Literally, I have been at cocktail parties in Austin where I meet somebody, and this is prior to my divulging my own abuse when I was a kid, and literally the fourth sentence out of their mouth is something about extremely graphic trauma.

00:51:38 Speaker_02
I'm like, what are we doing here exactly? I don't think this is for your healing benefit. It becomes performative in a sense. I suppose I just feel like that is unhealthy also not just to yourself but to others in a way.

00:51:57 Speaker_02
It, I think, can diminish how severely some of these things impact other people.

00:52:02 Speaker_02
Just because a person happens to have gotten to the point where they can casually drop graphic abuse into conversation does not mean that someone else is comfortable hearing or saying the same.

00:52:14 Speaker_02
I'm happy to sit on related topics for a second, but I'm very curious at Reboot, so reboot.io, you're the CEO and co-founder, You have lots of clients, right, in the capacity of executive coaching, leadership development, et cetera.

00:52:31 Speaker_02
When did Reboots start? When was it founded? July 2014, roughly. So 2014, perfect. So it's almost a decade ago. Just over. Just over a decade, you're right. Just over a decade ago.

00:52:48 Speaker_02
Have you seen any changes in the types of challenges people are contending with? Or are they mostly the same? I'm just wondering, as technology has changed, as social dynamics have changed, as the world has accelerated,

00:53:05 Speaker_02
Have you seen any problems crop up more and more or less and less? Or is it kind of the same old stuff that we've been talking about for thousands of years?

00:53:16 Speaker_05
It's about both, I would say. I think that there are unique expressions that have emerged. I think that there is a kind of global tension that exists in the world right now.

00:53:28 Speaker_05
That, sure, there have been, call it left-right tensions, call it whatever language you want to use, those tensions have existed. But it feels heightened right now.

00:53:41 Speaker_05
And you couple that, I think, and this I think is relatively new, the aftereffects of the pandemic. and you have this really complex mix.

00:53:55 Speaker_05
I think, for example, of the complexity, I know one company, for example, in November or December, after the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th, ended up having to shut down Slack for two weeks because there was no discussion, it was all argument.

00:54:18 Speaker_05
And quite honestly, a lot of the argument from all sides felt performative, to use a word you were just using, and not necessarily designed to really move the conversation forward in some way or another. This being said, human nature is human nature.

00:54:41 Speaker_05
It's why coaching is actually a good business model. Much of what happens continues to happen. You know, I mean, I can't name the company, but I met a new client.

00:54:52 Speaker_05
I rarely take on new clients, but I kind of fell in love with this kid when I first met him. Very, very hot, young company. Not quite the clusterfuck it was six months ago, but pretty close.

00:55:05 Speaker_05
And as I'm sketching out on a dry erase board everything that has happened and will happen, everybody's like, well, how do you know? I was like, because I've seen this a thousand times. This is what we do.

00:55:18 Speaker_05
This is called dysfunctional startup and here's the path and it's going to be fine. It's going to take a year and a half to two years.

00:55:29 Speaker_02
I hope that address your question i don't know i may have gone off on my own tangent well let me let me hone in on one particular concept that i'd love for you to expand upon or just refund and i may have it.

00:55:44 Speaker_02
transcribed, noted down in front of me incorrectly so you can fact check me as well.

00:55:50 Speaker_02
But it's around the discussion of guilt and part of the reason I think guilt can be such a powerful driver, sort of a negative driver in a lot of cases, I think guilt and prestige

00:56:03 Speaker_02
often terrible motivators to quote Maria or reference Maria Popova but the guilt I think also seems to be having quite a moment because when you are waterboarded with disaster and crisis globally 24-7

00:56:28 Speaker_02
it's hard not to feel like you are not doing enough. But this is what I've written down. Guilt is self-focused, whereas remorse is about the other person.

00:56:39 Speaker_02
So if you find yourself ruminating in guilt over something, that's when you bring attention to that and say, easy boy, easy, or a good man who sometimes fails to live up to your aspirations. The first part is what I wanted to ask you about.

00:56:50 Speaker_02
Could you say more about guilt being self-focused versus remorse? I just wanted to make sure I understood this clearly.

00:57:00 Speaker_05
I often think of my Buddhist teacher, Sharon Salzberg, whose line about that is that guilt is self-lacerating. which I find really a compelling image.

00:57:13 Speaker_05
What it does is it keeps us, here's an old reference, you may get it because you may have had record players, where the needle is stuck in the groove. Sure.

00:57:25 Speaker_05
Again and again, and you're ruminating, and you're spinning, and you're like, oh shit, why did I do that? Whereas there's no opportunity for growth, there's no opportunity for learning.

00:57:38 Speaker_05
Daniel Pink just wrote last year, I think it came out, The Power of Regret. And as so much of what Daniel does, it's kind of a social science take. on this question.

00:57:52 Speaker_05
I prefer the word remorse to the word regret, but I think for this instance you can substitute them. And there's something very, very powerful that's embedded in that is the learning

00:58:06 Speaker_05
And I think that that's what you're reaching for here, is when we allow ourselves to internalize remorse or regret, we're opening ourselves up to other people, to knowledge, to growth, ultimately.

00:58:24 Speaker_02
How do you do that without slipping into guilt? Well, so if you're talking to somebody and they're like, fuck, I shouldn't have done that. God, if it's bad, I'm terrible. I always do this. That's an exaggerated version, right?

00:58:35 Speaker_02
But if they're in a loop of self lacerating guilt, how do you move them towards one of these close cousins that is perhaps More healthy. Exactly.

00:58:48 Speaker_05
How do you do that?

00:58:49 Speaker_05
If you think about the setup, the setup more often than not, if I am often plagued by negative self-talk, I am going to be more subject to that ruminating guilt because I tend to see the thing about which I feel guilty as evidence of my shittiness as a person.

00:59:11 Speaker_05
And if that's true, then the movement is towards decoupling my sense of worthiness as a person from the action. So good people do bad things all the time.

00:59:31 Speaker_05
Good people who do bad things who don't learn are less evolved, less mature than good people who do bad things who then learn through regret and remorse. But they remain good people. Does that distinction help?

00:59:51 Speaker_02
It does. Are there any prompts or exercises that you would potentially assign? It could be something else.

00:59:59 Speaker_02
to a client who has developed the habit of negative narratives around self-worth because they did A, B, and C. That's just a reflexive habit that they have.

01:00:12 Speaker_02
Is there any way that you suggest they reframe things or start training their mind to go in a different direction?

01:00:18 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, I hate to sound like a broken record again, but how does it serve you to think ill of yourself?

01:00:25 Speaker_02
Any patterns in responses? Are there any patterns that, any common threads that you hear in response to that? Sure.

01:00:32 Speaker_05
In some family of origin structures, for example, the way I can know that I belong to my family is by turning to negative self-talk. Just like the way I can know that I belong to a family is by seeing myself as a victim, right?

01:00:50 Speaker_05
If I grow up with parents who see themselves as victims, that might be the way in which I interpret the world. And so by starting to unpack that and really taking a look at the way, to use my phrasing, it serves you,

01:01:10 Speaker_05
to think ill of yourself begins to raise the consciousness that releases you from having to repeat the pattern.

01:01:20 Speaker_02
So let's hop to a topic that you mentioned as we were brainstorming various directions to go in this conversation and I have none of the fleshed out contacts, which is perfect. It's kind of boring for me to know exactly what's coming. Me too. Legacy.

01:01:41 Speaker_02
Legacy seems to be something that you're thinking about. And I suspect we could have a needy conversation about this. So I'll let you kick it off in whatever way you think makes sense.

01:01:54 Speaker_05
Well, you know, I was joking before I talked about feeling like I'm slip sliding into my elderhood. It could be the title of your next book. That's right.

01:02:05 Speaker_00
10 Easy Life Lessons from Uncle Jerry.

01:02:11 Speaker_05
Well, that's kind of where I feel like I'm entering this period, Tim. It's like I've done two books now. I'm starting to think about what do I want to do? What is next? I've been thinking about these themes of redemption.

01:02:27 Speaker_05
I've been thinking about themes about legacy and what does it mean to look at, and in some ways, very similar to the conversation we've been having, to look back on the past in order to move forward in the future.

01:02:44 Speaker_05
And I think that, you know, someone asked me last week, well, what am I thinking about in terms of that legacy? And I don't really think about it in terms of, say, What do i wanna leave behind which i don't know maybe that is the definition of legacy.

01:03:01 Speaker_05
But i think about it really more in the terms in terms of three different circles of impact and influence that i have. The first circle being myself am i proud of the man i've become. The second is my children and descendants.

01:03:18 Speaker_05
How do I want them to look back on me? I mean, I fucked up royally, and yet, for some unknowable reason, my 27-year-old wanted to spend five days camping with me this summer. Can you believe that?

01:03:32 Speaker_05
Because I would never have wanted to spend five days trapped in a sprinter van with my father. And then the last circle is, how have I left the world? I hope, for example, all of the work that I have done made an impact on you, Tim.

01:03:49 Speaker_02
I wouldn't have all these notes in front of me if it weren't the case.

01:03:56 Speaker_05
You know, when we were celebrating your 10th anniversary, I sent a note, I sent a video, and I was telling you, like, I'm proud of what impact you've had on people.

01:04:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, I really appreciate the video. Thank you.

01:04:11 Speaker_05
You know, I don't know this to be true, but the story I tell myself is, you didn't start this podcast to have an impact on some random 22-year-old kid who's a little lost.

01:04:24 Speaker_05
As I experienced it, you started this podcast to answer questions that you had about your own life. That's right. But in doing so, you impacted a lot of people. And I think you should be proud of that.

01:04:39 Speaker_02
Thanks, Jerry. Yeah, it continues to this day, I think, when I'm doing it right for me to be conversations trying to answer questions I have myself.

01:04:54 Speaker_05
Isn't that interesting? I want to highlight that. Isn't it interesting that when you lean into the questions that you need answered in your own life, you end up positively impacting other people?

01:05:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, the personal being the most universal, right?

01:05:11 Speaker_05
Yeah. So what if that's the definition of legacy? Meaning being so real and so honest as to make yourself a palette, if you will, or a canvas, where people can work their stories out.

01:05:30 Speaker_02
That's pretty cool. Yeah. I like that definition or that placeholder for legacy because when I've thought about leaving things behind and know a lot of fancy muckety mucks, often very good people, very soulful people who somehow get fixated on legacy.

01:05:50 Speaker_02
Maybe because they've overshot Maslow's hierarchy of needs, maybe accepting taking out maybe self-actualization and transcendence, but everything else certainly. They've overshot by such an absurd margin. that they start thinking about legacy.

01:06:08 Speaker_01
And I always think to myself, I'm like, Alexander the Great, what was his last name again?

01:06:14 Speaker_02
Nobody knows. And we are somehow going to stand the test of time, like the head of the Sphinx poking out of the sands in the desert, come on. Like it's just, it seems ridiculous. But maybe, who knows, right, what I said about

01:06:34 Speaker_02
borrowing from Bill Richards, like Bill Richards told me this thing, or you tell me a question, I pass that on, then somebody else passes it on, and even though the attribution probably gets long lost along the way, that is some form of legacy, right?

01:06:51 Speaker_02
That continues.

01:06:53 Speaker_05
Yes, a thousand times, yes. Listen, I know legacy as a word can sound grandiose, and I love your self-deprecating humor. Don't use it, though, to deny the thing that is true. Yeah. Okay?

01:07:15 Speaker_05
And because that's another form of that self-delusion and bypassing. The fact of the matter is, you have made a positive impact on the world. It may be fleeting. It may disappear. Who knows? Listen, I'll tell you a story.

01:07:34 Speaker_05
About five or six months after my first book came out, I received a ton of fan mail on the book. I still get mail from people saying, you know, this book really impacted my life. But I'll never forget this one day.

01:07:48 Speaker_05
And one day I got two messages, one from the CEO of a Fortune 100 company and one from a man on death row. And they both wrote about the book and said in one form or another, your story is my story. I will go to my grave proud of that fact.

01:08:07 Speaker_05
That's amazing. Also to have it happen on the same day. On the same day. And the lesson, Tim, in that is there's really no difference between those two men. And that's what's really powerful.

01:08:20 Speaker_02
Can you say a little bit more about that? Because at face value, of course, if you look at their CVs, very different men. But I know you mean something different. Can you say a bit more about that?

01:08:29 Speaker_05
I do. I do. And in December of 2019, Well, first, in September of 2019, my first book came out in June. In September of 2019, I'm doing a book talk. You remember when we used to do things like that. It was pre-pandemic.

01:08:45 Speaker_02
Back when we were listening to mini LPs on the record player. That's right.

01:08:49 Speaker_05
That's right. I'm walking to this venue in Denver, and there's this woman who's clearly in her 80s who comes up to me and she says, you look like our speaker. And I said, well, that's because I am your speaker.

01:09:03 Speaker_05
And she laughed, and she stuck out her hand, and she said to me, my name is Margaret, and I grew up in the Dust Bowl. And I read your book, and your story is my story. Now, Tim, I did not grow up in the Dust Bowl during the Depression.

01:09:19 Speaker_05
I grew up in Brooklyn. Like, what the fuck, right? And a few months later. That was the best follow-up, too. I grew up in Brooklyn, by the way.

01:09:28 Speaker_00
What the fuck? I'm sorry. I should have warned you.

01:09:33 Speaker_04
Goodness scripted it better. fuck is a part of our dialect.

01:09:41 Speaker_02
I'm sorry. No, I have to just just a brief aside. I'm not going to mention it by name, but everybody listens to this podcast would know I'm a friend of mine who grew up in New York City. A lot of a lot of like Brooklyn influence.

01:09:52 Speaker_02
And his greeting to me is. You fucking fuck. This is like one of the most sophisticated, brilliant thinkers of our time, but that's how he greets me.

01:10:05 Speaker_05
I don't understand. Do you have a fucking problem with that? Yeah, exactly. All right, Margaret. All right. So a few months later, I'm in Dublin And I'm doing a book reading, and the audience is filled with, not surprisingly, white people.

01:10:20 Speaker_05
But there's this one black woman who's sitting in the very front row. And at the end of the talk, and in some ways, you've experienced something similar.

01:10:32 Speaker_05
At the end of the talk, she comes up to me and she says, I was really moved by what you were saying, especially the part I had been talking about how when

01:10:41 Speaker_05
We lose a parent at an early age, it forces us into early parentification, and importantly, that that can often be a signifier of leadership.

01:10:52 Speaker_05
She says, that thing you're talking about, what that happened to me, my father died when I was 13, and you know, I'm kind of dopey and exhausted, and I kind of nod my way in response. And then she says, on Robben Island,

01:11:06 Speaker_05
And I look at her and I say, what? And she says, yeah, he was, Robben Island is where Nelson Mandela was held.

01:11:14 Speaker_05
And she says, yeah, he was a freedom fighter based in Zimbabwe and he was caught on the border of South Africa and beaten to death in the prison. And then she says to me, your story is my story.

01:11:28 Speaker_05
And the thing about that, and her name, by the way, is Joy Tenday Kangari. She is going to be graduating, I think, with a PhD in law in October. She's one of the first black women in the city of Dublin to be a barrister.

01:11:45 Speaker_05
The thing about that experience is, to your point, our lives couldn't be more different. But there's something very, very powerful about this notion that your story is my story.

01:11:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, you peel back a few layers, we're all people everywhere in all times dealing with the same things. If you go deep enough, if you go deep enough.

01:12:07 Speaker_05
And if you're willing to be honest, I mean, so, you know, when people come up to you and want to share their trauma, Yeah, there's a performative element to it. But maybe, too, they're seeing their story in your story, Tim.

01:12:23 Speaker_02
Just for clarity's sake, if people do it after I shared publicly what happened to me, it's very different from the examples that precede that, where with no context, it's clear that they are showcasing their trauma within the first few minutes to anyone who will listen, which I think can get into dangerous territory.

01:12:41 Speaker_02
But I agree with you 100%.

01:12:45 Speaker_02
I do, I'd say probably in response to that episode more than any other, but certainly there are a few where I discuss personal challenges with depression and so on, which thankfully are fewer and fewer and shorter and shorter in duration, but you never know.

01:13:04 Speaker_02
And I agree with you 100%. May I ask you a completely unrelated question because it's stuck in my mind and I need to scratch the itch. Your son and the Sprinter van, five days. You mentioned fucking up a bunch of stuff, like all parents do.

01:13:22 Speaker_02
Even though one guy, great guy, I won't mention him by name, but he said, he's like, oh yeah, I'm going to send all my kids to the Hoffman process. He's like, I know I'm fucking them up, I'm just not sure how.

01:13:32 Speaker_02
So, you made mistakes like every parent does, but what did you get right? Why do you think, if you had to try to explain it, and I know it's not a laboratory, so nothing is easy to isolate here, but what do you think you did right, or what worked?

01:13:49 Speaker_02
Maybe it's your son out of the box, who knows, maybe he's just a very forgiving guy, but why did he end up wanting to spend those five days with you in the Sprinter van versus your experience with, say, your dad?

01:14:00 Speaker_05
The power of that question is twofold. One is I think it's a really, really important question. And the second is you're touching upon one of my most deep and profound fears, which was that I would have fucked it up as a parent.

01:14:17 Speaker_05
And so I want to be clear, I still have the capacity to fuck it up.

01:14:22 Speaker_05
I think the answer to your question goes back to something Dr. Sayers used to say to me when I would lie on the couch and bemoan that I was a terrible parent and I would be wracked by guilt because of this stupid reaction that I had or this stupid thing that I said or that kind of thing.

01:14:41 Speaker_05
And she used to say to me all the time two things. One, you cannot spoil children with love. You can spoil them with things, but you cannot spoil them with love. So love them. And the second thing was, she said, give them words. Give them words.

01:14:59 Speaker_05
And I think, I have three children, Sam is 34, Emma is 32, and Michael is 27. And Michael's the one that went camping with me, but Emma and her soon-to-be husband really enjoy the camping van as well.

01:15:16 Speaker_05
And the truth is, I have great relationships with each of them because they're great people. What does give them words mean? Yeah, give them the ability to talk about what's actually going on inside of them and listen.

01:15:30 Speaker_05
I mean, I think that as parents, we can become so afraid of fucking it up and hurting them that we get wrapped around our own anxiety, our own narcissism.

01:15:45 Speaker_05
And then we lose the connection, which is the thing that our children want more than anything else.

01:15:53 Speaker_02
Did you give your kids words?

01:15:56 Speaker_05
If so, how did you do that? Two things. I do think I gave my kids words. I think I also raised the bar on what they expect from other people. They expect words from other people, which, you know, has a mixed blessing, right?

01:16:12 Speaker_05
Because not everybody is trained to actually talk about what's going on. Not everybody knows how to answer the question, how are you? I think I gave them, the way I did it, was I modeled first and foremost.

01:16:27 Speaker_05
And the second, and I think I'm good at this, I listened. Now, I also want to give a shout out to their mom. because this was not a one and done, I did it myself by any stretch of the imagination.

01:16:42 Speaker_05
They had two spectacular parents who each endeavored to do right by their children in different ways and different styles for sure.

01:16:57 Speaker_02
Given your experience, you have good relationships with your kids, if you had to add a third or fourth thing to your therapist's rules, let's just say. You can't spoil a kid with too much love. Number two, give them words.

01:17:16 Speaker_02
What might number three and or, I guess it wouldn't be or, number three, if you want to add a fourth, then go for it.

01:17:24 Speaker_05
But what might you add to that? I think that if I could go back in time and give myself advice the way she might have given it to me, Because she tried to make me feel this.

01:17:34 Speaker_05
I spent far too much time feeling guilty and far too much time worried about whether or not I was being a good parent. I mean, this is another thing that she used to be exasperated with me about. It's like, all right, Jerry, you're gonna be fine.

01:17:51 Speaker_05
But the truth is, you know, and I'll give myself a little bit of a break, I didn't have the context. I didn't have, God rest my parents' souls, and coming to understand that they tried. I did not have role models for good parenting.

01:18:12 Speaker_05
And so I had to piece it together from people like Parker or my therapists or other mentors and elders in my life as I watched how they were doing it. How were they being the elder in their life?

01:18:32 Speaker_05
And learned to forgive myself for the mistakes so that with regret and remorse I could pick myself up and try again. Can you apologize to your children? Oh my god, what a powerful tool that is.

01:18:47 Speaker_02
Yeah, better start apologizing in advance if you don't have kids. Build the muscle. Don't try to win the World Series as your first baseball game. Exactly, exactly.

01:19:02 Speaker_05
Why are you thinking about kids so much these days?

01:19:04 Speaker_02
Oh man, I'm so bored of this business sage on stage stuff. It's just like I'm boring myself so much. I mean, look, I'm being a little facetious here, but beyond a certain base level of needs, we're all playing games, right?

01:19:25 Speaker_02
So the trick is knowing what games you're playing and then be very, hopefully, conscious of the games you opt into. What are the rules? What's winning? What's losing? What's the ranking? What's quitting time? What are the stakes, et cetera, right?

01:19:39 Speaker_02
And I feel like Family, kids, is the next big chapter, the next big adventure. I don't overly romanticize it. Almost all my friends have kids. I know it can be an enormous, enormous pain in the ass.

01:19:57 Speaker_02
It can involve a lot of sadness and anxiety and you name it. But then there's the other side. And joy. And joy, of course. Then there's the other side. And laughter.

01:20:07 Speaker_05
and a sense of completion. I mean, let's shout out, I mean, the best of all the accomplishments I've ever done, the best has been becoming the father that I needed as a child, without a doubt. Yeah, that's a big one.

01:20:23 Speaker_05
A couple of years ago, before I went to Ireland, I was in Wales. I don't know if you know the Dew Lectures. It's fabulous.

01:20:29 Speaker_00
I thought you were going to ask me if I knew Wales. I'm like, yeah, I think I've heard of it.

01:20:34 Speaker_05
But you've been to the Dew Lectures. You spoke at the Dew Lectures.

01:20:38 Speaker_02
I went to, I think, the first or second Dew Lectures, like 2009. It was amazing. I really enjoyed it.

01:20:45 Speaker_05
They're fabulous. And for those who don't know, you should check it out. It's kind of like Ted without all the performative shit.

01:20:52 Speaker_02
And with much more confusing street signs. I remember trying to drive around Wales. This is no Google Maps at the time, didn't have international data. And they're like, sure, just turn left at Widgewakawaka. And I get to the sign and I'm like,

01:21:07 Speaker_02
That's 24 consonants. How do you read this?

01:21:11 Speaker_05
What do you mean? It's 24 consonants in a row without a single vowel.

01:21:15 Speaker_02
No, that's what I mean. I'm just like, wow. OK.

01:21:20 Speaker_05
Anyway, so I was at the Dew Lectures, and I was doing a reading from Reunion, the new book. And I was maybe the first three or four pages. It was just the opening chapters. But it provoked such a powerful response from the group.

01:21:37 Speaker_05
And as you remember, it's like you're in this old hay barn, cow barn, the cow shed, I think they call it. And my oldest son, Sam, had come with me.

01:21:48 Speaker_05
And at the very end of the talk, people were sort of milling about and, oh my God, and telling me what I'd done wrong and telling me what I'd done right and all that stuff. You know what they do. Right.

01:22:01 Speaker_05
Oh, that's very good, except... He was like, okay, the next time you write a book, you can talk. Okay?

01:22:08 Speaker_05
Anyway, I look up, and Sam, who's, you know, 6'1", big guy, he's a Muay Thai fighter and trainer, he looks up and he just mouths the words, I am so proud of you, Dad. That's amazing. What a moment. That's the moment. That's what you want, you know?

01:22:29 Speaker_05
That's what you live for. That's what parenting is.

01:22:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, I feel like I need to make up for lost time. I've been wondering if I need to go like raise the red lantern style. I have no idea, maybe just have, you know, survival of the fittest, impregnate like 40 women and see how we do.

01:22:45 Speaker_02
I am, I don't wanna say desperate, but I'm just like.

01:22:48 Speaker_05
Well, I'm a little surprised you're talking about this because are you gonna now be inundated? And then you're going to call me up and say, Jerry, uh, what do I do? And I'll say, how have you been complicit in creating these conditions?

01:23:01 Speaker_00
You say you don't want publishing this to millions of people.

01:23:05 Speaker_02
Yes. Nephew Timmy. I mean, putting it on the podcast. Well, I had this, you know, I'll share this, this, I haven't really said to anybody, but I was, I was spending time with a number of my really close friends. We do this reunion once a year.

01:23:19 Speaker_02
And most of them have kids, not all of them, most of them have kids. And one was echoing this lesson or conversation he had with someone far older than he, a grandfather.

01:23:32 Speaker_02
And he kept saying, you know, there's nothing more precious than hugging your grandkids. And I started running the math and I was like, I'm 47. I don't know if that's going to be a thing. I don't know if that's mathematically even remotely

01:23:49 Speaker_02
reasonable for me to entertain and that fucked me up.

01:23:52 Speaker_02
I got to be honest, not because I've really thought about grandkids much, but when he put it that way and it happened to coincide with my birthday, which was sort of the cause for the reunion and I was just like, wait a second here.

01:24:04 Speaker_02
I'm no mathematician, but Fuck me. That was a tough pill to swallow, I'm not going to lie. I was like, oh yeah, that may not be a thing.

01:24:15 Speaker_05
Well, not for publication on this, so I'll do it over email, but we have a mutual friend who is in exactly the same place. You guys should hang out for sure. Just drink some whiskey and cry ourselves to sleep.

01:24:31 Speaker_05
Or put the red lantern out and say, I'm ready.

01:24:34 Speaker_00
Oh, God. I'm not ready to switch teams yet.

01:24:38 Speaker_02
You know, never say never.

01:24:45 Speaker_00
What are you willing to do for your kids? It's like, I'm no biologist, but yes, exactly. Oh, man.

01:24:54 Speaker_05
Well, before we move off that topic, let me give you a poem. You ready? This is by Philip Larkin. It's called This Be the Verse. They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had.

01:25:14 Speaker_05
and add some extra just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.

01:25:34 Speaker_05
Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself.

01:25:41 Speaker_02
Wow.

01:25:43 Speaker_00
So should I Sylvia Plath myself today or tomorrow? Jesus, Jerry. Well, he's British. He's British. Good Lord. I know.

01:25:56 Speaker_05
I'm famous for reading poems, but usually they make people cry. This one.

01:26:03 Speaker_02
This is like Dr. Seuss meets a star is born. Good Lord. Amazing. All right, let me try to write the ship here. So three books, I alluded to these. I'm curious.

01:26:16 Speaker_02
You've mentioned a few books in our conversations before, certainly around, which I recommend everybody. Also, When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. Faith by Sharon Salzberg, Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer.

01:26:28 Speaker_02
I'm wondering if any of your kids have been impacted by any of these books or if there are other books you've recommended to your kids, whether or not they read them.

01:26:40 Speaker_05
Oh yeah, Sam in particular loved The Wisdom of Insecurity, which is a really, really powerful book.

01:26:48 Speaker_05
Michael is probably the one who follows most of my book recommendations, and we go back and forth from novels to nonfiction, and we swap books back and forth. The novel that Michael loved the most was also really powerful in my life.

01:27:09 Speaker_05
It's Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. Call It Sleep. Call It Sleep. Never even heard of it. So Henry Roth wrote Call It Sleep in the 1930s. And it tells the story of a young boy, I think he's like seven or eight years old, growing up in the Upper East Harlem,

01:27:31 Speaker_05
when it was a Jewish neighborhood and they're Jewish immigrants. It was well-received and then lost in time.

01:27:39 Speaker_05
And it was, I think it was Kazan, the famous book critic who discovered a used copy in the Strand in Manhattan and then devoured the book in the 1950s and published the first review for a paperback book in the New York Review of Books.

01:28:03 Speaker_05
And so the book was rediscovered.

01:28:04 Speaker_00
That's ballsy, I love it.

01:28:04 Speaker_05
Oh, and anyway, I'm going off. Henry Roth, as a novelist, was one of the most influential novelists in my life. It's a book that I remember when Michael finished it, he sent me the same passage

01:28:22 Speaker_05
that I had first read when I was about 17 or 18 years old and was blown away by. I was like, yeah, that's the passage.

01:28:30 Speaker_05
And for those who know the book, it's the passage where David is touching a trolley car's third rail with a soup ladle or milk ladle. It's really a powerful passage. Anyway, you didn't ask about novels.

01:28:46 Speaker_02
Well, it's funny that you brought up a novel. Maybe I incepted you because I was going to ask you, actually, if there are any novels you recommend or find contain and convey a lot of truths that stick out to mind.

01:29:03 Speaker_02
It doesn't have to be the best, but for instance, Zorba the Greek, I think is a standout for me. You remember that. Good job. Yes. So Zorba the Great, huge standout. I've been meaning to read it again and some more of the same author's work.

01:29:17 Speaker_02
Do any others stand out to you? Because I've really found... fiction, which is very closely related to humor, right? Let's just say Bill Richards or your therapist, parable, these are all very closely interrelated.

01:29:32 Speaker_05
It's funny that you say this because I just completed volume one of a five-volume series. Do you know the Library of America series? I have either heard of it or come across it. It does ring a bell.

01:29:46 Speaker_05
OK, so Library of America is a nonprofit foundation that seeks to preserve the writings of amazing American writers. And I think there are over 350 volumes that they've done, writers like James Baldwin.

01:30:02 Speaker_05
Anyway, I just finished volume one of Wendell Berry. And the thing that comes to mind, and I said this to Michael in a text message,

01:30:12 Speaker_05
I think this is the first set of novels and short stories I've read that have changed my thinking about writing in a profound way. And what Barry did, and volume one is the material from

01:30:27 Speaker_05
Everything takes place in the fictitious town of Port William, Kentucky. He of course is from Kentucky, he still lives there.

01:30:35 Speaker_05
And these tell a series of stories, short stories and novellas and novels, all taking place from the end of the Civil War, in this case through World War II.

01:30:48 Speaker_05
And it all involves the same characters or the same extended characters, but many times the incidents that he writes about are written about from different characters' points of view. And it's still working on me. I've been reading it.

01:31:05 Speaker_05
I finished it a few weeks ago. and I'd been reading it for about three months, because it's close to 1,000 pages. Deeply, deeply moving.

01:31:14 Speaker_02
I'll check it out. I have more homework assignments, which of course I love. I do love my homework. What is the basic thesis of The Wisdom of Insecurity? I know this book title, and I've come across it multiple times, and I've never read it.

01:31:26 Speaker_05
It's Alan Watts exploring what is that anxiety about? What is insecurity about? What is it that we are working with?

01:31:35 Speaker_05
It's a way of coming to understand the, I guess, you know, if you want to link it back to what we were talking about earlier, it's how has it been useful for us rather than something that we need to push away?

01:31:49 Speaker_02
Got it. How has it been useful? Not in a condemning way. That's right. How are you complicit way, but how has it actually been helpful along the lines of the gift of fear by Gavin DeBecker? Right. That's right. That's right. Not something to swat away.

01:32:02 Speaker_02
It's not always something to swat away. How is it a gift?

01:32:05 Speaker_05
Right. It's a simple to understand, you know, we're often told that the way through insecurity or anxiety is to somehow embrace what's happening in the moment. But this actually walks us through. It tells us how to do that.

01:32:22 Speaker_05
And of course, Alan Watts is an incredibly important Zen teacher in the Zen Buddhist tradition.

01:32:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, he's a he's a one of a kind. That one and amazing narration as well. The people who want to take it in audio format has some spectacular speeches, presentations. Jerry, we've covered a lot of ground here.

01:32:41 Speaker_02
Is there anything else you would like to mention before we begin to land the plane? Is there anything else you'd like to say, ask of my audience, point people to, anything at all?

01:32:53 Speaker_05
You know, I think I've really appreciated our conversation, especially the amount of laughter. And you actually help remind me of the importance of that.

01:33:05 Speaker_05
And so let me double down on that because, you know, it's kind of a fucked up world we're in right now. You know, as I've been saying recently, it's the kind of world where babies get murdered for ideology. And that's a kind of fucked up place.

01:33:21 Speaker_05
And not that that's material to laugh about, but to understand that there's a human connection that can be gotten, even in the midst of all this, I think is incredibly important right now.

01:33:37 Speaker_05
So as Dr. Sayers would say to me, you've done enough work going off the grid, Go take your time, go have fun, and laugh your ass off.

01:33:48 Speaker_02
Good advice, good advice, I'm gonna work on that tonight. You know something I've started doing, and this is related, it's a bit of a hard segue, but games, just tabletop games, no phones, no screens. Yes!

01:34:02 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:34:04 Speaker_02
Rewind the clock. These things have been with us a long time.

01:34:06 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:34:08 Speaker_02
Amen. You know what? Can I mention another thing that got stuck in my mind? What's up? Which is funny because it was your mention of a stuck record when you were asking about records.

01:34:19 Speaker_02
And if I remembered records, the one thing that popped to my mind that I has been on repeat, which of course is sort of self-referential in and of itself. When I was a kid, I had this little, mini, tiny, mini LP. It was the size of a tiny pancake.

01:34:36 Speaker_02
It was really small. And it was a song that I played a million times and drove my parents insane. They made the mistake of giving it to me. And it's Disco, Disco Duck, who wants to be a disco duck.

01:34:55 Speaker_00
Donald Duck singing the song over and over and over and over again. Holy shit.

01:35:03 Speaker_02
What a wonderful song. Oh, and I actually had some speaking engagement like, uh, I can't remember. a year ago, two years ago, I don't do too many of them. And they asked me what I wanted my entrance music to be.

01:35:18 Speaker_02
I tasked them with trying to find disco, disco, disco duck. They were not successful, but boy can dream, a boy can dream.

01:35:27 Speaker_05
I mean, what's frightening is I, I will not, but I can sing that song.

01:35:35 Speaker_02
Everyone, this is my homework assignment to everyone listening, go find disco, disco duck. That's right, I'm sure it's on YouTube. It's a treasure. Jerry, where would you like people to find you? You're at Jerry Colonna on Twitter.

01:35:50 Speaker_02
We'll link to everything in the show notes. They can find Reboot at at Reboot HQ on Twitter. Reboot.io is the website. You're the author of Reboot, Leadership and the Art of Growing Up. And Reunion. Exactly. Leadership and the Longing to Belong. You got it.

01:36:06 Speaker_05
I think tracking me down there on Instagram, I'm at Jerry Colonna, all sounds great to me. So I appreciate that.

01:36:14 Speaker_02
Absolutely. And to everybody listening, we will link to everything in the show notes, including probably some version of Disco Disco Duck. And the Philip Larkin poem. That's right.

01:36:25 Speaker_02
And the Philip Larkin poem if you're too happy and just need a moment of sadness. Tim.blog.com slash podcast. And until next time, as always, be just a little bit kinder than is necessary, not only to other people, but also to yourself.

01:36:45 Speaker_02
And thanks for listening. 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?

01:37:00 Speaker_02
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. It is basically a half page

01:37:11 Speaker_02
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.

01:37:19 Speaker_02
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.

01:37:31 Speaker_02
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.

01:37:46 Speaker_02
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. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.

01:38:00 Speaker_02
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01:38:12 Speaker_02
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01:38:23 Speaker_02
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01:39:19 Speaker_02
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01:39:34 Speaker_02
They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Okay, this is going to be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is.

01:39:49 Speaker_02
Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know. I've tried all the dating apps, and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. Why did I end up using the League?

01:40:04 Speaker_02
First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On the League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier.

01:40:16 Speaker_02
It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the League users went to top 40 colleges, and you can make your filters really selective.

01:40:29 Speaker_02
So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work and that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn so you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months.

01:40:41 Speaker_02
It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations.

01:40:53 Speaker_02
I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this.

01:40:56 Speaker_02
So for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests as I like to spend say two to three months of the year in the mountains, summer rivers and mountain sky.

01:41:07 Speaker_02
The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out.

01:41:20 Speaker_02
Features available on the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from co-workers, bosses, family, etc. That's very easy to do.

01:41:29 Speaker_02
You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for?

01:41:41 Speaker_02
I am looking for a woman who is well-educated, who loves skiing or snowboarding, or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just, I'll leave it at that for now.

01:41:53 Speaker_02
Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person, who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years.

01:42:03 Speaker_02
Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women. Not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea.

01:42:12 Speaker_02
It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read, and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag Date Tim, so hashtag Date Tim, in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up.

01:42:26 Speaker_02
These are all reasons why I was excited when The League reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three-minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch.

01:42:38 Speaker_02
So check it out. Download The League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating.

01:42:48 Speaker_02
You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. much better. So download the leak today on iOS or Android and check it out.

01:42:58 Speaker_02
Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the waitlist and have your profile reviewed first. Check it out the leak on iOS or Android.